These days I’m a lot less likely to call people crazy, even if they are, and that’s because I have a sense of what the word really means. Many years after Neil Diamond and Grandma Prisbrey and the mustached bagel lady, my severely depressed brain and I walked right up to the shoreline of bona fide clinical madness. I dipped a couple of toes in the water to feel it, and I thought very seriously about jumping into the cold, dark, murky, depths. That certainly would have been easier than the alternative: exerting the strenuous emotional and spiritual effort to turn my back to the water and trudge back through the thick, hot beach sand littered with the sharp, fragmented shards of my ego, my dignity, and my sense of who I was. I stood on that shoreline for many months, all the while vacillating over which direction I should turn. There were days when I wanted to take that plunge because it was easier, because it would be far less painful and take a lot less effort than walking barefoot through the sand. But each time I felt like giving in, each time I stripped myself down and prepared to dive into the abyss, I chickened out. I couldn’t do it. I had no choice but to turn around, gird myself, and go for it.
It was hard to tell whether I was walking away from the darkness or toward something beyond the beach, but no matter the impetus, trekking across the sand was more grueling and exasperating than anything I’d ever done. I wept, I fell, I bled. Turns out it takes balls to go nuts, but it takes even bigger balls to fight back.
- Danny Evans, Rage Against the Meshugenah Read more
