anyways here's some writing
He took the phrase āsocial atomizationā very literally, he imagines himself as an electron in the Bohr model. The one you learn about in chemistry class. He was one of the smaller, more negative personalities that orbited around a collection of much larger and more positively charged particles. He thought that there are relationships that are like hydrogen atoms, just one lone electron and proton, one completely dependent on the other. He can at least assure himself that heās on one of those more complicated atoms with several blown-up positively charged persons and more neutral stable types all close together. The many small, despondent, and antisocial particles locked equidistant from each other in their shells, offering only minimal windows, passing moments as it were for the negative types to commiserate. He knows the Bohr model isn't reality, that many particle physicists and chemistry types now say the electrons orbit the nucleus in a cloud, a buzzing range of space where electrons have the probability of appearing. These clouds take many shapes. Some areas are denser, or more predictable than others, but ultimately obscure because you can never really know a given electron's exact position. Perhaps he could stretch his profound sense of alienation over this new model but he couldn't expend the effort, and found the cloud theory hard to picture. He knows that his grasp on atomic physics is extremely limited and that both models are just models, ways to visualize something that is intricate and invisible. But he can't shake the feeling that he was a little empty thing sailing along the same circle each year, distant even from the strange, small fliers like him. Heās afraid of stories about Beta-minus decay, when due to some atomic reshuffling an electron was created and thrown out of the atom entirely, screaming out perhaps to collide with another molecule in the future. He knows heās a stable enough electron, his orbit and direction has never changed, but sometimes protons become neutrons and the other way around. He's seen a few electrons on their way flashing out of an atom in decay. Memories of them keep him awake at night.
