mad

I've been thinking about going mad.

I'll clarify that; I have not been considering going mad, but I have been wondering about it.

When people go mad do they feel all their inhibitions and shackles just fall away from them? Does their new view on life when mad overwrite their old one or do they actually see their own new perceptions superimposed over everything like a transparent layer? Or is the shared perceived reality we all have the real layer that gets torn away?

I've been told I am crazy sometimes. Not by anyone qualified. Mind you, who is to say that a madman is actually mad if the only real definition we have is some "expert" saying someone is out of touch with reality. When so much of what we are told is reality is actually a construct, who are we to condemn other people with their own constructs in their heads?

If being mad means escaping, then I think I want to be mad. Some days I just don't really get what we're doing here if all we are cabable of doing is repeating the same pattern that was laid out before us for countless generations before: eat, go to work, sleep, breed. Is not the definition of insanity doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results? And if we're products of this planet, is the planet not insane?

Here's what's gotten to me lately. I'm 37. I'm not as young as I used to be. Sometimes when I wrinkle, it doesn't always go away. When I get hurt it takes longer to heel. I remember being able to go all night at anything I wanted to. All around me I see guys younger and fitter and I realize we're all the same; we're all just doing the same damn thing every day and wasting our lives. There has got to be more.

I want more. I need to know there is more.

I'm not about to join some crackpot religion or anything, nor am I going to try and start one. That's too much damn work. But I need some truth, some real direction of my own. Things are pretty okay in my life, there are no huge scary hurdles out there for me, but I don't want to just whitter my years away in some kind of holding pattern waiting for some revelation that may not even come.

So sometimes, I wonder if maybe I'm going a bit mad.

That is all.