Charlie II

It’s my nature to try and make sense of outwardly irrational behavior like the kind that happened with Charlie last night [link].

Information, rattling around the brain, is followed by a process that clears waste from the transmitter-sites (synapses). There’s a maintenance-network (glial cells) that picks-up whatever chemicals are left behind by the re-uptake process. A milliseconds delay in that action is long enough to produce a gap in transmission. A few gaps can lead to false impressions ..too many gaps .. hallucinations and delusions. It’s the nature of the brain to fill-in missing pieces, which often goes well ..but it is based on a principle of probability ..inserting the most likely, but not necessarily the most accurate, elements of a missing scene. This may distort events ..or momentarily launch them in another direction. The brain is self-correcting however, and can usually recover ..unless too many gaps occur consecutively. Then these excursions begin to create a story of their own. When fabrications get superimposed on actual events ..other people’s actions appear distorted and confounding ..facial gestures are skewed and incomprehensible ..voices blend and words and phrases arrive out of sequence. Suspicion mounts ..creating anxiety that only exacerbates things by accelerating the process of mis-information. The first sign that things aren’t going well is an outburst of non-sensical speech. The way to tell if they’re kidding, or not, is by the sight of sweat ..sometimes accompanied by clenched fists. When others don’t know what to expect, they get concerned. When they re-direct their attention .. breaking with the ongoing chain of events ..it looks like a bunch of faces looming up and bearing down on our sufferer. This can create panic. Panic is often met by the arrival of police officers, which can create a disturbance so charged that it shuts down consciousness .. until the next thing to appear are doctors, with masks and syringes, holding you down while trying to coax a more tolerable stream of events into place.

I realize that nothing I write in these boxes contains anything close to the boundlessness of life .