End of Want

            “Do you see things, Mr. Granger?” The psychologist asked.

            “I don’t understand the point of that question,” Mr. Granger responded, raising himself up from the old leather couch to change his focus from the beige, cracked ceiling tiles to the psychologist’s phosphorescent irises. “We live our entire lives in our heads, whether or not we know it.  Our life experiences are all interpretations of what is going on as it is presented to our brain by our senses, or nerves. The gathering, interpretation, translation, and retention all occur inside the brain of the individual, and this IS a very subjective thing, this reality. 

            Everything we see, do, think, feel, is simply a manifestation of electric and chemical signals sent between neurons in a cranium. That’s it, as far as we know. People may argue for a collective intelligence or experience, but no, that isn’t what really happens, if anything could be said to really happen. Suppose I kick this couch here, before I sit on it. I kick it hard enough to fracture three of my toes. Do you feel the pain of my toes being fractured, or is it just me? I am the only one experiencing the pain at that moment, the only one feeling the frustration of bringing injury upon myself yet again because of my own carelessness. I imagine you can sympathize with me, but I do not sympathize with myself. The experiences are not the same, but similar.

            So, given that what we take to be reality is purely a mental construction from the get-go, what does it matter if one brain embellishes a bit? Who is to say that the brain is not embellishing the stimuli, but rather catching and reacting to stimuli that other brains have merely missed? Can you be sure that you are experiencing the totality of what could possibly be experienced in this very office? You spend so much time here, but would it be too outrageous to think that you have perhaps skipped some aspects, and that I or some other person that comes through this office could pick up on those aspects your brain has glossed over, be it as some method of protection of the psyche or simply an act of absentmindedness?

            Perhaps the question you should be asking is not whether or not I am seeing things, but whether or not you are missing things.  You cannot hope to understand or control me completely. The only thing you can truly come to understand, control, and help is yourself. However, as I am part of your reality, it could be that I can be helped by you by proxy, I guess.

No Step For a Stepper

             So, I saw Philbert walking around in circles in my basement, again.  I’m not sure what had him all hot and bothered, and it didn’t seem like he was all that certain, either.

            “Oh God, what have I done?” he mumbled fervently. I tried to reply in case he was talking to me, but he interrupted me with, “It wasn’t your fault, Phil, and you know it. They made you do it.  Pi is relentless and omnipresent, you can’t help that.”

            Maybe he had prevented me from interrupting him; I’m not sure how the semantics of situations like this go.  Someone almost interrupted someone else, in any case, but it was foiled effortlessly.  Phil was sweating a bit. I only noticed because of the evidence on his shirt. I wasn’t close enough or concerned enough to see if there was sweat on his face or anything. He must have been power walking like that in circles for a while.

            How’d it take me so long to notice it?  He was hiding in the basement, sure, but I usually catch him close to the start of these, what would you call ‘em, sessions? 

            “Is this close enough? It has to be.  Pi wouldn’t have it any other way.  It is exact. It is endless.  It is perfect and irrational at the same time, how can we not see that we must be as it is?”

            I hadn’t heard Phil talk like this before.  What the fuck was he talking about? Pie isn’t endless unless you make it endless. You’d have to have an infinite amount of resources, which he doesn’t have, so he shouldn’t concern himself with it.  He was definitely concerned, though.

            “Fibonacci was the real genius, he figured out the secret of Pi’s golden ratio.  You don’t see people handing out literature on that, though, do you,” he weirdly rambled on.  By weirdly, I mean he used a fucked-up sounding voice that he doesn’t usually use.  It could just be something he does to differentiate between perspectives when he talks to himself, how should I know? It sounded really strange, though.  I figured I’d try to snap him out of that shit to see if he could explain himself.

            “Hey, Philbert?  Anyone home, man?”

            “Of course, that’s more like Phi than Pi,” he continued, ignoring me like an asshole.  He isn’t usually an asshole, though.  “Not much difference in our spelling of those, if you think about it.  Phi is just Pi with an ‘h’ in the middle, as if humans got in the middle of perfection, screwing it up.”

            “Ok, that’s nice,” I told him, in case some part of him was subversively listening to me.  I told him I’d be back, then went upstairs.  Found a few oatmeal cream pie things in the kitchen, they had to be his.  I can’t stand the thought of eating those now that I’m properly acquainted with internet porno.  I grabbed two or three, went back downstairs, and decided to play a game.  I could feed Philbert and entertain myself at the same time. Why not?

            As he retraced the circle end over end, I tried to toss the cream pies in the middle of the circle without hitting him.  His frantic pace made this an interesting challenge, and he stepped on one of them. His loss more than mine, but I still lost points.  I had good luck other than that, so I left him in the basement to whatever ends he was planning.

            If you’re wanting to go down there, good luck.

Went So Wrong

            “Oh shit!” Clint exclaimed as he stood up and finished examining his briefcase bomb. “This is where I went wrong, you see that, Sean? I should have put this wire right here… and… wait, Sean, that’s a zero on the ti-“ and the bomb promptly blew the fuck up, eradicating Clint, Sean, their buddy Fae, and the park in which they were testing their little contraption.

            Meanwhile, in the underground Lair of Doom (a.k.a. Clint’s basement), Chris rubbed his hands with glee as he watched his idiot cohorts blow the fuck up. He had warned them that bad shit would happen to them if they continued to avoid paying their taxes, but did they listen? No, they didn’t. This is what they got. Chris would not settle for being caught by the Feds because his dumbass associates were being investigated for tax evasion. That’s what most of the good ones were caught for, though. He was better than that; he had planned too well for something as piddly as that to trip him up. I guess I get to keep the basement now, Chris thought to himself. To the victor go the spoils, right? 

            But what should he do now? He needed to recruit, and that was a delicate operation when looking for pissed off citizens willing to terrorize their localities to scare politicians straight. One couldn’t just go into the nearest trailer park anymore and get some help for an angry speech and a six-pack. It required more tact than that now. People would go around, calling him a terrorist if he wasn’t careful, and he didn’t need that kind of attention. He was a patriot, damn it! The American people were fraught with laziness and apathy while their politicians raped their rights. Something had to be done, and if he didn’t step up to the plate, who would? He wasn’t a lobbyist, so he didn’t have the politicians’ ears yet. He would fix that whole system, but now he needed new people. The crew he was familiar with had blown themselves up to bits in a park somewhere in Wisconsin. It would make the news tomorrow, but it was a sideways movement, rather than the forward march he wanted.

            He tapped a pen on Clint’s keyboard as he thought to himself. Craigslist? Facebook? Both of those could turn up good people, but they easily caught attention from the authorities. Should he go to the Tea Party? The conventions for that group were like a farm for discontented white people with money, exactly what he wanted. That’s the plan, then, he thought. Wait for a local convention, and set up shop there. For now, though, he needed to go back upstairs. Jerry Springer was on, and he didn’t want to miss that.

Sparky

            Sparky plodded around the family home, thinking to himself.  Everyone else was away doing whatever it was that occupied the rest of his or her day.  He wasn’t sure if he was happy or distressed that he was the only one left alone in the house.  He was the only one that didn’t walk around on his back legs, and it seemed like this building hadn’t been built with canine operations in mind.  No matter, though.  He couldn’t remember the last time their abode had been invaded.  He could have justified relaxing, if that wasn’t exactly what an enemy might have wanted.

            Still, as he looked through the skylight in the billiards room, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of nostalgia for his old home, his friends, his old life.  The plushness of the oddly tasteful green carpet (and they thought he was color blind, pah) clashed sadly with the hollow, lonely feeling in his soul.  He flopped on his back, rubbing himself all over the carpet between one of the game tables and a bar stool, but that didn’t make him feel any better.

            How had it come to be that he had been marooned on this planet ruled by bipods?  There had been some sort of mix up in the commission report. He wasn’t trained for these observe-and-report type missions. He hadn’t even been given any equipment.  They just dropped him off on the corner of Vickers St and Oak Blvd, and took off, hoping for the best. But that had been years ago, and they had all been so young back then.  To think any of them actually had a good grip on the world was almost laughable.

            Still, all he had now was a faux family adopted under false pretenses.  They couldn’t know that he was not a native to their world. That would only complicate matters.  So, he sighed and licked his ass with quiet resolve.  He would keep up this lie as long as he had to, and never lose hope that his friends would come back for him.

Girl Disappointed

Oh, little girl on the curb,

I don’t mean to disturb

You, but I can’t help but

Wonder exactly what

Gave you that disturb

Ed visage. Absurd,

You say? Well, I

Don’t mean to pry,

But take a look

Away from your book

And at yourself and explain

What cause to complain

You might have. Surely,

A child like you, so purely

Consisting of innocence

Knows not of pestilence

Yet this look of yours

Persists, and encores

Yet again for your

Audience, poor

As they may be.

She turns to glare

At my inquisitive stare,

And I don’t dare

To misconstrue

The “Fuck you”

That shoots through

Her disappointed little face.