93% Crazy And Diligently Working My Way To The Finish Line

Prologue

I paint myself black like a soldier
I sneak through the jungle in the night
I make lists of all the public enemies
One list for the left, another for the right.

It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore
Which way your politics happen to lean
There are so many ways to be buried alive
So many maniacs and their manic dreams

Some people call me a killer
But I do what I must to survive
Some say I’ll never be happy until
I bury the whole world alive

But it doesn’t seem to matter much anymore
Who is righteous and who is wrong
So many sharp points to any point of view
So many maniacs coming on strong

Nobody gives a goddamn anymore
It’s just another bullet to the brain
The glazed eyes are a dead giveaway
The fragile wall between people and their pain

It doesn’t seem to matter much anymore
There are no drugs left to get us high
The only thing we pray for is absolution
So many maniacs waiting to die

I wrote this in 1982. It was part of a collection of lyrics that for a screenplay entitled Two Gods. It was all about the music industry but, it was obviously also an allegory for a lot of other stuff that was going on back then. That was thirty five years ago, and all this stuff is still with us. Only much louder and brassier and tackier than ever.

Oh sure I survived. We all survive. And a lot of us can shut out the darkness, turn on a lamp and read a book that was written before the Industrial Revolution started sucking the life out of humanity.
Sounds pretty cynical, I suppose. But looking around at the world, you can't help but get the feeling like it’s standing on the edge of a thousand foot drop begging to be talked out of jumping.
You could probably argue that it’s always been this way and that the big difference is that it just wasn’t coming at us 24/7 like it is these days.
But there’s a warning here. And the warning is for us to slow down. To get back in touch with our humanity, to start talking to each other like civilized human beings again, because that’s what’s lacking out there these days.
All this energy we are expending trying to get where we are going...all this me me me, it's all about me bullshit...it is doing nothing more than squeezing the world too tightly.
Sooner or later something has to give. Sometimes I feel like it’s my brain.

The Original Post

I am out of it.
The world appears to have turned a corner and headed off in some strange direction and I didn’t get the email.
I get headaches trying to figure out what’s going on. This is mainly because very little appears to make any sense any more.

How the hell did Donald Trump get to the president of the United States? I mean, to any objective observer, it looks like he just kind of conned his way into the job. He doesn’t really have any qualifications that make sense. He’s a billionaire or so he tells everybody, and he’s in real estate which is a business that's famous for people screwing other people over big time. He’s about as diplomatic as a mongoose confronting a cobra. He is as self absorbed as any human being ever could be. And only about 13% of everything he says has any relationship to reality.

I think I missed the point somewhere along the line that about 60 million Americans seem to have gotten. And damn it, I was watching closely.
How the hell did it happen that the British people voted to leave the European union, and the

very next day, Google registered millions of inquiries from Britain asking what the European Union, in fact, was? How could so many people vote for or against something they knew absolutely nothing about?
I was watching that go down too and just ended up shaking my head. Not for the British people, because I could care less. But for me, because it was all so fucking puzzling.
How many news stories were written about cops in the US and Canada shooting unarmed people (mostly black)? These cops get arrested. They go on trial are are found guilty. They go to

prison and probably have a hard time there what with all the young black guys they are penned up with.
And yet the cops don’t seem to show any signs of actually letting up.
I don’t get it. I mean if you were a cop and you saw all this happening to other cops, wouldn’t it be logical to say…you know, maybe I should think twice before emptying a clip into some black guy who’s just holding his smart phone?
This is me, sighing heavily because I am starting to feel that my marbles, which used to be bright and shiny and intuitive, are deserting me.
Where does all this insanity come from? Or has the world just morphed into a place where all the crazy shit is normal and I just didn’t get the memo again?
As a writer, I do a lot of thinking and a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately has to do with why I don’t seem to be able to figure things out the way I used to back in the day.
This is slowly becoming a chronic condition in my head. It’s kind of like one of those Mission Impossible episodes where the IMF team puts together a con so elaborate that you would swear it was real. But all the time you’re telling yourself that it doesn’t make any sense. But you still believe it, because, other than what's happening in your head, you have no reason not to.
The logical consequent is that either the world is crazy or you are. And frankly, I have an easier time thinking it’s me.

So what do I do?

Well, I try try and exorcise the demon by seeing if I can write it out of my system.
I try ignoring all the news in the hopes that if I do that for long enough, things will go back to normal. But they never do.
Finally, and this is the hardest, I try to stop trying to understand it. Because, let’s face it, it’s no fun being 93% convinced that you are nuts and having it reinforced every day.
But I’ll be alright. As a species, we are adaptable if nothing else.
Just another 7% and I will be able to join all the other crazies out there. And who knows…I might just enjoy it.
At the very least, it will be a relief.
jim out

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