| abstract
| - "It was a dark and stormy evening." Surely he was hallucinating. He'd forgotten his umbrella and stood outside the door in the rain. He had lost everything. Even his dog had left him. He was too depressed to speak as he stood there wondering how it had happened. They wanted him to take Lithium, of course. He'd been off his meds for two or three months and was convinced that he was just fine. Maybe he was a little OCD, 1,2,3,4, but he thought he could handle it. There was just one problem - God. He'd forgotten the secret name he'd been given; God's redphone, the hotline that would put him straight through. Others thought him crazy for having faith. Who would have faith in this day and age? He pulled his hat down over his ears. "Once a pickle, never a cucumber." He'd been sober for years. Finally, he had arrived at life on life's terms. He repeated the cliches to himself over and over again. They helped keep the demons away. And the angels. People already knew the God they didn't believe in. They knew what "crazy" was. He turned away from the door and stepped into the street. The rain came down like pouring pee from a boot. Where was an electric fence when you needed one? His paranoia deepened. The thoughts had to find a way out of his head. He was allowing them rent-free. He'd forgotten how to be funny. He'd forgotten how to simply be. And he had to remember. So many things turned out to be silly, like his mission to "teach everyone how to play," like his mission to promote the secret group-free communist cabal, like his mission to warn everyone about the plot of the squirrels. The voice in his head, offered: "You're crazy. Crazy standing in the rain." No meds, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes, all that was left was coffee and that had to go too. "I'd like to get laid sometime soon," he thought, as he walked off into the night.
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