I, Jamie Maddox, must confess that until all this happened I’d never given much thought to my own sanity. I mean, really. Who stops every morning before leaving the house to take this inventory: Keys? Check. Backpack. Check. Sanity. Oops. Left it on the kitchen table.
But now, sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for my shot, I get it. The journey to becoming a nutter, as the British say, is much shorter than we think. Sanity isn’t a given. It’s a fragile mix of hope for the future and an unwavering belief in yourself. Lose one of these two and you can probably limp along.
Lose both and you’re pretty screwed.
Lose both and travel backward in time, and suddenly those people who’ve been taken by alien spaceships and operated on by little green men appear stone-cold sane next to you.
All of those things happened to me (except the little green men), so it should have been no surprise that my life ended up being truly fire trucked. That word was in my life because Aunt Nicole deplored the f-word and pleaded with me, “Jamie, dear, there must be another, less offensive word you could use.” You’d think she was eighty instead of fifty. For her, I did find an alternative, which was harder than you might think. After she died, I continue to use it, even though I suspect it makes me sound a little…well…crazy.…