It used to be called the Roberts Institute for Living, but everybody knew that it was the insane asylum, and that’s what people called it. A few years ago, its board decided to accept reality and change the name to Bob’s Insane Asylum. In the past, patients generally came to the asylum themselves. They would become insane and show up on their own, or a relative or somebody would bring them in. Unfortunately, that business model stopped working, and facilities like this one had to get more involved in outreach. We now live in a country with more than seventy million completely insane people. Bob’s Insane Asylum decided to go and seek them out, rather than just sitting back and waiting for them.

You’ve probably heard that the real crazy people are the ones walking around on the street, and the ones locked up in insane asylums are the only people who are sane. The first part is correct, if you include those driving around in pickups with huge flags fluttering insanely behind them, but the second part is not, because some of the people inside insane asylums are also insane. The other day I caught up with Russ Freud, the interim director of Bob’s Insane Asylum, to find out more about the new program. As it turned out, I caught up with him only briefly, because insane people were chasing him. Suddenly a crowd of them appeared from around the corner of a building and he had to start running again.

Well-informed consumers may know Russ Freud from his recent best-seller, “Russ Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,” in which he applies a commonsense approach. Say you have a dream about speaking to a large audience while dressed in your underwear. His take on it is: if you dream that, you are seriously nuts, or “crazy as a road lizard.” His diagnosis refers to the way road lizards in the desert along Route 66 in Arizona or New Mexico used to stand there in the heat staring at the passing traffic with eyes not quite in synch—i.e., totally crazy-looking nutso. Generally, the lizards would just stand there as if counting cars until they got run over or went away. Step one of the outreach program, Russ Freud said, panting heavily as he ran, is to bring in any of those lizards still remaining and treat them, too.

“But forget lizards for the moment. Tens of millions of human beings in this country are more out of their minds than they are,” Russ Freud went on, having temporarily slowed his pursuers by toppling a pile of wood pallets in their path behind a Target. “Listen to some of the insane things they think—and I’m supposed to fix it?” He drank from a thermos he was carrying and set out again at a jog. “You hear these crazy people talk, and you have to wonder what my grandfather, the realist painter Lucian Freud, might have said about them.”

He sped up even more, to try to put some extra distance between himself and the lunatics, and I needed to catch up with him again to continue interviewing him. On a tight deadline to file, I was writing my article even as I interviewed him. I began the second paragraph: “I caught up with Russ Freud again just past the Target,” etc.—carrying my open laptop while I ran alongside him.

Finally, after he pulled ahead and I caught up with him for the third or fourth time to continue the interview, my excess weight, drinking, and smoking caught up with me, and I keeled over and did a face-plant right into the pavement of the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods, not far from Target. I painfully lifted myself to my knees, and was then trampled flat by the crowd of nut jobs chasing Russ Freud. A mall cop came over, pried me off the parking lot with a tire tool, and helped me to my feet.

In the mall cop’s little E.V. patrol car, as he kindly drove me around, I got caught up on some unfinished reporting (calls, etc.) and then, with the mall cop’s help, outstripped the running crowd of insane people once again and caught up with Russ Freud for what would be the last time. My editor, who was monitoring my computer remotely and clearing what I wrote with the D.O.J., texted me, “There is no story here.” But then I lucked into a scoop, when Russ Freud confided that Bob’s Insane Asylum was about to go national and would be selling franchises. Now there would be a locally owned Bob’s Insane Asylum in every mall and commercial strip in the U.S.A.! Corporate management would supply the logo, training, and supplies, and the franchisees would do the rest. “We know the potential customer base is out there,” Russ Freud said.

Sadly, it was all too late. During a moment of inattention, an enormous wave of insane people rolled over us and buried us deep beneath them. I regretted that I had ever caught up with Russ Freud in the first place. ♦