I’ve been searching high and low in cul-de-sacs of my foggy memory to form a collection of sentences that might make a readable follow-up to ‘Drugs? Thank you, I’ll pass.’ or ‘A rough timeline of a series of events’ as I prefer to call it. (https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/06/drugs-thank-you-ill-pass/)

Apart from a few light alterations – a few additions to the text here and there to add a little bit of context to some of my overly-vague scribbles – all the words published were written in the middle of September in 2018. So, at the time I had been in full time employment for 8 months. Upon reflection, I think it would have been better if I hadn’t suggested changing the 8 to 30.

The opening line would have been ‘An email sent to someone I’ve never met in September 2018.

It was a private, spontaneously typed letter, that shed some very selective dim rays of light on some rather insane behaviour of mine in a time, just before and for a wee while after being an acute maniac, devoid of liberty and without the ability to even reason with a mirror.

An interesting series of events led to it becoming a mad personal blog in America. I could write about those now, but the blank canvas forming in my mind informs me this is not the right time for that.

I am not recovering. I am not a victim or a survivor. I do not think psychiatry is an evil plot to enslave us. I am not mentally distressed. I am not mentally ill.

I am an outsider. A stranger in a strange land.

I am not a liberal. I am not a socialist. I am not a libertarian. I am not a communist fascist or a national socialist (nazi) fascist. I am not a Tory!!. left, right, centre, none of these things are for me. I am not a member of a tribe. I reject utopianism and political ideologies are not for me.

I have personal beliefs about God and eternity which, if revealed to the wrong people, might get me committed with a daily stiff chemical cocktail of pills forced down my throat on a daily basis.

I believe that Jesus is who the beautifully written King James Bible says He is. But I am scared to knowingly go to church on a Sunday for the first time in my life. I am a habitual social distancist. I am a shy pessimistic extrovert. This ridiculous lockdown situation that millions, if not billions of us have had forced upon us should be heaven to me you might think, but you would be wrong.

Civilisation, as most of us privileged souls think we know it in the ‘west’, is crumbling all around us. We are in this for the long haul. Rome wasn’t built in a day and it certainly didn’t crumble overnight.

I am actually starting to wonder whether we are living in an age which might one day be described as the last dying breath of Rome.