Brad Crutchfield

Extraordinary Expenses

The human component of any particular endeavor has invariably for me been a disaster to account for. A relentless engine comprised of I don’t know what: money-want, power-thirst and an admixture of other, more elusive, ephemeral, often enough quixotic cravings of the so called heart., the damning logic of which is sometimes revealed to me, more often not. This is just as true in the offices, workspaces and laboratories of the Brain Behavior Institute where I work as it is anywhere else. My predictive insight, when aimed at my own species, wavers, succumbs, is easily overwhelmed. And so when the phone in my office rang, driving away yet another reverie that itself had scattered an effort at concentration, I saw spring before me a murky tunnel, pocked with fissures like wormholes in its near and far ends – a choice such as it was between a direct route to a fixed point and circumlocution to that same point – encompassing the change of states from the fact of my right hand left to its own accord in the periphery of my vision and the fact of that same hand clutching the receiver of my desk phone to halt the ringing. Thus marking the inevitability of a new encounter.