According To This Man I'm Insane

Well this little milestone kinda crept up on me, story number 400 on Vocal Media (does that get any sort of a bonus VM?) I suppose it stands for something, maybe a triumph of optimism over experience. Or perhaps a sign of stubborn determination to keep doing something despite the odds of anything meaningful coming from it.

Another way to look at it is as a sign of insanity. Albert Eistein once said that repetitively doing something over and over again, and expecting a different result, is tantamount to insanity. So, there you go, according to the great man himself I am, by the logical definition of a proven genius, unequivocaly insane.

Of course, I have known ever since my days at university that I am not of sound mind. We had an excellent tutor who loved to explain how all writers are certifiably mad. No less a playwrite than William Shakespear, or a novelist such as Charles Dickens, were not the first to write a play or story in which they expressed themselves through a wide variety of alter egos, ie, the characters in whichever unfolding drama they happened to be writing at any particular time.

People with dual, split, or multiple personalities, normally get medically certified and put in a straight jacket and locked up in a padded cell. I once had a friend who was a very successful writer for the oldest, longest running soap opera, Coronation Street.

Tom Elliot, sadly no longer with us, once told me how he would spend hours in his office at home reading out loud the script he had just finished writing. Of course, being alone, he had to be each and every personality who appeared in the scenes he had written.

I have to say, when I get to the end of a story or article, I am prone to doing the same thing, reading out loud to myself. Tom used to laugh about it saying, if he wasn't a writer he'd be locked up for what he did. Instead he got highly paid for acting the lunatic that he secretly was anyway.

It is not just writers, actors are also inflicted with the same condition, especially an actor like Peter Sellars who often played several different characters in films such as Stanley Kubrick's Lolita as well as in the legendary director's cinematic classic, Dr Stangelove.

In the Muppet Show of February 1978, when Kermit the Frog told Sellars he could relax and be himself, the actor replied...

"But that, you see, my dear Kermit, would be altogether impossible. I could never be myself ... You see, there is no me. I do not exist ... There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed."

It was no secret that for various reasons Sellars had mental health problems, no doubt not helped by his penchant for alcohol, as well as the stresses and strains of a hugely successful acting career.

***

Blowing this idea of madness wide open, I could claim that in fact each and every one of us, writer, actor, or simply a bricklayer, office secretary, or factory worker, is in fact totally stark raving bonkers.

We are all a son, grandson, brother, cousin, uncle, lover, husband, father, grandfather, all at one and the same time. And I constantly have to slip from one persona to another. If having multiple personalities makes one certifiably mad, then ergo we should all be locked up on the funny farm. So if I am mad, then I amongst friends on and off Vocal Media and Medium, or wherever else I happen to pop up.

So the sum total of what I have learned this last three years, through 400 different stories, is that I am quite frankly as mad as a bloody hatter. Even more so since it took me 400 pieces of writing to realize that stone cold fact. Will somebody please call the local medical authorities now and tell them to come and get me.