Author: David Berger
inside ,
eddie is a strange combination of blandness and aggressiveness . he has a gift for sales , so he can always get a job selling something . eventually , he figured out that his gift also worked online . so now he buys and sells electronically , rarely touching anything in his commerce but a keyboard and plastic money . he does well . he likes to travel around the country . he uses bitcoin.
deeper inside ,
eddie is a sometime-poet . in his career , he has published eighteen poems in serious journals . he is a rambling man . before he understood the internet , he had to get a job in every new town . he had to find a place to live . he had to get to know new people . now he doesn’t have to do any of this . he has also murdered twelve people .
deeper inside ,
eddie is a product of his history . he had a dreadful childhood , including sexual abuse , foster homes, running away , drugs , prostitution and pimping . as a pimp , he discovered his gift for sales and killing .
deeper inside ,
eddie has emotions which are swirling channels of rage , fear , and , a curious anomie , all of which he’s quite aware of .
deeper inside ,
eddie possesses organs that are churning masses of tissue , responding to internal and external events . he rarely sleeps more than an hour or two a night . he is wearing out .
deeper inside ,
eddie is made of trillions of cells , desperate factories processing matter and releasing energy and waste . his cells run at high efficiency , but some of them are involved in motions that are unusual . and lately some of them have begun to devour the space that rightfully belongs to others .
deeper inside ,
eddie has a mind , a storm of nano-currents in his brain , with more connections than stars in the universe . some of these circuits run continuously . some of them are very odd indeed .
deeper inside ,
eddie is molecules in enormous numbers, linking and unlinking in massive chains to drive the processes in his cells . even inside his bones, in the follicles of his hair and at the roots of his fingernails, this coupling and uncoupling, uncoupling and coupling goes on . some of these actions are often aberrant .
deeper inside ,
eddie is atoms , oh so many and mostly sulphur , phosphorous , carbon , oxygen , hydrogen and nitrogen . you remember from biology class : sp cohn , like tiny solar systems , except they’re not .
deeper inside ,
eddie is particles , twenty-five kinds , including the famous higgs boson . more particles will doubtless be found before eddie is gone . they interact and build him . they are also waves , which sometimes surge strangely .
deeper inside ,
eddie is space , empty space. eddie is actually 99.9999999% space . not much to be said about that , except it’s stuffed with dark matter and dark energy . eddie’s space quivers .
deeper inside ,
eddie is churning quantum foam , constituting spacetime . there are lurches in eddie’s foam that reverberate oddly .