Picture a windowless room. Open the single door and take a look inside. Inside this room are things you wouldn't show anyone else, your secrets. A bottle full of habits sits in the corner. Nearby you'll find a small closed box with a rusty hinged top. Open it and you'll find bits and pieces of thoughts, the kind you never whisper to a soul. This room is one you only enter alone. You go there not because you want to, you need to. A hard day finds you sitting with the bottle or sifting through your box of thoughts. Oh, I forgot to mention the shelf. One single shelf, maybe two feet long and not very wide holds a book and a knife. The book is blank. There is no pen, but the knife works nicely. Once in a while you go into the room just to check that all these things are still there. Nobody knows about the room so it's unlikely anything would be missing, but you still wake at four a.m. and have to check again to be certain. You'll slowly unlock the door and turn on the small lamp, finger the knife and the flip through your book. Peek under the lid of your box and maybe take just a small sip from your bottle. Turning to leave you have a brief moment of terror...where is the key? Sigh as you find it deep in your pocket. Turn the light off, shut the door silently aside from the click of the lock. You'll never tell a soul. Surely they would think you were insane.
This week's Pod Club was an episode of Love + Radio called "Insane vs. Unsane". What a fine piece of work it was! The stories perfectly intertwined. I was transported to the living room of a man in his mid 40's as I listened to him recount his current life situation and acknowledge flat out that he is insane, but "so are you". I walked the echoing halls of an empty insane asylum with a man who'd witnessed demon possession and cutting. Fascinated as I learned of a college boy stalked by a girl clearly in a world of her own creation. All of this led me to the same conclusion as our first narrator..I'm insane and so are you. All of us somewhere on the crazy scale. Maybe a ten, blatantly walking the street carrying on a three way conversation with yourself and yourself. Or you could be lower, a less obvious seven sitting in the waiting room tapping your toe exactly ten times before you turn the page of your magazine. Some folks aren't even aware of their insanity, twos or threes interacting with the world smoothly and "normally" only to go home at night to drink until they aren't scared anymore or distract themselves obsessively surfing the internet. Once in a while you're a one. Then you get bored and start climbing the scale again...
Next week we'll choose another podcast for Pod Club and would love anyone with ears to join us! We post on Monday and report on Friday. Please comment on our blogs or post on your own. If you don't have a blog yet (ahem Stephanie) maybe this will give you a good reason to start. We'd love to have you join in the fun.
My co-host of the Pod Club : Just Jill (recently started xmas early)
Pod-Club member: Soft Spiral (recently had her blog taken over by a cat)
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