The Pattern of Insanity

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?” I actually wrote this quote before. About… ten hours ago. I had some brilliant idea that involved that quote and the title “The Pattern of Insanity” and I was going to write it and it was going to be profound and a great revelation like some of the stuff I write. I was actually in my car when I wrote it. The really great idea struck right before I got out of my car, just before I had to go clock on for work. So I typed up the title and the quote and saved it and stuff. Now, ten hours later I’m kinda exhausted and really don’t know what I as going to write about. I know it would have been great though. I know it would have been absolutely awesome.

Something like this would have bothered me before, you know, having that great idea and it gets away from you? Earlier, in life that is, that would have bothered me. Okay so it does kind of bother me, but I sure got over it pretty quick. Normally it would take me a lot longer to recover from a loss like that. I mean there’s quite a bit that can get built up inside when you have an idea like… well, like whatever it was I had before I clocked in. Anyway. I’ve kinda gotten used to it, so I’m not so bothered now. Used to bother me, not so much anymore. Probably because this isn’t the first time this has happened. It actually happens to me quite frequently… and I also know it won’t be the last time either. Though, logically, if its not the last time its going to happen, it does mean that I’ll probably have great ideas like that again, and statistically, every time I have a great idea, my odds of not losing it, like I did this time, actually increase… right? At least I think that’s the way it works. Then again it’s probably a joke. How can you predict the future with the past? I mean, seriously, if we could do that, someone would have the future mapped out already and finding out about it would be boring as heck when the future actually got around to being the present.

Actually I think that’s kind of what it was about. My idea… not the part about the future or the past or any of that, but the other part. About logic and statistics and all of those things. Or how… how they aren’t… I don’t know. Like how they aren’t working or something like that. Yeah, something like that anyway.

So… I really don’t know why I’m still here typing like if I sit here long enough just typing away eventually the idea will come back and say “Here I am! Write me down before I get away again!” Because that probably will not happen. And like I said I’m over it anyway so really what I’m doing now makes very little sense… at all. Really if you think about it, I’m not all that logical a person, in fact I’m pretty illogical if you think about it. Why am I here, still typing. And why do I stop every now and then and ask myself why I am doing what I’m doing as if I’m going to answer myself with something… profound?

Believe it or not most of those profound things that I ever write actually seem to invent themselves. Just out of the random… stuff. Like this. I’ll be writing along, maybe I’ll care about what I’m writing, maybe not, and eventually I’ll be writing and the thing will get really long and I’ll sum it up with something like “Well, I guess that’s all… I’m going to go to bed now.” (Because most of the time this stuff happens at night) And I won’t think about it again for quite some time and then later I’ll read it (like a few days later) and I’ll see it and I’ll be like “Whoa! This is, actually… pretty darn cool.”

I guess basically if I just wander around my own mind long enough its like I find something shiny laying there and I don’t know what it is till I… wash it off or…

Okay that’s a terrible analogy. Like I wander around my own mind till I find an animal and I don’t know that it tastes so good until I let it cook… and then eat it later…

Okay, better analogy, and somehow managing to be pointlessly barbaric.

Alright, so what I’m saying is that normally, if I come up with something profound, I am normally just writing along and it happens all by itself. I’m not trying to be profound, I don’t work towards it… in fact I wonder sometimes if half the stuff I discover is really worth discovering. Mostly though it happens while I’m just talking, ranting… I suppose more so in ranting because in ranting there’s a lot of emotion and you’re just spilling everything out there and somehow it gets written or said and its so raw and pure and true that anyone who reads it is pretty much profounded for the rest of the day. Those are the kinds of things that make people feel that… that profound this-is-truth feeling.

I’m just saying I’m really no genius or, a wise guy or any of that. I don’t really work to come up with this stuff, just because I have the capacity to doesn’t mean I intend half the stuff to happen.

I don’t even remember what happened today. I was sitting in my car for God’s sake listening to something, music or something like that, just waiting to go inside and get on the clock and sell a bunch of computers and stuff like that. And, of course, there’s my brain somewhere involved, running in the background like a trillion miles an hour like it always is. Because it never shuts up… kinda makes it hard to sleep sometimes. Anyway, so I’m just about ready to turn off the music and head inside for a good, productive work day and suddenly, BAM, something hits me, I guess… there were probably a few thoughts that went along with it… something about the matrix I think. Yeah, I can remember my brain mentioning the matrix, you know, just at random, right before it happened…

Yeah! Okay so it was the third matrix movie, the one where, well… basically everything else happens in this last movie, but there’s this one part where Trinity is pointing a gun at that snotty French guy and she threatens to kill him because he’s got Neo and the French guy’s wife is like “She’ll do it! She’s in love! She’ll kill us all!” And the French guy is like… “It is amazing how similar the pattern of love is to the pattern of insanity.”

Yeah… that was it. That was exactly what was reported just before the brilliant idea hit. Okay cool. So I still have no idea what that idea was. Wait a minute… why did I write a quote by Ben Franklin? Wait no… that’s Abraham Lincoln. Okay, so why did I write a quote by Abraham Lincoln? “Do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?”

Something is there… I can kinda feel it. At least I think I do. Sometimes I’ll get this feeling in my gut which means I’m really onto something. But I’m hungry tonight so it could just be a false alarm. Hm… I should probably go eat something and see if that’s it. No. No I’m not really that hungry.

No wait… I am. I think. Hm… my stomach and I haven’t got the most conversational relationship in the world. In fact we haven’t really adequately communicated in quite a long time. I think the last time I got a loud and clear “FEED ME!!!” was like… four years ago at summer church camp. I remember that because I had missed lunch and that was the main meal of the day, I had a pop tart for breakfast and that night, after a full day of avid recreation, there was dinner, which I also didn’t get because dinner was not complimentary. Unlike lunch, dinner was basically whatever you bought at the snack stand before the nightly program, meeting, ceremony thing. And I didn’t have any money. So I had always been sure to eat a big lunch when it was lunch time and I had missed lunch. I don’t remember why… And that night my stomach swore up and down at me. I eventually found something to eat the next morning. But I haven’t heard a lot from the old boy ever since that night. Just very light nudges of “eat?” but nothing so far since that I could actually verify as legitimate hunger. And even if I could there’s not really a way to measure hunger as legitimate or not so probably it would be pretty pointless. Kinda like most of this document.

So no, seriously, there was a reason why I wrote the words “The Pattern of Insanity” and that quote by honest Abe (which is a crock by the way, I played Abraham Lincoln for a bunch of fourth graders last year as a part of the speech and debate program, turns out the guy lied all the time.) and also now remember- (well not all the time really, but he wasn’t an angel by any means) remembering the origin of the “Pattern of Insanity” thing. A freaking quote from the matrix, and a quote from Abraham Lincoln as the last two clues to refinding my profound thought…

Yeah… I’m screwed.

What are we now? Three pages? Gee wiz, this little guy is just cooking isn’t he? Whew. This doesn’t make any sense at all. One thing you’ll notice about my mind is that it doesn’t sit still. Not for anything. I tried, it about drove me crazy when I was young, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, why there was this part of my psyche that I didn’t control that always went, over and over and over, and never stopped. It just started and never ended. I figure if I cared enough I could retrace the mental footprints to the point that I could calculate with some degree of accuracy the very first synapse that was fired in my head the moment my brain developed the ability to actually “think” about things. Which in turn I suppose would be a good argument to toss into the abortion debate. The first time a kid in his momma thinks anything, how’s that for a life registry standard? Nah… growing up was insane. Way insane. Seriously, it was kind of unnerving, having that extra part of my mind, like an extra, supplementary thought process that I didn’t control, that just went on its own, outside my own influence. I mean think about the identity crisis there just waiting to happen? Who are we if we are not even our own thoughts? What are we?

Fortunately I never went through such a crisis. I was an ignorant kid with a lot of imagination and only a basic understanding of my own motor skills and I figured that everyone had this and that it was normal. Eventually, I’d just get used to it. And eventually, I did.

Eventually I learned to proud it, to alter the flow of information if I wanted. It was a wild ride at first. Whew! Was it ever. Like trying to drive a car for the first time and your test car has only one speed: liquefy. (I know it’s actually a blender setting but trust me, if you’d been there, in my head I mean, it would make plenty of sense) I got the hang of it eventually, I can use it if I need it, and I’ve gotten to the point where I can almost ignore it… But its always there, just a running in the background as if it were trying to accomplish something. I hear it sometimes when I’m trying to have a conversation- you know like the stupidest things like, “Now would be a really funny time to poke that person in the eyeball.” And I’m like – Now where did that come from? As if… yeah. As if I’m going to answer myself. Then again I kind of know where it came from. I know where the idea came from anyway. I mean you could call it mine, but honestly, as much sense as that makes, I don’t know if I accept that. I mean… it sure would make a lot of other really odd things mine as well. If we’re going to set a standard or a system of rules for what comes out of that flying cyclone of independent brainpower. An awful lot of things would be mine.

If they are then that means I guess that I came up with them, whether or not I intended to, and that raises many questions about, again… who I am. If I wanted to ask that question… again. And I kinda really don’t. I know who I am, I just never bothered to explain this phenomena in my brain.

I did research on it, and the research that I did told me that I was autistic. Then I did research, rather thorough research, on autism, and I came to the conclusion that I could be, but I’m more likely just very close to it and something else entirely. (shrug) Who knows? Maybe I’m some new… genetic abnormality, the first of my kind. Hm…

Well whatever it is, it certainly doesn’t seem to be doing me any harm. If fact its been doing me a lot of good I think. Not a lot gets past me without getting a great deal of thought put into it. For that reason I am not at all impulsive, I am allowed an amazing amount of self-control, and I am the most patient human being on this planet. I mean, that isn’t a problem is it? C’mon.

I had a conversation, several conversations recently, about people with disorders or diseases, the mental kind mostly. My experience at the summer camp where I worked gave me a good foundation of experience and her… brother, mother, uncle, step cousin or something had a crazyness disease so she kinda knew what she was talking about. And we talked about… I don’t know. I think mostly about how most of those people, the crazy ones? They’re pretty much mostly harmless. I mean, at least as harmless as the average person can be. In fact I’ve met plenty of people who are in a perfectly normal state of mind who

Wait.

Wait wait wait wait wait holdthatthought…

What is crazy?

What is… insanity? And why is it bad? Why is it so… dangerous? Why is it bad. What is crazy anyway? What is insanity. What does it do?

Is there a method to it? A way to identify it? Anything consistent about it? Is there a pattern? How do you know if someone is crazy? You’d figure, that… I mean if we’re putting insanity to terms of definition, that for us to call a group of people crazy would mean that they all have something in common

Right?

Sure, they’re all crazy. What is crazy though? Hm… hard one. “You’re crazy man. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.” That’s what I thought the first time I heard it - “Are you crazy!? What do you think you’re doing?” So what is normal. What do I do different if I’m normal? What do I do different if I’m insane? “This can’t be happening… I mean… this is crazy!” Calm down - That’s it… calm down Eureka! Latin right? I have found it? I think… I might really have it I really think I might have it! the thought... the, thing... the profound one... emotion .... insanity.

There is a pattern here. Alright- people? You still here? Still listening? Okay I think I might have it, I'm holding the thought- I'm going to go write as much of it as I can and see if I can get it back. I uh... I'll post something. Probably not about this. This is... well you don't want to know about all of this. It's boring. I'll get back to you! :P

Cheers.