First, let me just say, I have never felt more mentally alert, focused, articulate, in the moment, centered.  Second, let me just add, I have never more frequently done things like locking my keys inside the locked house, making foolish mistakes on simple, routine strategic matters, being unable — some might foolishly say ‘unwilling’–  to move a foot in any direction, alienating more people or doing so more pleasantly, listing more commonplace small forgettings as ruthlessly or judging over and underwhelmed people, including myself, more harshly, if never in a calmer, more measured way.    

The phone?  It weighs a hundred and fifty pounds.  Why are you bothering me about picking up the phone?  I will send out a mass email, surely somebody I know, or used to know, will come by to help me lift the goddamn thing to my head so I can make those thank you calls.  “Thank you, thank you!” I will say cheerfully to people confused into silence by my sudden gratitude.  Suspicious, they’ll wonder if I’m mocking them.  They will be right to wonder.  That’s why I don’t pick up the phone, a small piece of metal that ridiculously weighs as much as many full grown human beings.   A once state-of-the-art cell phone that belonged to my now dead mother, she used it every day when she was alive, how the hell did she lift it to her ear?   

“You use the phone that your mother, dead more than four years, used to use?” asks a friend, already knowing the answer, but somehow having to ask anyway.  You are not the only one who is insane, I tell myself to console myself, wondering who is the one who is saying this reassuring thing to me.

Such is the madness of the mildly mad, or maybe not.