We have all been there before. You get in an Uber right before the deadliest pandemic in the world begins having absolutely no idea that such a thing is even happening. You are stoked to be going home after a long night of performing for complete strangers, but you are still exhausted from a long week's work, so much so that all that talk about your company shutting down for the next one, two or three years and having to lay you off goes right over your head. You get in the car, thankful to not have to take Caltrain, which, if there is a devil, is almost certainly his preferred method of transportation. You splurge and decide to take a car home for once. The car is nice and in impeccable condition and, look at that, the driver is well dressed, quiet and seems to have great manners. No thoughts of the driver being a raving maniac who has devoted his life to spreading misinformation crosses your mind. You kick, back and relax. The drive goes smoothly, but, as you near your house, something changes. Sweat beads on the driver's forehead. Then you realize his entire face is covered in sweat. He seems upset, deranged even. He jumps from sentence to sentence, while jerking his head around to talk to you in sudden and intrusive ways. You cannot even tell if he is looking at the street anymore. His eyes dance around the car. He is not really talking to you anymore; he is lecturing you, but the lecture is completely incoherent. Something about Trump. Something about the virus you just heard about a couple of weeks ago. The phrase, "the media is lying to you" gets used a lot. Something about waking up is mentioned. Then you finally reach your destination and you hop out of the car before it's too late. The mad driver shouts some other nonsense about "sheep" or "cattle" and drives off into the night, leaving you mystified and confused. You don't take him seriously, very few people could. But you remember the panic in his eyes. You know the panic is imagined; but you also know that panic was very real to him, and that when people panic, they become dangerous. Okay, well, maybe we have not all been exactly there before, but you get my point. The Uber driver, or as I like to call him, the dude with the crackhead face represents so much of what used to be my life: fear of rejection, obsession with prophetic visions, desiring to be in groups that you are not wanted in, feeling left out, lashing out at others, a desperate yearning for control, unbridled paranoia about the unknown, defensiveness, distrust of the media, wild assumptions about those more successful than you, and so on. I left all of that behind, but I can still recognize it when I see it. I suppose I looked that way once. I suppose I once yammered on incoherently to someone while they listened in horror. And, almost two years into the pandemic, whenever I think about the dude with the crackhead face, all I can ever seem to think to myself is, "conspiracy theories are one hell of a drug".