Clinically Insane Protest “March Madness”

By Lars Eisenberg

Well, the brackets are set and the seedings have been announced for the 2007 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. This frenetic and frenzied sports phenomenon is often referred to as “March Madness” due to the excitement level, suspense, and raw emotion the tournament games frequently evoke… and the fact that it’s played in March. While few will debate the visceral energy the tournament generates, some take offense to the term March Madness, opining that it demeans, denigrates, and/or expresses deep insensitivity toward those afflicted with mental illness.

Normally, a reporter offers this space in his article to a hairy-legged, placard-waving, neohippie chick with a nice rack to drearily and nasally monologue about the plight of the insane and the damage done by such capriciously tossed-about monikers as March Madness – most often in an effort to take her home, drink her beer, and pound her like a bongo drum in between her 100%-natural-hemp-fiber sheets. I, however, decided to go straight to the source and ask the insane themselves if and how they are offended.

Zvwarlix, The Ninth of Eight, a curiously balding and largely untreated schizophrene from Milwaukee, did confirm that the phrase March Madness does indeed “piss [him] and the Miklakki collective off to the purplest of green! Whore’s bathwater and bacon grease damnation upon the blasphemers and their scrotum caddies!” His reasoning for the offense taken was too intricate to recount, and since he forbade my direct recording of his thoughts through pen-and-paper, tape recording, or notebook computers (all of which are really flattened living pulsating brain cells from The Dark Seventh Crossainwich Mak-Haal intended to enslave us all), I rather lost track.

A patient at the Franciscan Mental Health Facility at Fond du Lac named Larry, however, phrased his offense much more coherently. Basketball, he contends, is exciting and at times unpredictable, but standardized, regulated and organized - insanity is not. In his more eloquent words: “Say some group of guys from Uncle Jedd’s Asscrack State outscores UCLA in forty minutes – that would be unusual. The excitement level of the UJASU students and alums would certainly be frenzied, loud, and potentially irrational – however such irrationality is inherently predictable, hence an increased police presence at NCAA Tournament venues, and falling far short of the true definition of ‘madness’. True madness falls more into the standing-in-the-mustard-tub-of-a-hot-dog-vendor-cart-on-the-corner-of-Sixth-and-Wingart-while-voraciously-buttfucking-a-plush-toy-Barney-doll-and-singing-Tiffany’s-version-of -‘I Think We’re Alone Now’-at-the-top-of-one’s-lungs category. From one who knows... I'm not in this hospital for spraining my ankle!"