The Insanity Ward

 

His name is Saschel Polanski.  He does everything backwards: speaking, spelling, wearing clothes, and even walking.  Long-haired, lean, a gypsy dancing string bean, who looks just like the singer in Supertramp, his favorite band.  His voice has that same silky-smooth frailty that Roger Hodgson has.  The song he listens to the most is The Logical Song, for the obvious reason that it isn't logical at all.  It greatly attracted him because he'd been trained to use logic every moment of his life, yet he grew more tired of it the older he got.  Doing sums, driving in cars, studying for exams, and discussing important issues had never made him happy.  Logic just wasn't very fun to him. 

That's how he ended up in our insanity ward.  There's me, the erotomaniac in love with the psychiatrist, whom I've tricked into thinking is someone else; Jeffrey Goines, the manic activist who thinks a virus is going to wipe out all mankind; Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant cannibal who's eaten at least 10 people and will probably eat more; Cosmo Kramer, the clumsy and eccentric inventor, who has all kinds of crazy ideas; Ace Ventura, the animated quack who thinks he can talk to animals; Ian Malcolm, the mathematician who insists that chaos will destroy all human societies; Willy Wonka, former CEO of a candy factory, whose outbursts I'm told can be heard all the way down other wards; Tyler Durden, an insomniac filled with useless stats about modern living, who blew up his condo and half the city after shacking up with an imaginary friend; Jack Napier, the moody chemist with a wild laugh, who fell in a vat of acid that deformed his face; Raoul Duke, the journalist who invaded Las Vegas with a torrent of drug-induced freak outs; Daisy Murphy, the depressed chicken eating 60s doll-face who's in love with her father; Garland Greene, the pedophile who only speaks unless he has something deeply insightful to say; Inigo Montoya, a man so obsessed with avenging his father's murder that he builds shrines to him out of miniature swords; Morpheus Fishburne, the ostracized monk who's convinced we are living in a simulation; Boris Grishenko, the Russian hacker who once clicked the springs out of so many pens that it took a biohazard unit to clean his office; Jon Doe, an envious, suicidal serial killer who thought he was doing God's work; Max Cohen, the savant who claims to have memorized the code of God; May Philips, an insecure surgeon with a disturbing collection of voodoo dolls she made based on all the men that jilted her. 

We each have our own strange story, and we get along splendidly.  But none are stranger than Saschel's, who seems to fit right in here.  Sometimes I hear him humming down the hallways at night, those classy Supertramp tunes tickling my ears, the sax fade from Child of Vision striking the chord of lunatic-criminal-genius we've all grown to love.  At least he doesn't hum backwards.