I think the world has gone mad. Not, roll your eyes back, stand on the table and do a jig to Dolly Parton’s ‘9 to 5′ on a Friday afternoon mad, but elephants at a tea party juggling cheese fish bowls while slowly undressing a warbling Stephen Fry with their eyes mad. As in, bonkers.
Or then again, the world has always been mad. I’ve just been in denial. That’s the thing, denial always partners madness. Firstly denial that life can actually be mad – and then, when realisation dawns and our trust in the logic and rationality of the world around us diminishes, denial that it actually is mad.
It’s the middle phase that’s the bugger.
We have a green button at work. It is placed before a very conventional door that is our exit from our bar area. The door has a handle, one which you pull to open. Nothing remarkable there. But the thing is, this door, one we’ve got quite used to across all aspects of our lives, only becomes a door when this green button is pushed. Otherwise it looks like a door, but is in fact a door shaped wall. Unmoving.
No one knows why we must push a green button to convert what looks like a normal door into an actual fully functional door. No one knows we we can’t just pull the door open as the design, it seems, intended. After all, if one can enter a room without constraint, shouldn’t the same be expected of leaving?
But this is the thing about madness. Up until recently I would have been in denial about it all. I would have presumed there was a perfectly rational and sane reason for its existence. Maybe health and safety, or the foiling of criminals. And in the near future I’ll fall happily into that stage in which denial means that I’ll chose to ignore this madness and look upon this green button as a perfectly logical extension to opening the door while balancing three cups of freshly brewed coffee on my nose.
But right now, and for the forseeable future it seems, I just think it’s mad.
