The human is a strange kind of animal, and so unlike their fellow ape. They love stories. They love patterns. They love words – all strung along, and in clever turns of phrase.

The human tells them to each other. They remember them. They repeat them to their children, and those repeat the same again.

They weave all those little fables, and in time they tangle up together. They bind those strange little humans together into families of people: communities who all share the same little knot of stories.

What else is culture, but that? A bloodline. Not the sort from veins. Not marrow or the heart. Nothing so base or crass.

But a bloodline of words. A memetic legacy of ideas. A genealogy of the mind. The shape of what comes after when they say: “come here, and let me tell you a story – that someone once told me.”

There’s a certain sort of story, that a certain kind of folk, have always loved to tell. It’s popular with the rebellious, with the counter-culturalist too. The seditious love to dabble, and the transgressionists it’s true.

But sometimes it’s just regular, boring, wonderful, and everyday sorts of people: just looking for escape. It’s a thrill, it’s a chill, it’s fun. It’s an outlet for insecurity, and for pent up anger too.

Stories give this structure to an agent, and that agent gives a voice, to all the things which go unspoken, and are forbidden to be said.

Delight, revulsion, fascination, and even catharsis for their demise. The story-teller invokes them for many reasons, and to reach all sorts of ends –

The Lunatic.

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Sometimes he’s a genius, with ambitions far too large. Some are just for ambiance, to juice a humdrum scene with charge. How about a tragedy? Make a hero fall to spite. And some are simply killers, they’re for lurking out of sight.

But that’s not mAdNESs.

Imagine waking up one morning, not sure what’s dream and yet what’s true. Imagine never knowing quite –

what others say of you.

It means overhearing whispers, but your doubts fill in the gaps. It means standing oh so quiet, while your mind is running laps.

So I’ll tell you what Madness means: it’s to be a traitor to yourself.

What could be that makes a soul? Your thoughts? Your memories? Your perceptions or convictions? Are such attributes the key?

But what if oh so suddenly, you could not be quite sure. Of what is real or fantasy, and you did not know the cure.

How frightful be your circumstance, how sad it is to live. Your brain was almost, nearly rightly made: it’s just got a bit of… give.

But just –

Be kind to yourself. Be judicious. Know the limits to which you can rely on common sense and intuition when you know they can fail you so spectacularly. Be pro-active, and open, and courageous with the people you love and understand. Check your thoughts (carefully) against their sense of reason, and always trust the (statistically averaged) compass and opinion of your neighbors over your own.

And above all else, trust your doctor. They will never be perfect as you need them to be, but they’re just trying hard to help.

Sickness is nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing unprecedented about the way you feel, and that means you are not alone.

Madness doesn’t have to be a Horror story. You can be okay.

But –

Rhode isn’t.

He’s in oh so much fucking trouble.