Insanity

My poor parents have run afoul of the God of the Aged the past few months. My grandmother fell and hurt her back, had to have some back surgery, then got released to a rehab facility. My parents had to move all her stuff from her assisted living apartment to a more advanced level of care in another building in the same complex. Then when she finally gets released from the rehab facility, she cannot be admitted into the new location because of some issue with measuring her meds. So now they have to move all her stuff.... AGAIN..... to yet another location so the poor old woman can finally come home from rehab. I have a really busy life with 2 small kids, but I was able to pitch in today and help them out carrying some really heavy stuff.

This new facility has Alzheimers and Dementia patients. The old place didnt. So I am carrying heavy furniture into this place and there is this old woman who is constantly trying to strike up a conversation with me. But the woman is clearly..... not there.

"Excuse me, do you want to share funds? I am trying to get to the waterfall. My son likes oatmeal."

Holy fuck. Luckily it didn't last long, but damn did it give me the heebie jeebies.

One thing I did realize though. Perhaps an insight too heavily weighted on just this crazy woman's behavior. But maybe insanity is just mixing up valid behaviors among different contexts. Like I am sure that at one point, that woman was trying to get to some waterfall. Maybe her brain just temporally displaced that memory into the present, so she thought she was currently looking for the waterfall. Like a memory just became reality.

Maybe when you are GMing and trying to roleplay an insane person, you can just think of alternative scenarios from this person's past and just use them to determine present day behaviors while completely ignoring the actual circumstances that surround them. I think it could work.