I don't care that it's over, I'm going back to it.

If I squint really hard I can just make out a thin line separating the complete dark from the not so completely dark. It’s a nice diversion from trying to find yet another small unnecessary piece of dead skin on the end of my fingers to gnaw on. Anything to take my mind away from exactly where I am and exactly how I got here is worthwhile at this point.

Where am I? And how did I get here? These are question for which one has to pick a point to start and stop and with the isolation the connections become both more tangible and more muddled.

Immediately where I am, is deep underground. I’m in a hermetically sealed, self-contained secret government bubble. The bubble is a habitat, and is surrounded by volcanic groundwater, beneath a newly minted national park so far from anywhere important as to beg explanation for its location. Of course, all this would lead the viewer to wonder who I am. This question is also quite muddled, and one needs pick a spot to begin and end the explanation.

Noises outside, just like it’s feeding time at the zoo, which is actually close to the truth. They’ve figured out the necessary nutrition content, but taste, color and texture seem to be a complete mystery to them. What ends up coming in through the slot is often grey in color, mealy in texture, and tastes much like the inside of a three day old sweat sock. The good news is that after a long enough period of time you no longer notice any of that. It IS warm, and it does fill the belly, and there is often a sliver of light that comes though the slot when the drones slide the bowl in.

This is an example of where things run together, and it shows the interesting aspects contained in the nurturing of the human species. I suppose you could call it nurturing. See, some of the other prisoners have gone mad from the dark and the monotony and the bad food. I suppose you could say that they were not given the advantages of my upbringing.

My folks were good people. They were poor but they worked their whole lives and part of that whole life was to have three children. It is easily arguable that they should not have ever had children, but since there is no test to be passed to be a parent they simply forged ahead. Part and parcel to being poor in the 1960’s was making due and being grateful for what you had. So we ate the most interesting things. Muskrat. Squirrel. Frogs, bullfrogs that is. Fish stew, complete with heads and eyeballs. Scrapple. What is scrapple? It is all the parts of the pig that no sane person would eat, ground up, mixed with lard and then pressed into a grey cake like form and then fried for breakfast. We thought it was ambrosia. So I manage to pretend that this gruel they slide through the grate is scrapple, and that I am glad to have it.

I am glad by the way. Intensely glad. Because as long as the nasty, tasteless, colorless, odorless gruel keeps coming through the grate, along with its wonderful sliver of light, it means I will live to slowly and methodically take apart my enemies from the inside out until their only option is to run or die. And perhaps I will allow that, and perhaps I will kill them as they flee. A man has to have fun somehow.