I need to go watch some football

 I can finally see how insanity begins.

 Take a man.

Take him and put him in a cage of any and no particular size. Stick him there for a good long time with nothing else and he very well might start to pace, just to “stay in shape.” Next thing you know he begins to count steps. How many across to here and how few accounting for this and that, just to “stay mentally sharp.” Then, struggling with mid-high school level math skills he starts computing and writing down. And he figures, if only to pass the time, the dimensions and square footage of the cell.

But even that victory fades and he must consider his confinement from another angle – the above and beyond. A new dimension in perception. So now a bit more climbing and counting and retooling the numbers. Quick estimations and the cubic feet appear leading to a consideration of the volume of the air and, as a passing gag, a joke about who pays for it all.

The years resume to refuse to resume and he, that man, stuck in a box, familiar with its every corner and cobweb, in an exercise to keep himself sharp reconsiders the question of cost and the volume of a human breath. He counts his own ins-and-outs, logging his lungs’ work and figuring his annual consumption of air. Bills had to be paid so a going rate, one that made sense considering comps, was established and he began to figure his daily air use in dollars per minute. He WAS sharp. He WAS in shape. He was the old man about the house – ask him any question about his cell and he can tell you a story. Ah, the adventures that that cell and he shared.

Then one day he is released. But where others see freedom he can only see disorder, unpredictability and an overflow of stimuli and no one else seems to notice. He is drowning in all that is happening, weaving uneasily through the street. He needs an apartment and insists on measuring its dimensions and working his numbers as he mumbles to himself.  He wonders aloud about the price of oxygen compared to the rate 24 hours ago and sounds as perfectly reasonable as any man who chooses to go into finance. He cannot interact with anyone, can’t leave his comfort zone and ends up recreating the world with which he is most recently familiar and retreating into that fantasy. He was more free when he was in a cell than when he wasn’t.

And we look at him, homeless, obsessed, angry and constantly shouting random numbers or words, and even prone to violent outbursts – this insanity might be so attractive to the patient because the real world cannot promise the same payoff.