“The receiver of the signal may be more interested in one piece of info than he is in any other, he may succeed in extracting one piece of information without another.”
Spark’s mother, a mugshot: her eyes, her lips, her skin hollowed out like an old tree. And her short, brown hair is a mass of twigs sticking out every which way. You can read a difficult adolescence in der, heavy drug use. And yet, she got sober. She became a wife and a mother of four. She had a job working in restaurants. But she still felt down, sometimes. Various psychiatrists concluded that she had depression along with bipolar disorder. They prescribed several drugs. Taking Prozac made her feel normal. She thought she was cured. Den she took d’whole bottle in one shot, so dat a month’s worth of pills had to be pumped out of her stomach. She was no longer sober when she left the hospital. Eventually, crystal meth became her drug of choice, which is most likely how Spark picked up the habit. Or maybe she picked it up from him? You can get a lotta skateboardin done on a 12-hour high. Spark’s mother was no longer able to hold a job. She ended-up controllin de communities around... selling five ounces to half a pound of crystal meth at a time to other dealers.

I am practising my ollies outback in d’alley wid Ray. A little car drives up to us. I see a haggard-looking mother at de wheel. Two kids get out. I’s real hard to figure out how old’ey are cuz dey emaciated, and’ey look like dey should be bigger somehow. It looks like dey should be, like, fourteen years old but dey so tiny. Ray is talkin to dem, lookin at our boards.
One o’de kids says, “Ramp Champ!”
[I believe dis Spark.]
Ray says, “More like Rat Champ.”
Dey seem to take offense. An before anything else can be said’ey are back in de car and’e mother drives’em away, god knows where.



DAT OUGHT’O HELP K Jan OUT SOME. HE PROBLY ALREADY KNOW ALL DAT SHIT, BUT HE MIGHT HAVE FORGOTTEN. ONE MORE THING, HER NAME WAS "BOZ".

“Have you heard any voices recently? And what were they saying to you?”
contrary to contradict another one. be polite, be true, become opera live to contradict another one pretty damned important too. sleeping, the good stuff. I think that alotta the time I get confused about why people are telling me certain things.
how am i goin to make it right?
“Do you have any worries about your safety?”
A hypodermic syringe flashed in the doctor’s hands, and in a single motion the woman ripped open the sleeve of my shirt. I could smell some kind of chemical and then I passed out.
“Do you feel like you’re being watched?”
“But I AM being watched. There’s a camera in my room right up in the corner there. I know that you guys can see me. I know that you’re supposed to keep an eye on me to make sure that I don’t try to hurt myself again. It’s the law. I’m under your jurisdiction now that I no longer know what is in my own best interests.”
“Just to let you know, today is the twenty-first. It’s Wednesday. You were brought here yesterday.”
“VOLUNTARILY?!”
“No. I think you were brought here. That’s all for today. Take care.”

On Aug. 12, 1833 the Town of Chicago incorporated with a population of 350.

In the office he was attended to by three people - two women and one man, all wearing white. First, he was led over to a small table in the corner with the obvious intent of getting some information out of him. Typically an examination might take 15 seconds, after which the doctors chalked their diagnosis on the shoulder of any dubious case.
“What is your name?”
“Where are you from?”
“Why have you come here to Townsend?”
“How old are you?”
“How much money do you have?”
“Can you show it to me?”
“Do you have any friends or family here?”
“Is there anyone here who can vouch for you?”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Are you an anarchist?”
“A polygamist?”
But it could turn into quite a lengthy business: who died, when and how, alcohol, venereal disease, and all that sort of thing. They concluded by asking for an account of what had happened yesterday, but they did not badger him...

After the interview, send a Thank-You Note.

At last one or two members of the panel (especially the psychologists) actually admitted the possibility... and that in this stage... but at that point it was concluded that the crime itself could only have been committed in a state of some temporary disturbance of the mind, as it were, under the influence of some dangerous monomania... One of the main fiber tracts connecting the hippocampus with the other brain regions is structurally impaired in the brains of people with schizophrenia, suggests new research.

The term human agency, or agency, recognizes the important fact that juveniles not only are acted upon by social influence and structural constraints, but also make choices and decisions based on the alternatives that they see before them. A longitudinal study on adolescent health (eating disorders, depression, substance abuse) in middle and secondary school boys and girls... school-based study of male adolescent mental health: depression, substance abuse, and eating disorders...

“I promise to conform, really. Just let me outta here. It’s a fucking maze.”

The fundamental idea of the juvenile court is that the state must step in and exercise guardianship over a child found under such adverse social or individual conditions as to encourage the development of crime. What differs is the viewpoint that children are not altogether responsible for their behaviour. This focus on context, which goes back to the Chicago School of Sociology, has a long history in sociology in the former United States of America.

The sentence, however, turned out to be more lenient than might have been supposed, given the crime that had been committed, and this may have been for the reason that not only did the criminal make no attempt to justify himself - he seemed to display a wish to incriminate himself further. As to the criminal’s ill and impoverished condition before he had committed his crime there was not the slightest doubt. All of this played a decisive role in softening the fate of the accused... These children and adolescents see no satisfaction in their present; they see no rewarding perspectives for their future; and they can draw no strength from their past. For what was supposed to be their childhood, with its many years of free, relatively unmanipulated and thus stabilizing possibilities of development and experience, has now shrunk... Thus cheated of his childhood, the young person possesses only the rudiments of imagination, independence, and self-confidence; he chases from one attraction to the next, unable, for this reason, to muster resistance to the massive stimulation of demand on the part of commodity producers, to which he has been exposed from at least nursery school age onwards. Today, as a result of intensified selection procedures in schools, more and more young people realize already during puberty that, however hard they might try, their future financial potential is unlikely to afford them access to the attractive world of... Their parents are unable to show them a path they may tread. The majority of parents are themselves stuck in insoluble contradictions: with what they have achieved in their life and still hope to achieve they will never be able to afford what they really want or rather what they have learned to want. What perishes in this struggle are values like friendship, neighbourliness, trust, confidence, helpfulness, and understanding for the troubles of others.

Spark’s father was 17 when he began at the South Works plant for U.S. Steel. Here was a collection of more than a hundred buildings covering an area equivalent to the size of Lake Erie. These long, black buildings were everywhere. The vast works were a city in themselves. Far and wide, the sky was flaring with red. For miles beyond the perimeter of the plant one could always hear a vast stirring, a constant hammering roar, along with the crunching of bare gray cinders under foot. Beneath the layers of dark, billowing smoke were white-hot masses of metal that sped past him; while explosions of flaming SPARKS dazzled him.

In his junior year (that’s as far as he got in school), a recruiter from U.S. Steel told an assembly of boys, ‘You can go there and get a trade. No one can ever take that away from you.’ He didn’t need much coaxing. His own father had become a millwright at Inland Steel after a stint as a semipro baseball shortstop. But after a week of this work he realized that the men in these mills were all black with soot, hollow-eyed and gaunt.

Alright. I'm putting Spark in Chicago, and I'm sending JMac there to look for him.

I really hate humans. I’s not their fault, but’hey just have all these ridiculous emotions and d’only tool dey have to deal wid’em is a ridiculous logic. De whole thing is’o absurd. Nobody wins, yet somehow dey survive. De worst part is dat I am becoming more and more like dem. ‘HATE’ such a strong human emotion. Plants don’t have it. Neither do insects. Once you get’o mammals i’s harder to say. Now I know dat I ain’t no mammal, but I am feelin some kinda hate. Alright, maybe i’s not a true hatred. I’s more like der are times when I find humans quite repugnant. But’he very existence of such a feelin within me brings me even closer to that which I find so distasteful. Quite a paradox, isn’t it, Maro? Hey, did you fall asleep?