----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
There are many Chads.
Not all got named Chad, but Chad did.
When he was 10 his uncle had taken him climbing at Pere Marquette State Park.
Although it wasn’t really climbing, it was rappelling.
But like most former Cub Scouts-turned-Cubmasters, uncle Tommy hadn’t exactly known what he hadn’t known, had he?
He’d had a tendency to embellish anyway, and so he’d subsequently referred to the outing as their “rock climbing expedition.”
They’d hiked to the top of a small bluff and proceeded to descend via a low angle east-facing slab that uncle Tommy had reckoned the appropriate blend of logistically-practicable and sufficiently-adrenaline-inducing.
It was about 30 feet high. They’d gone on to do a few—far more imposing—others that day, but that had been the first, and therefore the most memorable, for Chad.
On their third rappel of the day, uncle Tommy had pulled the ends of his rope taut, locking the figure-8 and stranding Chad dangling in space: twisting, writhing, screaming gleefully.
They had had a good laugh, during which Uncle Tommy had hollered up and told him he was a “regular ol’ hangin’ chad.”
Chad hadn’t understood the joke at the time, but he later came to understand that “hanging chad” was the moniker given to a small, usually circular or elliptical, fragment of paper created when a perforation device failed to completely punch a hole through a tape or sheet, leaving behind a movable, hinged paper lid.
The nickname had stuck, and for quite some time afterward, Chad had looked forward to Uncle Tommy’s regular weekend visits, he reveled in hearing his nickname spoken with a wink and a smile.
Eventually, though, he had stopped looking forward to the visits so much. He was getting older, almost 15!
Far too busy Growing Up to be cracking silly jokes with his uncle, or spending time with the pops, or visiting gramma even though she only lived a 10 minute walk down Main St.
Chad was busy getting on with his life, being an adult, going to parties, chasing girls, swilling inebriants of every color and potency.
And so, at 17, Chad was busy getting drunk and sneaking into a college party as uncle Tommy was clutching his chest and dying of a massive coronary event during his Easter weekend visit.
At 20, Chad was busy getting drunk trying to impress some girls he’d never met whose numbers he’d never get, as his father was flying through the windshield of the ‘97 DeVille on the way back from helping move furniture into a new apartment after Chad had managed to get himself kicked out the dorms for drinking.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
A day after his 23rd birthday, Chad was blackout-drunk, vomiting in an alley outside a dive bar in Saint Louis as his mother was downing her whole bottle of Norpramin at the kitchen table with old family albums and kindergarten artwork strewn about.
And at 28, just a few minutes past noon on a beautiful summer day, Chad was busy getting drunk just to get drunk, as his grandmother was dying scared and all alone in the nursing home 3 blocks down the street from his apartment.
He’d eventually come to regret these and many other of his decisions, and in time he’d come to reflect on them and acknowledge his shortcomings—first with the aid of drink, and after a longer while, without.
It was partially because of the crushing guilt that he’d agreed to help his estranged sister clean out the attic of the old family home.
He’d begrudgingly taken on the duty when she’d offered to deal with every other aspect of the estate planning in return—or to cut him off completely and forever if he refused.
In one of his grandmother’s keepsake-filled-shoeboxes he’d found an old birthday card from uncle Tommy.
On it was written “Dear Hanging Chad, happy 13th! Be good and have fun, but mostly have fun. I love you buddy!”
The same regret that had impelled him to help his sister finally clear out 4 truckloads of sentimental trinkets, was the same that saw him tear off the bottom of the card and slip uncle Tommy’s words into his wallet for safekeeping.
But regret was only partially the reason he’d kept the memento.
The other reason—perhaps 70 or 80 percent of the reason—was because he’d be drawn to it, that alias, hanging chad.
He couldn’t put his finger on why exactly, but on rare occasion when he found himself in an introspective mood, he concluded simply that the battered scrap had reminded him of a less complicated time. Nostalgia, the rose-tinted days of his youth, memories of a generally sentimental nature. When certain Things That Ended Up Happening had not yet happened.
But the actual reason—obscured to Chad and everyone else—was that just as a hanging chad was ofthe paper from which it hung, Chad was of the Fleshahedron. And just as a hanging chad was still connected, however subtly, to its wellspring, so too was Chad connected to his.
However, unlike a hanging chad that could yet be cut free, Chad would never be truly separate from that which had begotten him.
He was forever bound to that roiling maelstrom lurking at the seams of reality
And just as the specific arrangement of fundament that had come to be known as Chad had been passed across the gulf of infinity, so too were other things passed,
Not just mass and energy, ideas too. Which—considering ideas are merely particular dynamical constellations of matter persisting over time—is not so radical a notion.
Every species of abstraction permeates the void: memes, conceptual frameworks, zeitgeist. Their essences saturate the hypervolume.
And where the membranes intersect, these essences are passed through—shared, amplified, transfigured.
Thus, Chad was—in a sense somewhat more than just figuratively—a hanging chad.
Some portion of him had resonated with the concept so named, with its connotations, the implications. It wasn’t mere coincidence he’d been named such.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Of course, Chad didn’t know any of this.
No one did.
Not his parents, not his sister, not his cousins or his classmates or his colleagues. Not the hurried throngs of men and women on their way to matters of great consequence who’d passed by a crying infant on an unseasonably warm September night. Not the nurses who’d wiped the dirt and shit and gore off of him.
Not even the junkie shooting up in the alley by the theater who’d shambled away in sudden panic at the sight of flashing lights and sound of wailing sirens—nevermind the fact that had the addled street urchin interrogated his perceptions a moment longer he’d’ve known the sirens to be only in his head, and nevermind the lights hadn’t really been flashing, certainly not in ordinary colors with ordinary names like “red” and “blue.”
Nevermind that the softly undulating phosphorescence emanating from somewhere within that alley, actually came from elsewhere, somewhere beyond the graffitied walls and vomit soaked pavement and needle filled dumpsters.
Nevermind, too, the putrid smell that had accompanied that night’s queer mirage. The acrid, caustic scent of burnt hair and fermented afterbirth that had lingered and effected the nauseated circumambulation of passersby for weeks afterwards.
No, no-one had known, and so no one had ever told him.
The only people who might’ve been privy to the sparse—and highly classified—relevant material or who may’ve had the faintest intuitions regarding such events—born of certain transcendent ordeals—would be CIA- and NSA- and DoD-sponsored labcoat types or the odd hieroglyph and pentagram tatted yogi. But the former weren’t allowed to talk, and no-one was listening to the latter anyway.
So Chad didn’t know, he was as in-the-dark as anyone.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------