Mental House Memories, The Current Crisis and Pain and Necessity Of Yearning

When I was fourteen years old I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a mental hospital against my will. It was, as you might imagine, not a good experience. In fact it was downright traumatizing. When I was carried away by glowering orderlies I was definitely suffering from a deep, clinical Depression but in this case at least, the cure seemed to be way worse than the disease. 

The mental hospital was an immersive experience in the worst possible sense. After just a couple of days the cold, grey halls and fluorescent lights of the loony bin began to feel like the only reality I’d ever known and the only reality I would ever know. My whole world shrunk to a sad floor in a sad building where sad people became even sadder. 

An outside world I once viewed with withering contempt, as a hellscape so bleak and dire it made me want to kill myself suddenly felt like a goddamn paradise. As I wrote in my memoir The Big Rewind, my brain fixated on one post-mental hospital milestone in particular: the glorious, glorious day when I would be able to return to the movie theaters that were my home away from home and my life-affirming, life-saving escape and see a movie I was obsessed with devouring just as soon as I was free: the exceedingly violent, unmistakably racist Steven Seagal vehicle Marked For Death. 

I survived the mental hospital with my sanity relatively intact by letting my mind wander regularly to that glorious moment when I would get to leave and my normal life, my shitty, shitty workaday existence, would resume only now it would seem like a paradise compared to the nightmare of the mental hospital. 

I lived for that moment of ecstatic release when my torment would end I could live a normal life again. My body might have been stuck in a sleazy, mercenary mental hospital but in my mind palace I was a million miles away, having adventures, achieving great things and watching movies and TV to my heart’s content. 

Well, friends, thanks to coronavirus we are ALL in metaphorical mental hospitals right now. It’s not because we’re crazy but because the world has gone insane. As with the mental hospital, it only took a few days of self-quarantine for this new, terrible normal to feel like the only reality me or my family have ever known.

I do my best to live day by day. I try not to future-trip, because that can lead to some dark, apocalyptic places. This does not appear to be a crisis on the magnitude of 9/11. Rather, it seems to be an extinction-level event on the order of multiple 9/11s. One of the many terrifying elements of this crisis is that we have absolutely no idea how bad this is going to be, how many people are going to die or become desperately ill or when, or even if, it will end, and what the world will look like at that point. 

I am currently in the process of trying to hold this off for as long as possible.

I’m trying to see the silver lining in this unprecedented disaster, for the sake of my family as much as myself. Part of that involves occasionally allowing my mind drift to that wonderful day when this will all be over and we can go back to living some semblance of our former lives. For many of us the lives that this crisis violently interrupted was already difficult to the point of being damn near impossible. 

Yet those lives can’t help but look borderline idyllic compared to how we’re living now, just as my sad adolescent existence suddenly seemed like a wonderland of perpetual joy compared to the misery of the mental hospital. 

I yearn to experience what was commonplace, even boring and annoying a month ago, yet now feels too good to be true. Something as simple as going to a sunny, kid-friendly festival with my wife and two sons and our dog on a sunny Sunday afternoon now feels as far away as colonizing Mars or flying cars. 

It can feel good to imagine life on the other side of this. But it can also be painful because it’s so tantalizingly near yet so far away. 

I’d like to think that should the world return to the way it was we’ll learn to appreciate it, and each other, and ourselves, and the privileges we enjoy every goddamn day of our lives but never bother thinking about, in a whole new way.

If nothing else, the first Gathering of the Juggalos post-coronavirus is going to be lit, y’all! 

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