The Institute of Madness and Confusion

This is how I got recruited by The Institute of Madness and Confusion.

A few months back I moved into a new apartment building. I actually lived down the street and always had my eye on this building. It was one of those old places that had personality and character.

When I move somewhere new or even if I’m just travelling and staying in a hotel, I like to explore the building, locate all the entrances and exits, and so on. You never know when this information might come in handy. I was down in the basement where the laundry room and bike storage was located. Every building has its quirks or odd design. I noticed two strange things in the basement. First, there were lots of doors with new padlocks on them. Even with the new locks, some of them had thick spider webs along the door-jamb. Second, for a section of the hallway, there were steel panels along one side of the floor. And coming from these panels was a sound like fast moving water flowed underneath.

Finally, after being in the basement a few times, I pulled up one of the metal panels and there was actually water flowing through a tunnel. I leaned into the opening to get a better look down the tunnel. I leaned a bit too far and slipped, falling into the water. It was so fast moving that the water sucked me down the tunnel, my head bobbing up and down the surface. The sides of the tunnel were smooth and slippery and I couldn’t get a grip to stop. I don’t remember what happened, all I know was I woke up in what resembled a jail cell and I was not wearing my clothes, but a navy blue track suit.

A man entered my cell holding a tray of food and set it down next to me. He stepped back and watched. The food sparked my deep hunger and I stuffed myself. The man stood watching me, silently. After I was finished, he spoke: “You found us, and although from what I can see it was purely out of curiosity. Doesn’t matter, you still found us. You have two choices: join us or I shoot you right now.” He flashed open his suit jacket showing off a gun.

“What am I joining?” I asked. He motioned for me to follow him. We walked down a cement hallway to a metal door. On the way, a sign was engraved into the wall: The Institute of Madness and Confusion. Below the sign was an excerpt from a poem I recognized - The Shoelace by Charles Bukowski:

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…

We walked into what resembled an air traffic control room with five people each sitting in front of a wall of monitors. The institute is a secret branch of the government that has the purpose of sewing small bouts of chaos. It is wrong to believe that governments want docile or compliant citizens. They want citizens that are always on edge, right at the line where they're about to snap.

There are five pillars of the institute: construction, the economy, travel, public transit, and power (electricity, hydro, etc.). The members in this room keep an eye on the population through online data and other records. If certain neighbourhoods need shaking up, the institute might create an unnecessary construction project for a couple of months. The goal is to just throw people a bit, keep them off balance - and a slight irritability factor doesn’t hurt.

Another example could be the economy - the recent inflation issues and supply chain problems? That was courtesy of William over on the economy pillar. These pillars can also work together: remember the power outage a couple months ago? The institute likes power outages because they trigger multiple pillars all in one go. It’s not hitting two birds with one stone, more like five or ten birds. The power goes out, which brings everything from the economy to travel to a halt.

I was also introduced to the ‘Individual Special Projects Unit’ where they zero in on people and disrupt their lives in small and/or big ways. It could be something small, like say they intentionally ‘lose’ a utility bill of yours for a month and you either pay the extra few dollars in interest or spend hours on the phone arguing with customer service that you never received the bill. Or it could be something bigger - the members of the institute are fans of the domino effect. They’ll use the lost bill ploy, invoke bank rules, temporarily freeze assets, and roll all these things into eventually getting someone evicted from their apartment or house. This is considered a major disruption and saved for the most outspoken or problematic people.

I was led back to my cell which I’d have to stay in until they felt they could trust me. The next day I was starting in the department of public transit, which was apparently where most people started. I would gain their trust and blow things up from the inside. You can deal with madness when you know the root cause of it. That poem they engraved at the entrance, The Shoelace? I know the rest of it and it goes like this:

a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…
it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …
The dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there -
license plates or taxes
or expired driver’s license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.
light switch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
sears roebuck;
and the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out -
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.
then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails
and people who insist they’re
your friends;
there’s always that and worse;
leaky faucet, christ and christmas;
blue salami, 9 day rains,
50 cent avocados
and purple
liverwurst.

or making it
as a waitress at norm’s on the split shift,
or as an emptier of
bedpans,
or as a carwash or a busboy
or a stealer of old lady’s purses
leaving them screaming on the sidewalks
with broken arms at the age of 80.

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear view mirror
and blood in your
underwear;
toothache, and $979 for a bridge
$300 for a gold
tooth,
and china and russia and america, and
long hair and short hair and no
hair, and beards and no
faces, and plenty of zigzag but no
pot, except maybe one to piss in
and the other one around your
gut.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.