There was always a touched soul on the mental ward who thought they were God. Jonathan Clark was one such soul. He lingered in white pajamas offering consul and comfort, even the nurses came to speak with him. I met him on the 4th floor of the Behaviour of Medicine at a hospital in Elkhart Indiana. His departure, as spectacular as it was, affected Greg the most.
Jonathan claimed he was helping Greg and may have been touching him inappropriately. I’m not sure, Greg was leaning back on the bed and Jonathan jumped to his feet when I barged into Greg’s room.
“What’s happening, you fa… fraud!”
“He is not doing what you think.” said Greg. “You have a filthy mind. No wonder you’re in here.” I looked down and there was a pink plastic basin on the floor with water. A yellow sponge was dripping in Jonathan’s hand. Greg’s bare feet were wet.
“I’m washing away his sin,” said Jonathan.
I tried to understand this and it sort of touched me. I wished someone would wash away my sins. Wash away this rotten feeling I had all the time. It was like the whole gleaming jaded world was fake and fast as water. Things happened. A handful of Amitriptyline. A brown pill bottle in a scatter of beer cans on a dirty carpet. Sirens, a tube down the throat (gastric lavage) pumping charcoal—a catheter jammed in me—the whole hog. A doctor broadcasted his voice, so everyone could hear, “If it had been a half hour longer, he wouldn’t have made it.” Then they put me away for about two weeks in the hospital by the gleaming river. I couldn’t absorb it.
“You guys want to flip some quarters.” I said.
“Is that gambling, JC?” asked Greg. “We’re not supposed to gamble.” His eyes full of religiosity. It made me jealous how Jonathan had become Greg’s go-to guy.
“Penny pitch is what we call it.” said Jonathan. He carried the basin and put it on a small table, by Greg’s book “The Dark Tower,” (Stephen King). The old head nurse said Greg shouldn’t read things like that. It might cause him to go nuts—too late. Jonathan rearranged Greg’s socks, cigarettes, and a small Gideon’s Bible. Like a priest after mass, then he took a Marlboro Light as payment and slipped it above his ear. Nothing was free, certainly not salvation.
“JC? You think you’re Jesus?” I said, “Boy you are nuts.”
Jonathan shrugged. Greg said, “I don’t have any money—a few cigarettes.” He looked at the cigarette riding Jonathan’s ear. “I have a guitar. I’ll put that up.”
“Hell yes. We can do that. Is it a Fender?” I said with a greedy intensity that suited me. It made me feel like myself again. I thought all guitars were Fenders.
“I don’t know. The name came off,” said Greg. “It might be a Sears and Roebuck.”
“No-no. You’re not getting his guitar,” said Jonathan. “Just rest my son and beware of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.” He calmly looked at me. I was easy to guilt, and he seemed to know this. I looked down at my psych ward sandals. Cheap rubber things that looked like the ones you get in jail. I wondered again if I had any charges on me? Is attempted suicide a crime?
“Carl, didn’t mean anything. Did you, Carl?”
“Nah, man, fuck no.” I smiled and probably looked like the wolf darkening the door, but Greg liked me. There was always someone sicker to make you feel better in these places. Earlier I told some wailing old lady to shut up. Then the poor thing hugged my hard unrepented body, and I melted when she put her head on my chest. And we both cried.
I led the way down the hall past the nurse’s station where they doled out medications and judged us. They were nuts too, full of estrogen and sexual comments. “Ooh-ooh, look at you, Carl.” said the blonde one with a Jennifer Grey hairdo. I thought with a thrill, she likes me today. Yesterday, I put my arm around her and she stiffened like a cat.
We bickered about the name of the game, Jonathan insisting it was called, “Pitching Pennies.”
“But we’re using quarters, dude.” It made about as much sense as my reflection in the mirror.
“Inflation, man, inflation.” Jonathan was losing his holiness. I liked that, but hoped he wouldn’t come down too far. We needed a saviour.
Whatever it was called, we played a simple gambling game in a complex place. A shiny quarter flipped through the air and ticked low off the soothing blue painted drywall and rolled over the swirling circles, triangles, and polynomials of the carpet and stopped. The carpet was a little jarring like walking on a circus. The overhead fluorescent light on the psychiatric ward showed Jonathan’s quarter a half closer to the wall than mine.
“Dammit!” I yelled, covering my mouth. The nurses frowned on gambling.
“Gotcha Carl!” said JC. He scooped up the quarters. Raised his arms over his head like the mental ward champ of nutso. Where only crazy people can compete. See, competition never goes away. There are no respites from the human race.
“Let’s go again, man! Come-on—come-on!”
“I’m broke, dude. This is for the poor.” His wire-rim glasses caught the light. Jonathan’s eyes were very sane and calm. He didn’t really look like Jesus, but he claimed he had a new body after his resurrection.
“Come on, what ya mean you’re broke? You got fifty cents, man!” I’m addicted to all things. An old nurse who bossed the younger ones, looked at me one day and said, “Don’t drink.” Like drinking was the worst thing I could ever do, and it was. I knew I couldn’t use alcohol safely, but what’s safe about life anyhow?
“I need a smoke,” said Jonathan.
“I thought God was against smoking?” I looked at him, and added, “And gambling.”
He shrugged. That’s why I liked him. He had come down from heaven and broke bread with us sinners, even playing our little games. “Go in peace, my son.” Then he walked down the hall in his lunatic uniform—white pajamas (same as mine) sort of flowed and almost glowed. I saw him look into the bearded man’s room. Ernie something.
Earlier, we stood around looking at this Ernie as he gave birth to the delirium tremens. Ernie came in flopping and foaming at the hairy mouth. He lay on the carpet. A huge spit bubble covered his lips, and his body ceased seizing. Then it began again like the bass of some epileptic song, more frothing and leaking. The nurses were on all fours, working on him, asses pointed up. How I had envisioned them like that almost every night with strings of semen on my knuckles.
They stashed this wayward Ernie of the bar and discount liquor store safely away on phenobarbital. Sometimes they put the detox people in with us, (I should know). They were very shaky, trembling like they were freezing.
Inside the shadows of the room, Ernie started screaming almost like he had different people inside of him. “Help me father-help me father,” said a begging voice. I had one of those too. Then another voice answered like there were three people in that room. “You’re nothing. You’re nothing,” said a craggy voice sounding so much like my dead grandmother, I got the willies.
“Easy son. I’m here now,” said Jonathan, or JC. He really thought he was Jesus, and had a calming effect on all of us until he committed suicide.
On that day It was raining; I remember that. A grayness overtook me on those days, but some people were brightly happy and giggled like pull string dolls. There was a hollow-eyed clique of them that came out on those dreary days. Three middle-aged women. They skipped through the halls smiling like the Manson girls singing, “It’s raining—it’s raining—It’s raining.”
I ducked into Jonathan’s room. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark with his head down. I thought he might be in prayer, but he wasn’t. “Hey JC, are your parents coming? Or I mean the Lord in heaven, and Mother Mary?” He looked ashen, like all his holy light had dissipated. How he looked on the cross, I supposed. I tried to brighten him up. “Goin to Long John Silvers, my man?”
“Don’t call me that. I’m not JC. My name is Jonathan Edwardian Clark and my parents are quite wealthy. We will dine at the Notre Dame Country Club. Then we will watch Gang Gold trounce Michigan State.”
He changed before my eyes. Growing in a sort of snobbery, nothing like the kindly JC. Rich people made me feel so small. “Notre Dame, wow!”
“Yeah, it will be so fucking wonderful.”
Now that he was swearing and acting so down. I wanted Jesus back. I didn’t know what to say. “Well sorry, I guess… Shit.”
“Don’t be sorry. We are the eaters of the world.” He stopped and looked up and smiled. His teeth were very straight, and I noticed how sunken his chest looked. “You know who my father is?”
“No.”
“He builds places like this for people like you, and me.”
I studied his perfect teeth. “Do you have false teeth?”
I watched from the fourth floor of the Behaviour of Medicine. He looked like a prophet in his gray hoodie and he had a walking stick, maybe a staff. Like a shepherd. I waited for the tromp of sheep to come out of the cold, hazy rain and trot across the river bridge, but they didn’t. I saw Jonathan get into a chauffeured limousine. The long black car from my vantage point was like a black hole moving in the rain.
Then I forgot about him for a while.
I kept doing laps around the four corners of the ward—exercising my demons. I looked down at the circles, symbols, and trapezoids in the burnished yellow carpet that seemed too complex and disturbing, like permanent crazy.
There was a black girl I had fallen in love with, but she was locked away behind a square of wire mesh glass. Thick as a tank’s window. The door had a blank placard on it, like it was an unnameable place. It was for the criminally insane. We all knew this. I walked by making eyes at her, but she was like looking at five or six different people fighting with each other behind her smooth pretty forehead. I would never get through to her. She was exhausting me, but I was excited about our future, even though she had just killed her baby with a boning knife.
The word came back on Jonathan, our very own savior. He had somehow gotten to Notre Dame’s golden dome and jumped. Thinking perhaps he was an angel. I guess he was upset about Notre Dame losing.
“How’d he even get up there?” I said, to the old nurse who watched me. Did she think about me and masturbate? “They don’t let people up there, do they?”
She said, nothing.
Then our old black psychiatrist, Dr. Redman, came up to the Nurse’s station. He looked so wise in his tweed coat, and smelled wonderful, like a Swisher Sweet Cherry cigar. I desperately needed to talk to him. He had the answers, but he only wanted to see me MoonWalk.
“Hit it,” said Dr. Redman in a powerful Doctor’s voice. So, I did my dance, sliding my feet, gliding away. It was the only thing I was ever good at—besides my Star Trek impressions.
Greg was plucking something sad on his acoustic guitar. He cried all night about Jonathan among the bright giggling of those three women as they roamed the halls singing. “It’s raining—It’s raining—It’s raining.” I’m not sure if they were real.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay Two pennies laying one on top of the other.
literally stories 
Christopher
Truly brilliant. Telling the tale through a person who has problems, and letting those problems ( especially with women) out bit by bit is a great touch.
Nearly everything set in a mental hospital is held up to Cuckoo’s Nest. This compares well and stands on its own right!
Leila
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Leila
Thanks for your excellent comments!
I love the movie with Jack Nicholson!
Christopher
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s a description of a hell, isn’t it. Everything outside insane and everything inside insane. Really disturbing and very well done. It was gripping in a really scary way. Great writing. dd
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Diane
Thanks for your kind comments!
Christopher
LikeLike
Christopher!
The title and the first sentence of this are totally brilliant and totally original! And the rest of the story does justice to these first two pieces of it.
The title, “Our Lunatic Uniform,” strikes me as one of the most unique and original titles I’ve heard in a long time. Something about the way these three words are put together in such an unusual, but natural-sounding, way, really makes this title strong, bold, and memorable, and something that grabs the reader’s attention.
“There was always a touched soul on the mental ward who thought they were God,” is also great. This first line does many things to plunge the reader straight into the world of the story immediately. And it’s written in a kind of Mark Twainian/Ernest Hemingwayesque American prose style that sounds familiar in a good way (placing it in the context of American Literature) but also sounds brand-new, raw, and honest.
Good short stories are often the closest thing to poetry because of the compressed and highly original way they use language, and this story is a wildly good example of that.
This piece is just as well-written as all your other stories and it also seems to move your voice in a new direction. Maintaining your hard-won style (in the best sense of the word) while also striking off for elsewhere. And that is awesome.
Finally for now, as someone who has spent some time in such locations (voluntarily for seven days one time eleven years ago), I can attest to the total realism of this piece, including the humor and the horror of it all simultaneously.
On the inside of such a facility I had a roommate named Keith who described his job on the outside world as “hustler” (which meant cocaine and hookers near as I can tell). But Keith didn’t wish to be a hustler any more. His new ambition was to go to janitorial school and get himself a “real job.” He’d seen too many people get killed or otherwise die on the street. He did not even want to leave the mental ward because he didn’t feel safe out there. But his time was up and they kicked him out anyway. Straight back out into the West Side of Chicago, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the US of A.
Really cool and great to see you maintaining your style while striking off in a new directions like this!!!…….
Also, you have great courage in writing about all the things you write about in all your stories, keep it up and I know you will anyway!
Dale
LikeLike
Hi Dale!
Glad you liked the title! Awesome how you analyzed it! I thought it had a nice ring, too. Sort of symbolizes being drafted into the service of mental illness. Glad the first line helped to hook the reader. That makes me happy! Opening lines are so important.
When I was a kid I once saw my Dad wearing detox pajamas at the veteran’s hospital in Marion Indiana. I think I judged him as being crazy or maybe sick–then I became that.
For some reason this reminds of Frank Martin’s halfway house in “Where I’m calling from,” by our main man Raymond Carver. I think it’s these “time outs” from life that fascinate me. Sometimes I think I’ve lived my whole life this way. Funny how writing fiction is such a collage of experiences.
That’s great that you think the language is original! It’s a lot of fun to write something that has a unique language that adds to the story. I always find that to be a bonus. Like in Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” ….”Under Midwestern clouds like great grey brains” I love that line. It sticks to the bone.
I sympathize and even celebrate your time on the mental ward–kindred spirits my friend! The way you described the “The Hustler Kieth is really cool! And his aspirations to go to janitor school. It’s too bad that he got kicked back out on the Chicago streets. I help my ex-wife clean offices on the weekends.
This story has me in this place–I was in this place. The trouble started when I was sixteen. Drinking and drugs kind of put the fuck-o in my head, lol. Partying became everything… Then I quit school and got arrested, put my fist through a window, after drinking shots of Kamikazes, and about lost my arm And here’s the sort of bombshell. They sent to a state hospital on a court order when I was 19 for four and half months for alcohol and drug treatment after getting into a fight with a cop in total blackout. It was that or prison. He got hurt but if I meant to hurt him I don’t remember it. I’m sorry Mr. cop (truly), if you read this, which I know you won’t. I remember waking up in jail transformed back to Dr Heckle, without a medical degree, but with a felony.
I didn’t think they were ever going to let me out! I was afraid they would send me to a back ward, ( a backward is the end of the road at the nuthouse) chemically lobotomized–do the Thorazine shuffle to the graveyard. Or I would get kicked out and sent to prison. Talk about being surrounded by insane people, lol. It was very sad–some of those people…
I always say I wasn’t an actual mental patient at the state hospital but I can’t deny being there. Once you say you were committed to a state hospital people think you are a lunatic–which I was and wasn’t. It was the most bizarre experience of my life, but not as bizarre as becoming lost in addiction–that went with me wherever I went.
It turned into a kind of before and after moment in time that I gauge my life by. I say this many years since I was in Richmond State Hospital. I even went back to visit but I couldn’t find the place where they had me. They called it the Addictions Service Module (ASM) back in 1985.
Then it just went on and on until I finally got honest when I was 32 and got a sponsor and moved into a halfway house. And got a job at Pizza Hut and it felt like had been dropped from a space ship.
Thanks for your great comments!
Christopher
LikeLike
Christopher
It’s amazing all the things you’ve been through, and I can and do believe that all of the above should be worn as badges of honor because these things are EXPERIENCES that teach one the real and deep ways of the world in the realest and deepest way/s possible. Another thing we have in common, too, is Pizza Hut, where I was employed as a delivery driver in dangerous crap neighborhoods in Wichita, Kansas for a few years while trying to write and going to graduate school at Wichita State University where I met James Lee Burke while blasted out of my mind.
Going through all you’ve been through as a person with your level of sensitivity and imagination is well-nigh miraculous. Having all the hard-edged, hard-won, and hardcore experiences and then being able to write about them so well too is one of the rarest things in the world. Surviving all that stuff and then moving on and growing as a person is one thing. Also being able to “tell the tale” (in a fictional way) makes you a blessed person. At very high levels!
When I landed (myself) in the mental ward for a week that time, it was after becoming addicted to benzodiazepines, then thinking I could go cold turkey all on my own. Stopping benzos abruptly when you’re physically addicted is one of the stupidest things any human on this planet could possibly do (the side effects are horrific and potentially deadly, and it’s much worse than coming off heroin, especially when you’re taking 20 to 30 pills a day, like I was) and within three days I was a raving madman who’d utterly lost my mind. Raving and running around seeing things (demonic things) and hearing voices, too (evil ones). The one and only time in life I’ve had a full-on PSYCHOTIC BREAK and the symptoms can only be compared to schizophrenia. And WOW, did I learn my lesson that time. The first thing they did was give me another pill to make it all go away. It took me almost two years to fully recover afterward.
Thanks for all your fearless telling of tales of a life once lived, now remembered and recreated in both nonfiction and fictional prose. With so many people in America losing their minds these days in various ways (and blacking out drunk is no less, which I can also speak to), you are an example of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous quote that poets and writers are the real “legislators of the world,” the ones who are also the antennae of the race, the ones ahead of the game, the ones who bear the burden for the rest of us, the ones who live the life, then recover and write about it, like Bukowski, Carver, Denis Johnson! Putting all these things into words LITERALLY redeems all these experiences for the ages, and to do so takes massive levels of both courage and boldness…And your life story and stories also show how far a deep and profound SENSE OF HUMOR can get you, too…Very hard to survive without it, I do believe!
Dale
LikeLike
Hi Dale
Thanks! I try to write about those events. Write what you know… I really admire Denis Johnson’s writing about those days in Jesus’ Son. Might be my all time favorite book–not sure.
In your Drifter column on Sunday you mentioned how you write about those drinking days even though you have been sober for 20 years. That’s how I am. I can’t seem to stop. It really is what I know. It just seems easier to write about screwed up people. And maybe that’s all I can do.
My last drink was the last time I got arrested back in 98. They got me for a PI. I put my fist through the post office window. Another trip to the ER riding in a police car. I have a bad thing for windows when I drink. Pretty much insane. The definition of can’t use alcohol safely. And I’m not safe to be around, either. Got some scars on my hands and arms. Done a lot of stupid things. lol. Definitely grateful to be sober! No stitches no cops no empty wallet no getting my face kicked in no assholes–ad infinitum.
I was a delivery driver too at the HUT. I could only imagine driving in Wichita in a dangerous area. Holy smokes that’s probably when BTK was active and roaming!
I just finished another J.L.Burke story. That’s wild that you met him, and how you were loaded! That must have been crazy! It’s kind of a writers’ mecca out there.
Yes those were trying times back when I was in and out of jail, hospitals, unemployed–The whole vicious cycles. I think that’s a story in the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill Wilson was a pretty good writer.
Your description of going cold turkey on benzodiazepines is riveting! A full psychotic break would be a terrifying experience! Then a stay on the mental ward. Hearing demonic voices would be no joke! That sounds like a helluva battle getting over it.
I know alcoholism is really bad and dangerous, but the added physical withdrawals of drugs must be pretty damn rough. Glad my apparent willingness to do everything that was in front of me–didn’t get me mixed up with heroin. Even though I did have a smoking cocaine and meth period.
When I was 18 I had this 32 year old girlfriend that fed me Valium and strong downers called 185 Glumethatide, like I was a little bird or something–along with all the drinking. She was pretty hot, and I was already all fucked up, so I can’t blame her. I remember laying around in Richmond State hospital and I think I was in some kind of withdrawals.
“legislators of the world” what a great way to describe writers! Percy Shelly’ was pretty famous in his own right. That is a neat way to put it. A redemption in a literary sense!
You are a very wise and talented writer and person. Your knowledge of these great philosophers, poets, writers, actors, painters, and musicians of the world always impresses me!
Yes without this sense of humor I think self pity would have killed me long ago, Ha! I love when something comes across as funny in my writing, not everyone gets it, but I know you do. And I think Hugh sees the humor that is there between the lines. Some people see horror but some of this stuff makes me laugh when I read it back. That’s what I like about your writing too there is this intelligent humor that I can relate too. And I think that’s why I like Denis Johnson so much too. Maybe only people like us can get this humor into our work after leading these kinds of lives, battling the bottle, drugs, and ourselves.
From the ten foot tall corn rows and typos, lol.
Christopher
LikeLike
Hi Ananias!
Yes, I did live in Wichita when BTK was still on the loose, but it was also during some of his “quiet years,” so he wasn’t in the news too much.
There was a small town outside Wichita which my ex-wife and I (before she was my ex) used to visit sometimes, in order to see the horses. (Seeing the horses involved calling them over to the fence and talking to them.)
Turns out it was BTK’s hometown, the same one he was later arrested in and the same one in which he was a deacon in one of its churches, as well as the local dog-catcher.
As Marlon Brando said in Apocalypse Now (at the direction of Francis Ford Coppola (from the novella by Joseph Conrad)), “The horror, the horror!”
You have a really Russian way (not like Putin) of dealing with character in fiction, in the way you give life to all kinds of antiheroes (also like Kafka) who are so human they really seem real.
And all your stories together are turning out to have the reach, depth, and cohesion of a novel (while remaining well-rounded short stories, they are also starting to seem like chapters), in the manner of Jesus’ Son, which can perhaps most properly be called a novella (or a novel) in stories. Another classically great novel-in-stories is Go Down, Moses, by William Faulkner. Further back, we have The Decameron, by Boccaccio (one of Bukowski’s favorite books), and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (one of mine).
Thanks again!
Dale (The Drifter, LOL)
LikeLike
Hi Dale
That would be a strange experience having an almost brush with a serial killer. You may have passed him in a car. Or he may have passed you while you and your wife (at the time) petted and talked to the horses.
To be a deacon in the church is an added layer of cynicism and sinister–ism to the man. His hypocrisy is almost as bad as his crimes. I feel sorry for any dog that ended up in his clutches.
Thanks on the stories! I like the Russian way of handling characters. I admire the Russians definitely not Putin (lol). And Kafka!
I’m going to check out “Go Down, Moses.” Iv’e never read the Canterbury Tales.
Christopher
LikeLike
I enjoyed the hard-boiled humour in the hard-boiled narrative. The short sentences were very effective.
I’ve been wondering: how come every mental hospital seems to have a Jesus, but there’s never a Father Christmas?
LikeLike
Hi Mick
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Not any Santa’s on the mental ward–that I’ve met, lol.
Christopher
LikeLike
A chilling story of madness told from the inside out. Inside a facility and inside an out-of-touch mind. Excellent characterization and well-crafted.
LikeLike
Hi David
Thanks for your excellent comments!
Christopher
LikeLike
Christopher
Great! I remember an experiment performed many years ago at a facility for the insane associated with The University of Michigan. Three people, each believing he was Jesus, were allowed to live together. The subsequent study was called, “The Jesuses of Ypsilanti.” The authorities thought the trio might realize they all couldn’t be JC, each and severally, at the same time.
Forget it! Imagine putting three Jonathans together on a ward? At least the Ypsilanti experiment became famous.
(I always thought Jesus’s crucifixion was a sort of suicide. I mean, He could have bailed out if he wanted. Right? Plus, He had all the right connections on high for a lifesaving intervention. There must be something I’m missing.)
But you didn’t miss a trick. And so masterfully written! — gerry
LikeLike
Hi Gerry
Wow that is a fascinating experiment! That opens up a lot of possible conflicts. It makes sense too. I can only imagine those conversations. That study sounds like it would indeed make a great movie! Those college experiments are truly great and sometimes, dangerous.
I hear what you are saying about suicide. He willingly went to the cross. Jesus did as the Father commanded, but asked, ‘Let this cup pass.” He had the command of the angels, but still didn’t call them down on his tormentors–is beyond human. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” His words are truly everlasting.
Thanks for your comments! I really appreciate it!
Christopher
LikeLike
Hi Christopher,
This is beyond brilliant Christopher. It is one of those stories that I really do wish I had written!!!!
I think you have went beyond the last one that I said was your best!!!!
It’s hard to write wit, perception with intelligence but you have blown this out the water!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Superb my fine friend. I will remember this with, ‘Unanimous’, and ‘Short Straw’
Hugh
LikeLike
Now for something quite irrelevant. Reminded me of something I’ve wondered about. The past tense of cast was cast. Now I see casted, forecasted, broadcasted. When did someone try to change cast to casted? I, some authorities, and others of the elderly cast don’t accept the change.
LikeLike
Sounds negative whatever you mean.
LikeLike
Hi Hugh
Wow! Really happy you liked my story! I was blown away that you like my last one so much! That meant a lot to me! So that goes double on this one!
Glad the first line caught the wind!
That joke is hilarious! I can see Napoleon with his hand in his jacket! Ha!
Religiosity always makes me think of crazy people ready to set the barbecue grill lighter to the straw. Whoosh sinner!
I think it’s like this with the human condition. A search for the comfort of superiority and maybe a little security wrapped up in someone a little “less than” (or so they think) to fuck with.
PC blows. I hate that shit! It’s so phony. Glad the humor came through! Life is so horrendous it has to be funny. If it can be… This is what I love about writers like yourself. You see!
Thanks again!
Christopher
LikeLike
The story seems to be about chaos… a series of character vignettes and interactions with chaos in the mind and the world underlying. As someone who worked in a psychiatric hospital, I can relate. The elephant in the room is why did Johathan kill himself? Likely voices telling him he could fly, as Jesus of course he could work miracles. I like Dr. Redman’s cameo appearance at the end, he’s in control.
LikeLike