Insanity is overdraft fees.
Insanity is not having an ADA-required PA device with which to announce that the bus you’re driving also doesn’t have a cord to pull to let the driver know you want to get off.
Insanity is needing therapy to address the underlying cause of why you can’t afford therapy.
Insanity is a dually with wheel spacers and a lift kit.
Insanity is not having a game-plan for loss of natural open spaces and tree cover.
Insanity is a the city school bus having to make a special stop for all the kids who live at the motel.
Insanity is an apartment complex being allowed to stop accepting government vouchers.
Insanity is every government website and app and office, ensuring those with no time to spare spend every second stuck in a loop of apathy and miscommunication.
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There is a Joseph Campbell quote “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” I don’t know about this. What if we have the capacity to be both psychotic and mystic? Do those costumes happen in waves, like an ebb and flow thing? Sometimes Thom Yorke’s “The Mother Lode” pops in my head, sort of relating back to this quote somehow, a shallow pool. Dread and hope and absurdity and comedy.
All that to say, singer-songwriter Conor O’Brien puts it in a way I like a lot: “The art of pretending to swim.” In a way, that covers all ground, maybe like “falling with style” or fake it til you make it. Whatever the hell making it is. But O’Brien’s way of putting it is compassionate to all of us drowners (or at least prone to feeling like we’re drowning)- while flailing around and calling it swimming isn’t technically swimming, it’s also maybe not drowning. At least not literally for that moment. His phrase also implies that, like, everyone’s pretending. Even the ones who look good in a bikini, and the ones who aren’t afraid of waterparks.
A personal anecdote, when I was in swim class as a kid I won every tread competition, which was exciting because I wasn’t exactly outstanding in other sports- I felt strongly that I was pirate material, fling me into the open sea already. What I didn’t love was the waterpark area, the tire swing that glided barely above the water, the partially-submerged jungle gym- it was simply an accident waiting to happen. I once got stuck, probably just for a couple seconds, upside down in the tire swing part with my breathing parts under water. It was terrifying, and enough to keep me away from any further obstacle course or water-related challenge. I wonder now if that one happening was enough to scare me and my board shorts away from waterparks as an older kid. Probably so, well that and those little puddles everywhere of everyone else’s runoff, maybe some soupy fries and ketchup….shudders violently.
The “it” in these paragraphs is ambiguous, and that isn’t on purpose, it’s just that I was thinking about all this today while driving around and wanted to toss it online, crazy-talk and all.