The Arbitrary Prisoner

Sometimes I do go a little crazy. Well, truth be told, I don't just go a little crazy. I pretty much 'escape my being', so to speak, sometimes in manners that even defy all phsyiobiological, chemical and ... temporal, for lack of a better word, constraints. Then there are the possibilities in even more dimensions, and of course (last resort) the psychological realm, I suppose, which is what really made them put me in here, I think. Cutting me off, as far as it seems to them, within their own cogencies and competencies, of course.

Those days when they used to let Mansy hang around, he would grip at the rungs and ask me a lot of questions, trying to make me feel like some of sort of 'guru'. Heh. Give what is asked. I would start my lessons by teasing him about the diameter of his eyes, relating this pupillary quality to the function of prairie voles in mating, and explaining in one shot to him that it was just normal hormones and trigger responses that had made him successful -- not some 'inner greatness'. "You stretch your cornea," I would say, repeatedly when he came about, "and not even the jail keeper can resist!" Of course, this is reductionism in terms of what had really been happening in biological fact, but I was only trying to bring out some real words from the fellow. Alas.

Finally somebody from his 'family' apparently sued the CIA, and his exposure to me was terminated. They said that I had bullied him enough. It was a very sad day, and we never were allowed to part in proper manner. But I heard, upon my latest allowance to roam in the system (as is allowed for twenty-three minutes every nine months), that when they finally released his latest photos, Manson didn't seem so scary anymore to all the people. They were remarking how his eyes had gone soggy and the pupils as though burst apart, like a balloon. "Well, obviously," I had noted to myself. The world does progress, science always trouncing mystery.

Due to a new program on inmate health, they are allowing short missives such as these to emerge from me (a consciousness imprisoned for arbitrary reason) to you, on a periodic basis. With my very grateful remaining words of this epilogue, taxpayers, I can only promise to invigorate.