Perspective

Just when your head is about to explode, covering the nearby walls with enough red to require a fresh coat of magnolia, something comes along, taps on you the back and introduces a whole new school of thought.

I'd be lying if I said the past few months haven't, in the main, been a thinly veiled, self absorbed introspective. That can be fun, if you find your own mental torture more fun than trying to eat a bowl of Rice Krispies whilst riding a rollercoaster. Or it can be like being trapped in a lift with only yourself for company, and some absolute Bastard continually calling it up and down and never letting you get out.

They say (it's them again. Who the fuck are they?), when one door closes, another one opens. What isn't in the manual and isn't answered by the call centre in Delhi, is what happens when one door closes, and every door in the building swings right open? I now have a rough idea what happens- all the lunatics you had trapped behind those doors, suddenly take over the asylum. Now, when your asylum is about a cubic foot of grey matter and it was holding a lot of lunatics, it's going to make One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest look like a trip to the library to borrow a book about shoes.

Whilst these lunatics are running amok, I dunno, pretending to be Napolean or eating the furniture or being suckered in enough to think they really do enjoy X Factor, I'm there, trying to work out which ones need dealing with first. It's true, you know. The quiet ones are the worst. The quiet ones are the ones who really need help at the scene of the accident, the ones who turn up one day and shoot someone just because they can, or like to get kinky and wear leathery stuff and put oranges in their mouths whilst being spanked by a midget in a firemans outfit. Or something.

Anyway. The analogy continues (you knew it was an analogy, right?)...

All these nutters (assuming you're allowed to call them that. Well, it's my blog, I call can call them what I  fecking like). All these nutters, running around, I've realised isn't a bad thing. The more you keep them locked up, the nuttier they get. Let them out, and they get less nutty. It's easy logic. Easier than, if you don't poke that angry tiger with a stick, he'll be less inclined to tear you into at least 7 or maybe 8 pieces.

Now the inmates have had a chance to run riot, jump on the furniture, urinate on the receptionist and do their animal impressions and they've calmed down rather a lot. My asylum is running smoothly, the doors are remaining open and I've introduced a new menu, as the old one sucked a lot of ass.

They say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Now apart from the argument that drinking your bodyweight in Guinness might not kill you but it certainly won't make you any stronger, I think there might be some merit in it. Behind one of those doors (you remember, the ones that opened when the other one shut), was a tool I'd chosen to forget all about- Empathy.

By now you should be hoping I'm bringing this all back around to the beginning, otherwise you'll know I've either forgotten what I was on about or have joined the mentalists in burning down the asylum. Now I do like a good bonfire...

Okay, empathy.

You've gone through your whole life, it might be 10 years, might be a 100, and the doors of your asylum have never been opened. The lunatics have never escaped their rooms and you think you're running the best asylum there is. Other people, with their bad management, let their crazy bods escape all the time. You can't empathise with them, because you think you're the one doing the great job and they're sloppy and pathetic.

Then it happens to you, yours get out and run riot, completely unexpected and not by design. Talk about an epiphany. It's like Stevie Wonder suddenly being able to see and realising at times he's had the worst haircut possible. Then realising he can aim and shoot a gun, most possibly at his stylist of the time.

This epiphany (go on then, Google it if you're not sure), is that you were the one doing it wrong and the others were right. And once that's out of the way, you see in the faces of people, that there are problems out there beyond your wildest dreams. You think your resident lunatics are bad? There's always someone who can top trump you in the maddest asylum resident stakes. So you now know to respect that fact, to see that you're not a blemish in a world full of people's perfect lives. Almost everybody has shit going on. The question isn't whether the shit is there, it's how deep is it? Some people only have enough to stain their flip flops, some people have to snorkel through the bastarding stuff.

Maybe I have just little enough to keep my wellies from filling which, in the grand scheme of things, isn't really that bad. And that is the perspective. Being able to see in context what you could not before. Letting the little loonies run around your asylum is the best thing you could do.

Today my heart goes out to someone who, right at this moment, is probably one of those snorkelling through it, having to say goodbye to his daughter in a way a parent should never have to.