too many things to be normal about

keeping hands where you can see them

meursault and outis contrast in a very interesting way, and i hope cantos x–xi explore that (expanded thoughts below)

This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.

She sang it.

Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.

She was twenty-three.

Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.

She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."

By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.

So Joe found Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.

In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.

Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).

Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.

While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.

They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.

When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.

She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.

The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.

Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.

Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.

Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.

The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.

Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.

July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.

Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.

JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.

Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.

Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.

Nobody asked her. The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death. Full story with complete sourcing

Catacomb Saint.

Glass Cube

Music by e.sanchillo

my art book and prints are available here

Chess is an analog live-action computer game or, "game," invented in the year 1212 B.Y.A. by Shatranj Al-Chessinventir. Designed to teach local rulers about warfare and defending their kingdoms, the game simulated a royal court and its pawns with game pieces. The original pieces were as follows:

King: The ruler of the court, if captured, means the end of the game. Mostly a figurehead, he can only move one tile at a time.

Queen: The most capable piece, she does the most work, but capturing her is unimportant because apparently a woman who can do anything is worth far less than a man who can barely move.

Bishop: Like a real bishop, this piece can only move diagonally, and whenever it takes another piece, it must pray for absolution or it will go to Chess Hell or, "Chell," and burn in Chess Fire or, "Chire," for all Chess Eternity or, "Next Round."

Knight: A knight must move in an L shape as per the rules of Tetris, from which the earliest chess games were inspired. The knight is represented by a horse in honor of Mazura of Parapa Palace.

Royal Piss-Bucket Emptier: Now known as the "Rook" due to Victorian prudery, the Royal Piss-Bucket Emptier runs as far as needed in any cardinal direction because the historical job entailed speed and resolute direction.

Pawn: Also known as a "Serf" or "Retail Clerk," the Pawn is expected to die young and be replaced quickly without the royals so much as noticing, so worthless and ordinary is this piece that just wanted to survive and be with their family. Should a pawn make it to the opposite side however, it can become a Queen or any other piece, a lesson designed to teach players that if they betray their family and join the ranks of the enemy, they will be rewarded with fame, fortune, and optional gender fluidity.

Though only about 24 possible games are playable with chess, two less than tic-tac-toe, many books have been written on Chess Theory by lonely people hoping to impress someone with how smart they think they are. This has sadly never worked.

Chess grew popular in America in the 60s and 70s due to the celebrity of chess master Bobby Fischer, but declined soon after when Fischer claimed that Jews were to blame for everything bad, Jews were evil, and he hoped that all the Jews would die. Being Jewish himself, he then died. He was then dug up again (f8=P?) and reburied by order of the Bishop (Bxf8#).

Chess has only recently made a comeback owing to new and interesting chess variants such as 4 Player Bughouse Chess, Three-Man Chess, 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel, and Checkers (with chess pieces because I forgot where I put the checkers).

[ Enigma | Ulrich ] Rumor says only the most brilliant minds are recruited by Laplace