Flirting With Insanity Is Dangerous
“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope”
“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope”
It was morning rush hour as I approached Chicago and I resolved that I’d live with whatever hellscape the Windy City had in store for me over the next few hours.
I’d been driving for four days by then. Having dropped my daughter off at Lake Superior the day before, I left in the dark of the morning with every intention of making the 23-hour trip in one go. My eyes were burning and my stomach was acid.
I’d been listening to Skeleton Crew, a collection of Stephen King’s short stories, and toying with my own book in my head, trying to find a way in.
I knew all the facts, the dates, the disparate reporting. I had been interviewed at length by the people doing the documentary for ViceTV and understood everything I was going to understand about the story, but it was still ephemeral for me, a list of horrible facts without a point.
A Bagel Manifesto
Stories about coming to terms with belief, culture, and the profound sense of loss that no one really cares about bagels anymore.bit.ly
That’s an overstatement, the point was that the book wasn’t about crazy people killing crazy people but I didn’t have a good way of convincing the reader of the fact. For the moment I only could state it.
I swung right and down then left and up navigating the ramp that would dump me on the throughway and was shocked to not find a traffic jam waiting around the corner.
The short version is that, in reality, they have just latched on to something so fascinating and tempting that they follow it to their own self-destruction.
Covid didn’t do me many favors in 2020, but it made it possible to hump through every city in the Midwest without worrying about traffic.
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet
On the audiobook, Michael C. Hall read the next title, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. It was followed by a music swell and had my full attention.
Although I hadn’t thought of the story in a decade or more, I’d probably read it 20 times. The book itself is one of my go-tos because almost every story is perfect unto itself. It’s comforting and challenging all at once, and revisiting the stories always comes with the reward of new insight.
The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet provided more than that. As the story started up I recalled the plot immediately.
There May Not Be Such a Thing as a Sane Superstition
Very little separates reptilian overlords from mainstream religionbytonyrusso.medium.com
A young writer is driven mad because he believes “They” are out to get him. They come in disguises, they blast people with radio and energy waves to give them cancer. It was essentially a 20-yar-old work of fiction about the real life people I was only now meeting.
The beliefs were different, but the attitude and the worldview were the same. More than that, Steven King had succinctly solved my problem about how to think about people who may seem to have lost their minds in a more complex way.
The short version is that, in reality, they have just latched on to something so fascinating and tempting that they follow it to their own self-destruction.
“Madness is a flexible bullet,” one of the characters proclaims.
“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope. I truly believe that.”
He sets the scene: All of us have an empty, padded room in our brains. In the middle of the room is a table and on the table is a revolver.
When we come across a ladder in the street and decide that not walking under it is just as safe as walking under it, we open the door and look inside. Then we pass the ladder, the door closes, and all is forgotten.
We begin to play with the pistol when we start writing letters to the paper, demanding the government do something about the ladder menace, tying ladder use to a rise in crime or a budget shortfall or whatever.
We start pulling the trigger when we begin driving around town knocking down ladders.
“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope,” the character concludes. “I truly believe that.”
The larger point is that not every bullet fired into the head kills, you really don’t know until you try.
Madness Versus Distraction Verses Reality
I drove through the day and into the evening thinking about how normal it is to wonder if there’s something bigger going on, how shadow conspiracies are fun in the same way that, say, shoot-em-up action movies are fun.
I thought about how often I entered that white room and lingered, thinking about ghosts, or time travel, or heaven.
Eventually, I got to think about the appeal of it, toying with why people take comfort in psychological horror. I realized it was absolution.
We’re Undermining Our Shared Reality and It’s Driving Us Nuts
Matthew Coleman killed his children in an effort to save the world. He was tragically mistaken, and we helped him stay…bytonyrusso.medium.com
You aren’t responsible for what happens in a world of monsters and cabals. Maybe you’re frightened all the time but it makes perfect sense. Who wouldn’t be frightened all the time if they could see that the world was full of monsters?
Conspiracy theories give us permission to go play in that room, where our lives aren’t shitty because we made bad choices, but rather they’re shitty because “They” have a problem with us.
And you can pick your “They.”
If monsters aren’t your bag there are plenty of Them to blame, and looking for the They and thinking of all the ways we can stick it to Them or hold Them to account is much more satisfying than stepping outside of the room and taking responsibility for our lives and the way we conduct them.
Join Medium with my referral link - Tony Russo
As a Medium member, a portion of your membership fee goes to writers you read, and you get full access to every story…bytonyrusso.medium.com
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.