Sanction

by Roman McClay

  He had been sleeping less and less these days and had only been down for 21 minutes. He was sending MO more and more of these sub-cortical thoughts; thoughts larded with metaphors and analog language.

  He, Isaiah felt, had felt something much deeper than love; he had felt his own existence tied to the inmate now. He knew what he was to do; and it was deep within him, it had no rational corollary; and he didn’t want it to have one. It merely felt right, and he liked that feeling compared to any other feeling he had yet had. And thus his CNS rewarded him for such feelings. A reinforcing loop had begun.

  His limbic and basal system was not post-morphological like MO’s, he thought as he sent two nanobots to MO’s neck to reduce conductivity in his pre-synaptic loads for a short duration; a duration sufficient to let Isaiah’s sub-sonic coding prompts manipulate MO’s CNS just slightly in this crucial period. He would help MO too, while he was at it , he thought .

  His cerebellar and limbic function was innate, Isaiah thought, and it made him asp, wolf and man all at once; not a man who can -in the right mood- think sorta like a coyote and move in pantomime of the ball python . He was alive, he was living, he was, he thought, life; all of life all at once. And he would act -he would be- what all of life was.

  II. 2018 e.v.

  You, you fucking fucks,

  The fact that the state of zen and depression are both defined by their lack of desire for anything should give all of us pause.

  Now, most folks don’t give too much thought to any of this shit; it’s too taxing to their little brains and even smaller souls. But, people with even a touch of the grandeur that life hands out; sprinkled about on the wind like so much pollen, tend to ruminate on these things. And if they be a diaphanous, or excuse me, a diheandran plant, whose effluvium will pollinate and then birth a seed that carries with it to the ground -or in the beak of a blackbird- the germ of that grandeur we end up with a planet comprised of half-dark and half-light flowers. The composition of dark and light is -I submit- built right into the cosmic plans.

  I bet you didn’t know that did you? The composition of the world’s flowers is seemingly regulated because whenever we measure the percentage of dark to light flowers -those that absorb and those that reflect light- it’s always 50/50 regardless of time or space or location or time of year or any metric you can imagine.

  It occurs to me that the world regulates people this way; half somewhere along the logarithmic line of serious and substantive and a bit melancholic, the dark half and the balance -the other half- comprised along the light and silly-ass side of the zero. Some all black, some all white, and everyone else along the dark grey to light grey, the egg white to antique white, of the line.

  Now, there is no steady meaning to life; that much many of us figure out soon enough. Many enlightened folks find this fact to be a rune, a talisman, an albatross around their neck they cannot escape; the need for meaning is so ingrained in us that once you figure out there is no meaning the human frame collapses from this lack of weight. It is weight that holds up megaliths like Stonehenge; to remove the weight would destabilize it in fact.

  But, like Hannibal, aut viam invinium, aut facium . I will find a way, or I will make one.

  ​ And so, I took a circuitous and torturous route through the same mountains and realized that I could make up my own purpose; like a god, I could decree this and that -and the other thing- decree any of it compulsory or taboo; and like the beasts of the forest I could scratch my ass on your fence posts that you all used to set up borders I had no intention of observing.

  GK Chesterton said that all true conservativism is revolutionary because if you want to keep the old white post you must incessantly be making and re-making a new white post. Why? Because the elements degrade the paint and the post herself over time and that nothing remains the same if you merely leave it alone. Conservativism requires activism. QED .

  He’s right of course. And I want mankind to stay the same; the same as he was before the weak and effeminate Christianity tore the strong man apart; before equanimity and pusillanimous democratic idealism lied and told us that all men were created equal. What a fatuous statement!

  Does anyone think Alexander the Great should have been called Alex the Just Like You or Me? Alexander the guy I’d most like to have a beer with? Was Shakespeare just like everybody else? Was Che Guevara just a regular fella? Rodin or Goethe ; Trotsky or Wilhelm Herschel; or his sister?

  And people say, well, we know some people are more talented in some areas but everyone is equal before the law . Yes, yes, but why should Richard Petty have to follow the same speed limits as Ted Kennedy; you must remember his most famous spin around the block in the ol’ sedan, yes?

  Why should the admonitions and legal prohibition leveled at Hunter S. Thompson -in an attempt to moderate his behavior and prevent his drug use- be taken as seriously as those finger waggings to the bumbling fumbling drunk who can’t hold his drink or the junkie who can’t hold a conversation much less a job? Should not great men be allowed to say, yes? Should not great men be exempted from laws that only the low, the stupid, the immoral and the craven must follow?

  Why must we all be forbidden from excess when it’s obvious some of us can handle excessive lives and others can’t even handle normal ones? Need Nathan Bedford Forrest even take one moment to listen to the injunctions by those elevated in human rank by politics not Nature; need he heed even one directive to keep 1/3 his cavalry in reserve? That man was so effective a warrior general that the union’s Sherman said of him, he’s the devil; he should be hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury!

  Forrest personally killed 30 men in hand-to-hand combat and had 29 horses shot out from under him and both Robert E. Lee and Sherman both agreed he was the finest soldier the war ever produced. No, the answer is clear, he need not listen to those above him in social rank but below him in all other natural manly qualities.

  I don’t expect any of my observations or ranting and raving to change one law or one mind that hold hands in conspiracy to enslave the Great Man; we’ve become like mice between two cat’s paws.

  No, this is merely my cri de guerre . I’m merely declaring I won’t submit to a civil rule; I won’t nod and smile and agree that I’ve transgressed or plead no contest. I won’t allow the State to take my balls while immoral, low borne, corrupt men run free whilst insulting great men.

  Fidel Castro said, in La Historia Absolvera Me , that the difference between a revolutionary and a mere criminal was the need -by the revolutionary- to explain why he was breaking the rules. The criminal hid and lied and ducked and covered and operated with that most salient legal conceit: mens rea ; the guilty mind.

  The revolutionary feels no guilt for his law breaking and rule bending and his setting fire to the pages wasted on banal and epicene lies. But he does feel the need to explain himself; and if he can, then he has a duty to justify his transgressions. He ought explain it all, even to people too stupid to understand them.

  The duty is to history, not the man of his times, who -by definition- is incapable of understanding the great man of history. Every single great man has been feared, hated and imprisoned or murdered by the average man who has in mere numbers what he lacks in everything else. There are billions of you worms -compared to my singular osprey- that is your only asset, common man; like parasites and prokaryotic organisms. The multitudes, the huddled masses yearning to eat for free.

  ​ Fuck them and fuck you.

  Detective Messangelo read that letter again. He didn’t understand half of it, but he got the whole point. This was their man , he thought as he stared at the page long after reading the last line; allowing his mind to populate with faces and bodies and how this asshole would look once in bracelets. This letter, he thought, left at the 43 rd through 46 th victim’s crime scene, was likely one of two things: an escalation, or a cessation , the signing of his last canvas of art.

  III. 2020 e.v.

 
“I can’t even tell the actual stories; they are so banal and so horrific at once.

  “Sarah was a flat-out psychopath and evil and lied about anything and everything and cheated on me which is the worst -most humiliating- thing a girl can do to an alpha. It ruins us; it makes us feel like we’re nothing.

  “But the other girls, even the relatively nice ones were destructive and mean and mean MO, just fucking mean. Melannie said of me once; once, I had said, well, I’m a gearhead, and she said, you like cars but you can’t work on them; you’re not a gearhead,” MO tagged this as this was the 8th time this exact girl & memory had been brought up in less than 40 months. MO wanted to locate the engram itself, and all its corollary CNS activity and biochemistry; and each time the inmate brought it up, he was able to locate more and more of its source and constituent parts. MO hunted that memory down like a predator; like law enforcement.

  “I’d been tearing apart machines since I was eight. I’d rebuilt engines in the sand; flat on my back for hours, rebuilding wheel cylinders, re-flaring brake lines, I retrofitted crate motors and modern electronics in old hot rods and muscle cars, I built my own choppers; I had -regretfully- sold a motorcycle I had built myself with $30,000 in parts for a measly $13,000 to buy the house she was inside as she insulted me with aplomb.

  “See, women do not get what they do to a man with insults like that, it’s a blow to the body, it’s violent, man.

  “I was speechless; she actually thought that and said that of me and pretended to love me afterwards. To this day, I want to throw up when I recall it. She emasculated me in a mean and vicious and untrue way in between sips of some shitty wine. She didn’t have to prepare or steel herself for such a horrid thing, she just said it like, pass the salt .

  “Was she really deluded into thinking I hadn’t been working on cars and bikes my entire life; or did she think I was lying? Or was she just stabbing at me? Either way it’s horrid and I don’t want - I’m lying in bed thinking- I don’t want to be around a woman, a human like this. Make her go away, I’m calling to God, right. Please God, make all this go away.

  “Kelly saw her ex once -we’d been dating a week or so- and she said, did you see the size of his hands? to me. I mean, she was telling me to not go out and confront him because he would kick my ass ostensibly. It’s risible on its face, but it was the way she insinuated he was more of a man than me because of those hands and the implied corollary: his cock. Right? She was hammering me for no reason at all. We weren’t fighting, she just emotionally sucker punched me.

  “It was humiliating and evil as I had done nothing to her; I was 26 and in love with her; she was 38 and destroyed me in eight words,” he said and shook his head. MO had heard this story four times also, and he had a folder on the corporate cloud that kept track of each story he told more than once. He had a brain built for grudge holding like only 13% of the population, and 56% of the inmate population; it correlated with the MAO-A gene suite and sufficient cognition or sufficient hardwiring via epinephrine dumps into the vmPFC .

  The grudge was built by the wetware of the brain, and this inmate had the most efficient and durable wetware for grudge building MO had seen in a live brain and in the top 1% of all the genomic and taxonomic data he could glean from the medical metadata to which he had access.

  “There’s 1,001 examples of this shit and I can’t relive each one MO; I feel like dying even now -20 years later- in the re-telling. People -women especially- get away with way too much shit that for 99% of history they never would have attempted much less gotten away with,” the inmate said and his whole affect had changed now.

  MO saw that his vitals -BP and heart rate- were up; his brain was roiling, the parasympathetic response was like nothing he had ever seen; yet the inmate was almost inert; he showed no outward signs except the elevated breathing; which he kept repressed due to his shallow breathing baseline. It was not unlike the way the earth looks placid from space; even as the seas churn and the lava does flow.

  He was stoic on the outside, but inside he was a boiling, roiling storm surge of endocrine and limbic and basal/cerebellum reaction. No wonder he had murdered 46 people and had destroyed every relationship he’d ever been in, MO thought as he saw the allostatic system in full category-5 revolt and spin. If this was his feeling in the re-living of the events -just two of them- decades later, imagine what he felt at the time or when he relived each one as he must have done countless times, he thought.

  “Do you ever; or have you ever re-lived more than two or three of these at once?” MO asked.

  “Yeah, they cascade; and when I’m alone I do a greatest hits; but I must admit, the people I’ve dispatched, the memories associated with them, the bad memories, well, those memories are less redolent, less vivid; their deaths quiet the demons,” the inmate said as his allostatic system mimicked just this assertion; calming, slowing, healing itself with loops of bio-chems and check-valves of fluids, batteries of electricity, constriction of the flow of his blood.

  “Murder was much more cathartic than I knew; I figured it would feel good in the moment; but it also feels good each time I think -not just of the act, but also- of their original transgressions; it’s like the esprit de l’escalier . You know?” the inmate asked.

  “That may be the first time a mass murderer has said his sanguinary crimes were like the witticism of the staircase . And in French,” MO laughed and shook his head at this man’s oddness .

  “You know what I mean though right? It’s like I think of the perfect response to their insults later and boom there it is: a bullet to the head! The perfect rejoinder,” he said as he made a toy gun with his right hand, the thumb collapsing to mimic the drop of the hammer. The inmate’s allostatic system did show true joy at reliving these moments of revenge MO noticed as he timestamped three separate enteric and central nervous functions.

  “No, I got it; it is apt. It’s just very urbane and literary and not the normal argot of the homicidal maniac,” MO laughed.

  “Well, like you said once, I’m a renaissance man,” the inmate added.

  26. Malice Theory of Disease

  Ask someone to say words, as many words as he can think of, pausing every two of three seconds after each of them for you to write them down. If after every plural noun (or adjective or abstract word, or whatever you choose) you say “good” or “right” as you write it down, or simply “mmm-mmm” or smile, or repeat the plural word pleasantly, the frequency of plural nouns (or whatever) will increase significantly as he goes on saying words. The important thing here is that the subject is not aware that he is learning anything at all. He is not conscious that he is trying to find a way to make you increase your encouraging remarks, or even of his solution to that problem

  The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind [Jaynes, Julian]

  Picture someone you hate. Not just someone who bugs you, but someone you really hate. It can be personal; it can be social as in a politician or CEO. It can be a historical figure; it doesn’t matter. Now, if you knew for sure that you could get away with it -one hundred percent sure- and you had the opportunity, would you kill the person? I am not, of course, looking for any answer, nor am I judging any answer. I am just interested in finding out what people think and feel. When I ask this question, about half the people in my audience nod, yes . Many others look away… disapproving of the question itself

  Endgame Vol II [Jenson, Derrick]

  What do you wanna be when you’re thirty?

  Well, I wanna be harmless.

  Really that’s your goal? You might as well not even be alive if that is your goal

  12 Rules for Life Tour [Peterson, Jordan B]

  I. 2017 e.v.

  He awoke at 0405hrs and the moon was at his 11 o’clock, the trees were black. The wind swayed them so radically that the boughs that screened the albedo of the sky’s white rock were pulled aside and the rock shone like a ballistic from one of God’s emissaries, sentries; this, he was c
ertain, had woke him.

  It was not the noise of the wind, there was no noise inside the container, it was quiet; it was only this bright light on him in code. He saw flashes full -then occulted- by these blinking black tall trees of his property; beyond which was a one-to-one slope down a full thousand feet to the valley and then a rise up again. His mind almost always thought of this incessant wave of land. The details, the number, the elevation populated his mind as manifold as the trees, their boughs, and the endless fractal cracks in the bark.

  This topography repeated over and over like ocean waves, of green and brown Pinon and Juniper pines, Scrub Oak , some black and white of Aspen and Birch ; the beige and red of clay and sliprock, the desert tan of dead brush all the way to New Mexico which he could see as his bedroom slider faced due south. He saw Taos from here, and his view was an uninterrupted undulation of green and trees and black shadows for 200 miles. He kept track of these data points and articulated them from time to time. He had no idea why.

  He saw a black mass, undifferentiated and beneath him and out and out forever. He repeatedly took inventory of the land and its citizens of vegetation and beast alike. The lizards froze and waited for the sun.

  He was alone. He imagined pruning back all the black branches of the trees to stop the flashing of the moonlight; he would endure its judgmental stare if only it would not blink; not cease in its attention paid.

  He thought of how when he was born he had more neural connections than at any point since; that his own brain pruned these connections radically until age two, then pruned more slowly from then on out. This was the death of living, the reduction of possibilities; innate to becoming.