1.

I see it—I am the only one who sees it, and there is an awful desire in me to tell the world of it. It is the city, but it is not an ordinary thing I see. Everyone’s movements, everyone’s every expenditure of energy is prescribed. The cars all move in predictable patterns and formulas—I can predict when they will stop, when they will slow, when they will speed up—I know which ones are about to turn and what way. They move through the city like blood cells, carrying themselves along as if they are only parts in some vast organism that I am inside, that I too am a part of. I cannot see the limits of this organism; everything I see has arisen out of it, and exists only by virtue of its systemic functioning. All the buildings, all the stores, the landscaping, the streets signs and stoplights—they are all It. I am not its enemy, I am not here to tear it down, I am not a revolutionary or an extremist. I am here to tell the world that It exists—no one can make a single movement but that the movement is an expression of it, and yet no one sees it but me, no one even knows it exists. I am here to tell the world of It.

I’m sure these ideas sound psychotic. That’s because they are. I look at things this way because I’m schizophrenic. Let me explain.

Psychosis is a break from reality. Any fool can tell you that. And schizophrenia is a disease of psychosis. What does this mean? That my brain won’t work? That I have disordered thought? Let me ask you something. If reality were completely objective, if there were nothing that existed that weren’t reality, how would one break from it? Wouldn’t one be as stuck inside it, merely by virtue of living in it, as a stone is stuck with being a stone? A healthy mind—your mind—must process reality, must find out what to emphasize and what to push into the background, must draw connections between experiences in a meaningful way. This is how reality comes about. It is constructed by your mind—a healthy mind. My mind cannot construct it like yours does. Am I getting psychotic again? I cannot quite tell.

When I take classes at the university—and I have decided only tonight never to take one again—I write philosophical papers. I’m a philosophy major. I write very rationally, and get As in all my classes (at the university I transferred to in 1999, I have only one A-). Unless the professors can tell from my slovenly dress and shyness with other students, they have no idea I’m schizophrenic. I always thought, based on my performance in these classes, that I could spot psychotic ideas when I write them down, and can see what logically follows from what—the rules of logic are like arithmetic, very clear. Except. I recently wrote a 140-page essay on schizophrenic belief systems in the context of ideas coming from Existentialism and cultural anthropology. I won’t bore you with the details. I was going to publish. I was going to be hailed as an intellectual figure, a man of analytic genius. My essay explained many unresolved issues in science, even ones having nothing to do with schizophrenia. In a one-paragraph digression, I showed in the clearest way a simple logical invalidity in the Ontological Argument for the existence of God, which no one had seen before. But then it hit me. Perhaps my essay explained too much. It even, after all, explained the biological purpose of the phenomenon of dreams. Yes, then it hit me.