Karma (Five) (One of Four)

Winter was a fair deal warmer, to my mind. Whether this had to do with the ozone being steadily, gradually melted away by the great collective folly of the human race...or my one-of-a-kind triune brain physiology incorporating certain new experiences and the skills inferred from those experiences, I couldn't precisely tell you. I know that every minor detail began to shine with this suggestion of importance. Everything from brushing my teeth to the way random pedestrians handled themselves on the sidewalk to the vividness anger brought to people's faces to the sounds of automobiles and rain and whatever was the focus of the news on a certain day now registered with an unmistakable clarity that both caused me to experience the sort of chestpains ubiquitous to heart disease and cardiac arrest and compelled me forward to see how much of it I could endure. 

It was this scary kind of exhilaration. I know, you don't have to tell me: this is just the sort of warning-sign to give well-intentioned onlookers their cue to call a mental health professional to protect some potential drug/sex addict from themselves. Believe me, no one knows better than me what I look like. My whole life I've been a candidate to commit suicide or cut myself or sell my boney ass to the highest (or most convenient) bidder or you'd at least think I had an eating disorder or something like that. But, as it turns out, I've got a little more self-control than I'm typically given credit for. Even after my father died, the shocks and surprises of life weren't so overwhelming. It could get on my nerves when certain people would, almost stubbornly, try selling themselves as certified professionals of sensitivity, firmly telling you how much they understood and then were perplexingly dismayed when you told them you were just fine -- but that's all in interpreting people's projections; it just means you have to know what your problems are, and what they aren't. 

Chris Pizitsky was never good at pulling apart the differences. He thought that between his amateur comprehension of cyberhacking and his mother's (Cynthia Lynne's) endless, undiscriminating approval, he was going to stomp-fuck through life drinking frat-party beer and biting the head off his enemies. Surely, this is what lead to his manufacturing discreet tracking-devices and putting them on Ted's and Clyde Henry's personal vehicles after he'd heard the rumor, as a great many people did, that either Ted or Clyde Henry -- if not both of them -- had casually stumbled into an algorithm-translator that'd allow it's user/s to scan magnificently large territories of internet browsers, divide those territories into individual parties, and then write "identities" (avatars) for said individuals that could be contrasted with real-live existing people who matched the description. 

This, as you might've just guessed, is how we began tracking Roberto Mancini to Nebraska. I'm sure Chris and his mother and Ted and Clyde Henry would try persuading anyone foolish enough to listen that they were endowed with some ineffable divinity more common to the 1500s than some racist, misogynistic, mildly computer-savvy residents of South Carolina in the modern age, but that's really all it was. 

You can actually assign/blame a lot of it to the cerebellum and it's relationship with the limbic system. See: what's supposed to happen, in normal people, interprets all this activity within its major components as it receives voltage-inputs from the cerebellum, and then those interpretations get integrated by the frontal lobe -- where all the proto-thoughts and activity are prescribed a certain logic -- and it's up to the person this is all happening to to make a decision... But if the cerebellum is going too fast or the limbic system is poorly wired for sensitivity, that logic can be a little too hard to come by. 

So, when your reptile-monster of a President tells you there's money in apprehending an enemy of the state and you lack the integrity to think for yourself and make hard decisions on the difference between right and wrong, there's a betting-chance you're soon to pick one of the worst choices of your life. 

As for how Erin and myself ended up with Ted and Clyde Henry: keep your shirt on, I'm getting to that now. 

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