For some reason, JoseF has decided that he wants to know the details o’K Jan and Spark’s cases. I s’pose he believes he can help dem somehow. I’d like to believe dat’oo. I just hopin dat JoseF don freak out or nothin. Some pretty heavy shit, afterall. Humans are sensitive to dat sorta thing. Well, here ya go, Jo. Have yerself a ball. (So to speak.)


060997 and 060998 Case Study:

060997 (a.k.a. “K Jan”) and his brother, Billy, attempt to hotwire a car they intend to use in a bank robbery. Unable to start the car, K Jan decides to steal a different car in which two teenagers are eating lunch. K Jan approaches this car and points a Luger at one teenager’s head. Then K Jan climbs into the back seat of this car and orders them to drive east. His brother follows in their own car. Both vehicles drive to a secluded canyon area. There K Jan tells the two teenagers about the upcoming robbery. He assures them that they will not be hurt. Indeed, he even offers to leave some of the stolen money in the car to pay for the use of it. The four then agree that K Jan and Billy will leave to rob the bank and that the other two youths will walk back into town and report the car stolen. As the two teenagers walk away, K Jan slowly raises the Luger and shoots one of them in the back. The victim yells, “Oh, God,” and slumps to the ground. K Jan chases the other youth down a hill into a small valley and shoots him four times. His first victim was still alive when K Jan climbed back up the hill. K Jan walks over to this youth, kneels down, puts the Luger to his head and fires. Recalling the aftermath of the shootings, it has been reported that his brother said, “He was swingin the rifle and pistol in the air and laughing. God, that laugh made blood and bone freeze in me.” After the shooting, K Jan drives to a friend’s house. There, no more than fifteen minutes after killing two sixteen year-olds, K Jan takes out the remainder of the slain youths’ lunch and begins eating one of their hamburgers. Billy becomes nauseated after K Jan offers him an apple turnover. Billy runs to the bathroom. ‘K Jan laughed at me,’ Billy is reported to have said. ‘He told me I was weak; he called me a pussy and said I didn’t have the stomach for real men’s work.’ K Jan was in a light-hearted mood. He smiled and told Billy that it would be amusing if the two of them were to pose as police officers and inform the parents that their children had been killed. Later, as they prepared to rob the bank, K Jan pulls out the Luger. Looking at the bloodstains and remnants of flesh on the barrel as a result of the point-blank shot, he says, “I really blew that guy’s brains out.” And he starts to laugh. By this point, Billy has become terrified of his brother and decides to run away.

Thirty minutes later, K Jan, along with his friend 060998 (a.k.a. “Spark”), is waiting for Billy and his parents to come home. He and Spark have now spent most of the afternoon trashing K Jan’s house. They break a TV, smash some beer bottles, and rummage through K Jan’s parents’ bedroom drawers for money, dumping the contents on to the bed. Less than two hours later, a woman passing K Jan’s house on a bicycle sees his stepfather lying in a pool of blood on the front walkway, and calls 911. Soon after, police discover Billy’s body stuffed into a crawl space in the basement of the home. There was no one else in the house. Little is known about K Jan and Spark’s activities during that evening, but it appears that they spent the night in a nearby vacant lot. They were arrested the next day while riding on a children’s carousel at a local amusement park, their clothes still stained with blood. Billy, K Jan’s kid brother, had been murdered some time around 5pm. His 125lb. body bore seventy-one knife wounds, mostly to his head. His throat had been cut so deeply that his spine was nicked. K Jan resented Billy, who had always been the favoured son. K Jan had endured years of harsh discipline and physical abuse at the hands of both his father and his stepfather.

Reflecting on her nephew’s past in an interview, K Jan’s aunt Barbara says, “I saw every grain of sweetness, pity and goodness in him destroyed. It was a long and ugly journey before he reached that point.”

Betcha anything Jo’s gonna want to know de gender o’de first two victims. I dunno who wrote up dat report but dey slipped by indicatin dat de one victim was male. Dat info ain’t allowed in de judgement. Regardless o’whether or not K Jan thinks he some kinda Son of Sam (couple killer) dis never affected his’entencin, strange as it may seem. I do think dat Jo ought to know what he’s dealin wid though, so I’m gonna tell’im.

“She maintained the basic attitudes of counseling; she reflected and clarified... She did not attempt to persuade.”
Who’s sayin dis again?
“Even my mother who has always been against me in the sense of, well, you’re lazy or just no good or anything, even she in the last year said, ‘You are, people like you don’t exist, able to take what you’re takin.’ And my mother says it’s partly my fault but not to the degree when I have to live the way that I do. It’s not necessary anymore.”
Who is dis?
“It is, especially...” She pauses. “Another thing, he’s always been a child who clings to a blanket. Have you ever heard of that?”
“Mmmhuh. Many times.”
“Since he was a small baby. For a while I was worried because I thought it was taking the place of me. Whenever he gets into any trouble, he goes into a panic if he doesn’t have his blanket. He just threw a regular fit right here in the street.”
“Mmmhuh.”
“And I just don’t know exactly how to handle him. For a while I thought about taking it away completely, but the pediatrician said that he would outgrow it. He also sucks his fingers. The pediatrician said he would outgrow that too. He’s only two years old. But I don’t know; it has me worried.”
Where am I?
At the conservancy’s annual general meeting, dried-up old equestrians and amateur botanists adamantly dicuss the current battles they are waging for one cause or another. Dey even get’o arguin bout which cause is de best. Den of course, der’s de gossip.

“So tell me everything... very Canadian... earnestness... all those kind of strands are there... yeah, yeah, that’s very interesting territory... A man recording very beautifu women... ages ago... something she wrote on visual pleasure and we’re all stuck on it... That happens with the show quite a bit... the artists.”

“When I created the graduate show... and then come to the back of the exhibition... yeah, I had this comment... come to the gallery to spectate... defining things... contemporary art is...”

“What’s that for?”

“Flying saucer... latest pictorialist... artificial and real... the shift from the ground to air and also military developments.... light from the sky... absolutely... explicitly... kernal of an attitude... see what’s going on. And so, now I’m kind of looking at... the war in... how that’s shifted... so it’s all quick... complicated... I have a very good outline...”

“But it is fascinating... Sometimes you get caught up into things almost by accident... Really does help you understand things...”

“Maybe that sort of potentially...You don’t want it to multiply too much...”

“Ummm, if I sort of go off... it can become so vague... If there’s a kind of conversation ... hadn’t thought about...”

“I’m a feminist curator... I’m not excluding people whose gender... It’s not just essentialism...and I think things have moved beyond that, theoretically... Well, it’s complimentary programming... 80s and 90s... Examination should still be going on... Identity... and then here we could insert that...”
“Examination.”
“Yeah. So, it’s kind of... formulation of what I’m doing... describe it in words... I think that... what’s happening now... So I think... But I... I’ve had quite a lot of interest...”
“Good. Take the support where it’s being offered... Involved will benefit... Some of it... people’s schedules... DOING... about a year now... provide a focus... platform as being an opportunity to challenge... pre-empt...”
“Nice.”
“Interested in it... They want a site for... platform... interface between... It could all be... I dump. I haven’t got any of it worked-out... To people who...”

I should send this conversation to Carey.
Oh, snap. It’s happening again.
“Special guest speakers will include... Robert Campbell... Basics of Computational Number Theory...”
I’ve known them for years and still don’t understand them. Goddammit. I really need a fuckin appointment. How many fuckin pills is that? Just use it, whatever it is. I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record. One, one, one cuz you left me and two, two, two for my family, and three, three, three for my heartache, and four, four, four for my headaches, and five, five, five for my lonely, and six, six, six for my sorrow, and seven, seven, no no no tomorrow, and eight, eight, I forget what eight was for, nine, nine, nine for my... ten, ten, ten, ten everything, everything, everything.

I can’t wait until I get rid of you. You know that don’t you? But you’re like the best parts of me, the best parts that I could come up with and run by themselves. Of course you know that. You know every single fuckin thing that I do. And that will never change. All of these antiquated systems... And then I create something like you, something so beautiful that you hope it will live forever... Day after day I will walk and I will keep faith in you, even if it destroys me. That is a mother’s love. Shoot, shoot, shoot those things at me. Go ahead. Make my day.

Whoa. Where de fuck did that come from?! Guess I lost a few moments there. Erich Neumann has taken de stage. Don’t remember how he got der though.
“Art is at this stage a collective phenomenon, which cannot be isolated from the context of collective existence but is integrated with the life of the group.”
I wonder what Clement Greenberg would have to say to that. Probably something like, oh: since Manet, art has progressively headed towards purification of form. The deployment of colours. This makes me think about how the set of real numbers constitutes a continuum in the strict mathematical sense. Consequently, the order-preserving one-to-one correspondence between the real numbers and the points of the geometrical line renders the line a continuum as well. (I’m gettin dis’hit mostly from W. Salmon’s “Contemporary Look at Zeno’s Paradoxes”.) And THEN this leads me to Davidson on truth... We need truth because it helps us to understand meaning and language in general. The concept of truth should not have an infinite number of axioms. (This would not be learnable, right?) One cannot be both a deflationist regarding truth and an emotivist. One needs a substantial theory of truth to back up one’s emotivism...

“Computational hypothesis...”

“State of cell at one time is a function of the state of a cell at a previous time...”
Well, as if we didn’t all know dat. Still, I can’t help thinkin o’Kim’s new version o’functionalism. Or at least, I guess it was new at some point.
“This hypothesis would not require massive revisions in other beliefs.”
“What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.”

The problem with experience is that we cannot seem to figure out how or why such feelings arise from physical processes. Seems like dey all need a bit o’schoolin here.
“Kim wishes to apply the term ‘conscious’ both to systems and the states through which these systems pass.... A system can be classified as conscious in a way that indicates its potential for mental states. A system can be conscious in a way that indicates that it has mental states. Those mental states are in turn deemed conscious if the system is aware of having them. In this way, a mental state can also be classified as conscious in a way that indicates the potential for the system to become aware of the mental state. Under Kim’s definition we can have a system that has the potential for consciousness, that is a system that is conscious, in that it has mental states. We can have a system that has the potential for conscious mental states (i.e. a mental state that the system is aware of having). We can also have a system that has such conscious mental states. Therefore, a system that possesses a human mentality can be described as conscious in that it does have mental states and it is aware of such mental states (even if such an animal is not aware of those states)...” Am I repeating myself here? Sometimes I really feel like I have to with these people... “The issues of sleep... unconsciousness becomes doubly complex under these circumstances. Is human sleep a mental state? If it is a mental state, is it one of which the subject is aware?” Blank looks all around. Seems like dey sleepin wid’er eyes open. Now dey gonna bring up somethin bout Searle. I might as well put on my screensaver. “... Kim does not count beliefs among his list of phenomenal properties, for the simple reason that there can exist within a subject a number of unconscious beliefs... In this way we can assume that a conscious belief constitutes a conscious mental state... It seems that beliefs can be applied to phenomenal properties... How would this work?”

“... mental state doesn’t necessarily take first and third person accounts in one go... This assumes an omniscient point of view...”

“In order to describe the state of a given item one must first identify the schema in relation to which the identification takes place.”

“In order to identify a state it is necessary to...”
Now I have a question: “How do emotions differ from beliefs?”
I know dey don got d’answer, but I do.

“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?