My dad, dear, lovable angel of a person, Walt Cieplik, died crazy. There was a never a kinder man. The twin devils of Alzheimer’s and dementia took him over. He was living with me those last years and many of us share the experience — touching the poison robe’s edge of senior mental illness. Nearing 90, Dad angrily demanded to move from our cozy Iron Canyon acreage rich with stars, oaks and coyotes into a solo Newhall apartment. Senior citizen agencies were sweet but powerless to thwart his wishes. I drove a half-dozen times from Iron Canyon to Downtown Newhall daily to check up on him. Â
Not a week later, I’m at dinner. Frantic, the apartment manager called, reporting Dad’s front door was wide open. He was missing. Sheriff’s deputies were called, as were friends. We formed a safari, driving Santa Clarita’s highways and backroads for hours, looking for him. I did something I should do more often. I surrendered to God, which is different than praying. Middle of the night. I pulled the truck over. I closed my eyes, took my hands off the wheel and opened my heart in surrender. I resumed my search, letting the steering wheel guide me. Ten minutes and several miles later, I saw Dad walking on old Highway 99, smack dab in front of the old ranch we almost bought in the 1950s. He was a carrying the cherry pie I had given him earlier in the day. Shivering, incoherent, my war hero father, lover of nature, who sometimes worked three jobs just to pay the bills, blessedly fell asleep.
Home again, I got him to bed, then I collapsed, exhausted. An hour later, Dad was outside, on our patio, screaming. Couldn’t talk him down. Called 911. Paramedics came. they gently subdued his fighting, strapped him to a gurney and drove him to the hospital. His last days in this parenthesis, he screamed. My father didn’t have a God. More correctly? He didn’t know he had a God. Unaware of that divine friendship, his last days were spent in terror.
Poor mom? She spent her entire life insane, frequently a guest of the old Camarillo mental hospital. I’d visit as a small boy, afraid to touch my mother’s hands, holding onto the cold and thick metal bars. She’d sob, asking if I could do anything to free her from that bedlam. I was 8. Signing people out of mental institutions was above my pay grade. I speak three languages fluently — English, treason and insanity. Fluently. A progressive disease, insanity has become our national tongue and that saddens me so.
How the devil grins and pirouettes, inhaling our exhaustion, time, attention units, our souls.
We’re a complicated species, capable of saintliness to murder and murder is not our lowest point. Lips curl into sneers. Eyes roll. We point fingers. My mother’s self-hatred dwelled below the lowest level of Dante’s Purgatorio. Dear poor thing. Since childhood, she was misdiagnosed with “being a difficult child,” sent away at 3 to a Vermont orphanage. Frequently, my mother screamed at family or white-coated nuthouse staff, as they wrestled her into a straitjacket — “I’m not crazy! YOU’RE the ones who are crazy!!!”
And here we are. America, 2025.
A landfill could be filled with nominations for Most Important Issue Facing Mankind Today. Global warming. White men. Trans-alphabeticals. Guns. Roses. Nuclear war. Not enough or too many whales. I’d cast my ballot for Insanity being our greatest threat. If there is a Satan — and, there is — Craziness is his twin.
It’s good therapy, to be an alleged humor writer and satirist. It lets out steam and pain. Almost 12,000 columns later, I’ve noticed something. The sighting of Things Insane is no longer a rare observation.
Starting at 14 as a sports columnist, I delighted at opening an envelope with a small check, just for poking fun at underage jockstrap gladiators, low-hanging fruit safely on other sides of our mountain ranges. I graduated to Valhalla — Opinionist On The World — an endless Serengeti Plain teeming with prey. Crooks. Politicians. Bureaucrats. Perverts. School boards. Liars. Hypocrites. Crooks. Imbeciles. Writhing, pearl-clutching community posers, loudly singing hymns while picking pockets and bra straps. The uncountable naked emperors proudly parading their new clothes.
I seem to be stuck in this eternal figure-8, conjoined with the addled.
My dear mentor, friend, hero and Signal Editor, Ruth
Newhall, prior to the invention of Human Resources, was fond of poking me in the sternum, a little too hard, thank you, for a variety of misdemeanors, office decorum-wise and prose-related.
Mrs. Newhall offered this observation only once: “Satire is best written with a feather — (thump) — not an anvil.” Insanity has happened to America, lewdly entwining itself top-to-bottom in our schools, institutions, communities, media and culture. It’s too familiar. I don’t like it.
Years ago, a rare and delicious oddball story would fly wounded into the newsroom — senator caught with pants down, dog running for mayor, postman thinks he’s a Klingon. Then, it became five zany stories, then 10. Today? If you read enough, there’s 100 major daily reports about nutjobs, many holding high public office or station.
We’re ALL crazy. But, one particular demographic has morphed into a gaggle of community theater thespians, auditioning for a low-budget production of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Only they can’t act, sing, dance, are always in character around town and aren’t particularly funny. Sneering, their angry words, surrounded in spittle, are the same as mom’s. “I’m not the one who’s crazy! YOU’RE the one who’s crazy!!”
How do you fix that? Feather? Anvil? Crazy Glue? A sincere, “… there-there?” Guillotine? Chewy toy? Forty minutes of therapy at Kaiser?
I was powerless to stop my father’s dementia, my mother’s brutal schizophrenia. All the Oscar Wilde one-liners can’t pull a cane-waving elder congressman or screaming Hamas college thug/protester from the pits of insanity.
I’m beyond weary. But, I realize. The only craziness I can cure belongs to that face-making chap in the bathroom mirror …
John Boston is a local writer. His bookstore is at johnlovesamerica.com/bookstore.
