Madness

Since I didn't accomplish anything else I set out to do today, I will at least do this.
I had intended to go to the gym. At first I was going to go in the morning, but then due to a headache I decided to wait until lunch time. At lunch time I got caught up in something and decided I'd go at 3pm instead. When it was nearing 3pm I was feeling ill. My stomach was hurting and I didn't feel good at all, so I decided to go to the gym in the evening instead. Well, it's now almost 8pm and I still haven't gone. Nor did I write on my book as I set out to do. Today has simply been a crappy day all around.

At least I will write a little bit on one of my favourite topics - madness. I was chatting with a good friend this morning and she said that she was spring cleaning her house. It was 3:00am in her time zone! I can well imagine if I had started cleaning in the middle of the night when I lived at home with my parents. They would have thought I was stark raving mad. My mom would have stuck her head out the bedroom door and hissed:

"What the hell are you doing! Have you lost your mind?? Go to bed!"

Not in my friend's house. There always seems to be someone awake there. I've told her that her house is a madhouse. Madness lurks behind each door. This really appeals to me. A house full of oddities. I grew up in a home where I was often alone and even when my parents were home there wasn't much going on. I dreamed of living in a house where there lived a lot of people and where something was always happening. That's why when I was 14 I started a book called "The Funny Farm", about a big house where 7 people lived together. Something was always happening. People were always coming and going. Somebody was almost always awake and there were people arguing, an old lady baking, all kinds of activities, you name it. Each chapter contained some event, such as the adults being away for the weekend and the teenagers ending up sleeping in the same fold-out couch for some reason.
Initially it was a normal book with normal people and regular stories. Then as I grew older I grew more dark and troubled. I started becoming depressed, and with this depression the stories turned a dark corner. Now instead of being a relatively normal household, everyone became mean and extremely troubled. The old lady who used to bake and cook disappeared into her bedroom where she spent her days and nights sleeping and only came out into the kitchen in her nightie to drink water, only to again disappear into her bedroom and slam the door behind her.
One of the characters, the character who had previously been the most forward and active, turned into a catatonic vegetable who spent his day sitting in a corner of the hallway staring into space. Sometimes he would bang his head against the wall.
Another character turned into a psychopath who was prone to violent outbursts, where he would ferociously do karate chops and kicks in the air, for no apparent reason.
The other characters were no rays of sunshine either. And everyone suffered from the same problem, malnutrition. As an added bonus to the outbreak of insanity, the front yard was blocked by local hooligans who had taken a very severe disliking to the inhabitants of the Funny Farm, and who would always stand outside the house hurling insults and throwing rotten eggs and tomatoes at the windows. If one of the people inside the house dared so much as stick their noses outside, the hooligans would get them. This meant that they couldn't go to the grocery store. So they lived on stale buttermilk, dry, hard bread and dried meat. Where they got this from and how they always managed to have a supply of this but nothing else was never explained.
I loved every minute of writing about it. I was into the story while writing it that I would laugh out loud. The characters became so real that they felt like real people. This is what writing is all about for me. Emerging myself in this fantasy world that I've created. The reason that this story turned so dark, and the reason I am still prone to venture into the field of the absurd, is because madness has always fascinated me. That's why my favourite subject within the field of Psychology has always been Abnormal Psych. What other people find dark or disturbing, I find incredibly interesting, and sometimes even funny. Inside a movie theater, I'm the person who laughs like an idiot at things that other people don't find remotely funny. For example, when I saw "Pretty Woman" for the first time in the movie theater, I laughed when Vivian tries to get her glasses unfolded at the opera but can't and says 'These are broken! Mine are broken!'.
I was the only person who laughed.