Never Go Full Rowling (Spoiler: You Will)

Our decline into madness is inevitable, so there's really no need to panic.

It seems to me that there are only two sorts of people.

The first are those who live with the uneasy certainty that they will, eventually and in grim consequence to their being alive on this earth, become stark raving mad. To such people—and I number myself among this population—the slow decline into madness is as tacit as it is unavoidable. We get by as best we can and watch for the signs.

Then there's the other sort. These believe, in a blissful and cavalier way, that madness is avoidable—that staving it off is simply a matter of maintaining proper levels of due diligence. They take all the necessary precautions. They keep their kitchens sparkling and immaculate. They abstain from toxins and fret about glutens. They live in strict accordance with scripture. They walk ten thousand steps each day, sometimes more, with smiles fixed upon their faces to deflect all forms of negative energy. Methodically, they sharpen all the pencils in their drawer. They organize the books on their shelves by color.

It's this second category, of course, who keep the rest of us on our toes—because they're the ones who've gone mad already.

The Lawn-Vacuuming Epiphany

I've been on the lookout for this type of person for most of my life. I am vigilant around them; I can almost smell them across a busy road. I'm not entirely sure why, but I can tell you it started when I was about ten years old, when I stepped out of our house one day and happened to observe our next-door neighbor vacuuming her front lawn.

I looked on in awe for a little while, then went and fetched my parents to serve as witnesses. I was dumbstruck. But my parents did not seem overly concerned. They merely looked at our neighbor for a while, then went back to whatever they were doing. They did not panic. They did not exclaim loudly. They did not seem even remotely troubled.

So I sat down, gave the matter some thought, and came to a rather sobering conclusion, which was that the adults weren't panicking about this woman vacuuming her front lawn because they had all, in the course of their lives, observed much crazier behavior.

I became preoccupied with that awful question: just how much crazier do people get? And gradually, over time, life began to supply me with answers.

The Long Timeline of Sanity

I've seen some wild things. Then again, we all have in recent years. There was a time when an American president didn't threaten to invade close allies like Canada or Greenland. Political life never used to be so furnished with spectacle. But that's not really my point.

I'm saying that, given a long enough timeline, the odds of any of us staying sane drops to zero.

I don't know how many people you know over age seventy, but most of them don't seem to be doing well. My mother is 82 and no longer in contact with any of her friends. "It's the racism," she says. My mother has always hated racists. In fact, on one memorable afternoon in 1982, I said the N-word for the first time (not knowing what it meant after seeing it on television), and wow, did I receive a beating.

In retrospect, it had an interesting effect on my psyche. Whenever I encounter a racist in my life, I endure a strong compulsion to beat them half-to-death with a leather belt. I've never discussed this with anyone, not even a psychiatrist.

Growing Up Different

I think that's partly because the psychiatrists I met were all back when I worked at Harvard, and I don't think any of them would have been able to wrap their minds around what my life was like growing up in rural Australia. For instance, when I was eleven years old, one of my favorite pastimes was hunting goannas—these remarkably large lizards. Why did I hunt them? Because I wanted to eat them.

To be fair, my mother was not an exceptional cook, and I had Aboriginal friends who occasionally fried up snakes and lizards on their campfires, so this all seemed perfectly normal to my eleven-year-old mind.

I once wandered for so long in search of goannas that my mother called the police and they organized a search party. I walked out of the wilderness and into a world of pain and regret. But my point is: can you even imagine how I would explain any of this to a Harvard psychiatrist?

Well, I can, because I did one day. I was called up to fix a computer in Harvard Health Publications and found myself chatting with some eminent psychiatrist who was having trouble opening a file. Somehow all this stuff about hunting lizards for food as a small boy bubbled up to the surface (as it sometimes does), and let me tell you, that eminent Harvard psychiatrist looked at me like I was out of my mind. Which did not seem particularly professional of him, frankly. There's a whole chapter in my novel, The Harvard Skull Fiasco, in which I address the incident in a very fair and reasonable way.

When Good People Go Bad

But back to my mother's friends. She can barely bring herself to speak to any of them because they have all—every single one—become incredibly, stupidly racist. They never used to be like that; they just swerved off the deep end, suddenly. She finds it unsettling. And quite likely, though she hasn't said it to me, I think she wants to beat them half-to-death with a leather strap. I am merely extrapolating from our shared history.

But I don't feel surprised by her friends' transformation into bigots. Because one time, long ago, when I was a small boy, I exited the house and saw our neighbor vacuuming her lawn. Ever since, I have assumed that one day everybody succumbs to madness. I don't know in what form my madness will manifest, but I suppose the joy lies in the discovery.

The Pressure Cooker of Modern Life

I never understood the process. I thought it was just the never-ending barrage of bad news about which none of us can do anything. We just go about our lives. We floss our teeth. We recycle. Meanwhile, major governments commit genocide, but if we condemn them, we'll be put on watch lists. One day you wake up and government authorities are describing normal human empathy as a sin.

The pressure builds and eventually something snaps in your brain. There you are, suddenly worried about transgender people playing competitive table tennis, and now that's all you can think about.

As for me, so far I haven't lost my mind. I like people, so I’m allied with those transgender folk. I just want everyone to live their best lives. That said—and this is my main point—it's only a matter of time before I start freaking out about something stupid. Some billionaire will do something despicable, and the last thread holding my mind together will snap. Then, at last, I will go absolutely mad and develop a fixation with diesel train engines or something nice like that. That’s the better scenario. The worst one is when you wake up one day and decide that all of the world's ills can be explained by a small minority of people, and you go—what I like to call—completely Rowling at them.

When I go Rowling, I hope it's at the furries, because some part of me thinks that would be the silliest way to proceed. But I don't think it will be furries. I think it's going to be the manufacturers of electric kettles.

The German Kettle Incident

Earlier this week, I disassembled my cell phone and replaced the cracked screen. Simply put, I am the sort of person who will happily repair electronics. I just like to solve problems.

But for the past decade, I have not managed to keep an electric kettle in a functioning state for more than six months. They just die, and I'm never able to fix them. This is no exaggeration—in the past decade I've replaced about twenty electric kettles. The most recent one was this week.

I don't want to create e-waste. I don't want household appliances to be like disposable paper cups, but that's what's been happening. At some point, about six or seven years ago, I tried to circumvent the problem by buying a really high-end model. No more buying $100 kettles. I would order the most expensive kettle I could find. The one I chose was manufactured by a company called Zwilling—a German company that probably got its start manufacturing war zeppelins or something of that nature.

I bought it because it was manufactured by Germans and because I trusted them. And they betrayed my trust because even though that kettle cost me something in the vicinity of $400, it developed rust under the lid in fewer than thirty days of use.

My wife wrote to them to complain, because she's that sort of person—a reasonable person who complains when companies act poorly. As for me, when I saw that rust accumulating after a month of light usage, I wanted to burn their factories to the ground. But my wife is better than me, so she wrote to them instead.

She wrote: "We have had the kettle for a month and it is now rusted on the inside and on the lid."

This is how Zwilling replied:

"Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us. We are sorry to see this [...] To prevent rust and other corrosion, be sure to hand wash and promptly and thoroughly dry the kettle after use."

So, to summarize: the reason my $400 electric kettle began to rust after a month is because I had not, after making myself tea, emptied the kettle of water, reached my hand into its scalding hot depths, and patted it dry. After every single use.

The Inevitable End

It's been six or seven years since the German Kettle Incident, and here I am, still thinking about it at this very moment, even though it’s 3.30 AM. That little interaction with their customer service people has left me scarred. All these sorts of interactions have left me scarred.

And this is what happens to people—this is what happens to all of us. There are only so many interactions we can have with corporations or mindless bureaucrats before we find ourselves vacuuming our front lawns. We all go mad in the end and if you think you haven’t, you have, and if you think you cannot possibly … well, that just means you’re on your way. As for me, I’ve started paying much more attention to birds. I used to ignore them as much as possible, but I woke up one day and birds were suddenly interesting. I’ve already started heading out on walks, specifically in search of interesting birds, so I guess I’m going to be one of those people.

I can’t make any promises here. I’ll try to keep the madness contained, but that’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? I’ll do my best, but everyone starts out that way, don’t they? It’s just that everybody has their limits. I don’t know how many interactions I can have with German kettle manufacturers before something finally breaks within me. Obviously, I’m trying not to go Full Rowling against anyone because my mother raised me to treat everybody equally. But if I do go off the deep-end, I somewhat hope it’s against those people who go about in public wearing spandex for no good reason whatsoever, because those people have it coming to them.

With chaste affection,

Kris St.Gabriel