Why? Because I pulled the fire alarm at a hospital. Twice.
Let me clarify. There wasn’t a fire.
Now of all the asshole things one can do, why would one commit such an atrocity? Why would one cause every infirm patient to be wheeled and pushed out of the hospital in their beds and with their dialysis machines and ass-revealing gowns to hustle out of the hospital? Why act at the height of douchebaggery?
Well…I was insane. This is a little-known fact (it would have been nice if my psychiatrist knew this): I was hearing two voices. The first was the singer from Mars Volta, Cedric Bixler-Zavala. The other was a deep, agreeable baritone—the guitarist, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. I had been listening to them jabber continuously in my head for a couple days now, glad that I finally had friends. The y would make excellent radio commentators.
But let me digress. I am bipolar. As a bipolar person, I get to experience the confident, intuitive, impulsive knowingness and sureness of being right, along with the bewildering, paranoid hallucinations of sweet psychosis, which accompanies mania in some humans. When I am not loading my valuables into a backpack, dropping the backpack off in the woods because it contains things that can identify me, and walking along the highway for 12 straight hours to get away, I am asleep in my bed wishing I were dead. This time, however, as it turns out, I was manic again. Really manic.
(I think the source of comedy must be pain.)
Anyway, don’t feel sorry for me. I get to go out on adventures. Terrible, terrible adventures. Furthermore, at the time, I was getting ECT for my previous chronic depression, and as a side effect some of my recent memories were disappearing. Like how I ended up in a mental institution.
All I knew was that I wanted out. No more art projects. No more filling out menus made to seem like I was fine dining. No more putting together puzzles with missing pieces. Oh, and I wanted my shoelaces back.
Hence, I pulled the fire alarm, planning to escape as we exited the building. However, the lady in the office just turned off the alarm from her desk. (The next day it still seemed like a good idea, so I did it again.) Nothing. Nada. Foiled. I, Cedric, and Omar wouldn’t be escaping today, making me…an asshole.