Madness or Insanity, Mental Illness or Industrial Disease

A brief exploration of a mind operating on a different frequency

“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” -Albert Einstein

What is it about scents evoking memory? The post office in the old coal village deep in the prairies, evoking instant memories of a childhood thousands of kilometers and decades away, of warm kitchens, red rose figurines and Wareneki!

I tried for years to produce a batch of Wareneki that would taste even a fraction as good as my memory of Nana’s. Funny thing about memory. Apparently we only ever remember an event once, after that we only remember the memory of the event, then the memory of the memory of the event, well you get the idea.

The want burned away at me, becoming a need. Not like you want a fancy car, more like you feel you need it, for status, or a job perhaps.

Cool fancy clothes? Not for me. wareneki on the other hand is the comfort food of all comfort foods. To suffer loss is to want return. When the pain becomes unbearable the want becomes a need. To want wareneki is to need them.

To make them on the other hand is effort. Sometimes in life wants become needs, needs must, effort is involved. When a need becomes entangled with scent and memory of taste, when emotion influences the final product I find myself unable to succeed. Enough effort expended, I opened my contact list and my wallet.

There lives a mennonite lady nearby, I ordered a few dozen. With tears streaming down my cheeks I savoured the taste, the memory. She made them perfect. Need met!

Other memories like the ones stirred by the stench of brewers yeast permeating the air of a coastal city in Nova Scotia, returning me solidly to the factory town of my youth in southern Ontario.

Whisky, made in Canada, only sold abroad. Perhaps where we started to go wrong as an economic force on the world stage? Fourteen bars and nine factories for a population of around ten thousand when I lived there. While factories dominated the economy, farms were all around and casual labourers were in demand this spring. Time to shed the winter blues and baggage around the belly, honest labour should do the trick.

We met in an asparagus field, or rather on the edge of an asparagus field. The flattened wire coat hangers were strategically placed in metal tubes, becoming antennas, part of the fabric of the machine he sat on. Machines designed to facilitate maximum production and yield with no regard to human requirements. Par for the machine.

His grin was invigorating and infectious. Loki was everything your mind conjures when hearing the word. His mind of course light years distant, burning with the same intensity as icarus felt in his ascent, to his demise.

More brightly than the sun did his mind burn. Not my first glimpse of madness, for how many repeat the same actions expecting different results, yet it was my first glimpse of defined madness.

Definitions I have always sought, rarely if found are they ever accompanied by understanding. To know a truth without understanding, is this not belief, faith? How did faith in truth and light become religious dogma?

His madness, a sickness that is forgotten when medicated, only to return with the fever of a dry alcoholic, when medication is stopped. A chemical imbalance, or pure unaltered perception of the universe?

Self medicating with readily available drugs (including alcohol) does not produce as civilized a result as pharmacology in some cases. It does in these cases produce a planet of emotional extremes, paranoia, and madness.

Over thirty years in a rooming house, at least you had your own toilet. A prisoner of your mind, stuck in a physical cell, ten by ten, understanding is five by five, no one to be there with you.

I have fact checked much of what you taught me in those early years. Clearly complete madness depends on perception. You filled me with questions, even more, you taught me life and truth are a matter of perception. I curse you and love you for it.

I still remember the secret knock. Do you remember my last visit? The routine you had not had used for decades, you were suspicious. How had they found you, why this unused code? You opened up in the end, embraced.

How much you opened up that day, the mind of another, was to ripple through time and space growing larger as it flowed.

Do you remember the van? Crap, in hindsight I’m amazed the old grey panel van made it across the border once, let alone seven times.

Remember the green shag? I didn’t know which way you would go on that. From your parent’s old farm house. The family. Left you on the ice flow years ago. Would you come on the grandest of adventures?

We worked all winter that year, raising funds and becoming familiar with the idea of adventuring cross country to the west coast, leaving the comfort zone. Leaping out of the pot, understanding anything is better than sad madness. Remember how well you cleaned up for the mini road trip, the restaurant? Goodness my friend we laughed.

In the end you stayed, I miss you man.