“Living is easy with eyes closed; misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out. It doesn't matter much to me.”
-The Beatles
A.L. Morrison’s
'The Space Pilot'
a novel.
My name was Jim Miller, and I was a kid from Pennsylvania.
1:
I was conceived in the back of a ‘92 Chevrolet, sixteen years after it was. I was born in the neck of autumn, a surprisingly warm one nation wide. Yet, The year was by no means pretty. 2008 held, and still holds, the title for the most calculated deaths in one year by Leukemia. Remember? Maybe you don’t, so I’ll do a quick relapse: In February of ‘07, an elderly woman named Lucy Cox, a resident of Florida’s Big Pine Key, was driving to a restaurant and bar, that was demoed in 2015, called No-Name Pub. Now, an old woman of 72 wouldn’t have any reason to go to a pub would she? Unless of course, it was for someone else. Sure. At least that’s what she claimed dozens of times. Really, it wouldn’t have done any harm to her in the media, but she was apparently not only a great-grandmother, but also a non-alcoholic.
Well, luck had it, that before she had time to look in her rear view mirror, she was slammed in the license plate by some stoner in his twenties driving a green Nissan. It just so happens that the b***h had Leukemia, and probably only had a few years, with the chemo. The initial impact was very heavy, and left her with a broken nose, collarbone, and jaw. Yet, it all happened in the rear of her car… Cancer. Old age. The works.
The doctors were pretty certain she was ******** out of her life, and who wouldn’t have been? She was 72, dying already, and her upper body had taken a fierce beating. She was going to die. They knew it. Yet, after 3 days in a complete and utter daze, and 7 months of recovery, guess who became America’s little I-lived-it-must-be-a-miracle-thank-you-god sweetheart? Yep. But now we’re finally getting down the point of this memoir. After her full recovery/rehabilitation, she had to talk to her doc concerning good old leukemia. Yet, there was nothing to be found in Lucy’s brain. At least, nothing that was of a threat. After days of tests, Lucy’s doctor confirmed, to his eye-popping astonishment, that the cancer basically ******** vanished. Tumors and all.
The Media? Hit Hard. The top physicians in the country reviewed medical records, while America cried to the bittersweet story of Lucy Cox: The woman who beat cancer with a car crash..? Well, yes. There was no other explanation. Reviewing hospital notes and records, a Doctor Joe Pell found that the crash, with a little help from whiplash, caused minor brain damage, but seemed to have no effect on Cox’s actions, thoughts, coordination… anything. So, the doctor sort of kept it to himself and the nurses. Yet, a warrant tells all.
By November of 2007, doctors were raving that, with minor disruption to a cluster of brain cells, Leukemia could possibly be cured. Well, they had no other lead than Lucy, but hey, why not? What would be the pain of tossing a few bones out there? So, the docs basically said: “If you’re dying, why the hell not take a chance? Come on, you know Leukemia has you by the neck, so why not try to do something to save yourself?” America ate it up. There was little chance that giving the brain a good rattle, and pissing it off a bit in the process, would show good results to the patients who signed on for the gig. Most likely, there would be certain death. Well, there wasn’t. Not in the beginning. Tumors were eliminated left and right, and astonishingly, cells basically built their own steroids and killed cancer. So, thousands of people got this operation in a little more than a year, and it was surprisingly cheap (though the first few grand of people had it free, because it was all just a test): The operation was extremely easy, like electroshock therapy, and involved only about ten minutes of work. I can’t tell you how many, because I don’t know for sure, but by October of 2008, every single patient had died of basically a brain collapse. Apparently, ******** up the brain for a good cause only defeats the purpose. 76% of the people who got the operation had more time to live, most by more than two years, than what they got from the surgery. Lucy Cox was one of the last to die, on September 26th, 2008. Now, maybe you’re wondering what the relevance of all of this is, to a story about some teenager, more or less at the tip of puberty. Well, in time, I’ll be sure to feed that to you. But I guess we have to start right back where I began.
I was conceived in the back of a ‘92 Chevrolet, sixteen years after it was. My parents were Jim and Emma Miller, so I guess that made me a junior. They were both in their early twenties, and they both never married each other or anyone else. My existence was ignored by everyone except for them: typical new born b*****d eh?
As life moved on, the world entered into a new era of which America gladly opened the door to. After the horrible incidents leading up to the ‘08 election, Hilary Clinton stepped up to the White House duties, after winning by 19% lead vote. By 2010, the ******** war in Iraq was finally shut down. No Osama found. How funny, eh? Troops were still posted here and there, keeping watch for the guy, but he still hasn’t been found to this day. I suppose I have always had my doubts about what the point of the war even was, but it was before my time: Why should I be worrying about it in the first place? I shouldn’t.
My parents were college students, whom, I’m guessing, used a bad condom, or faulty birth control pills. Who knows? All I know is that as soon as they made it out of the hospital, they chucked me at the front door of a local orphanage, which is where I spent my life up until the age of 10. That’s where I really get into my story.
This place wasn’t run by the typical nuns you see around orphanages, and surprisingly, there wasn’t much of a religious stench to it at all. The owners of the place, (it was called Brookfield Child Home), were an old man and his Italian wife: Alex and Anita Fillmore. By the age of 7, you absolutely had to receive education. The people who provided it? The old smelly guys unlucky enough to get this job who merely handed you a book, and said, “Read.”
Now, in reality, most of these guys didn’t really give a ******** if you got an education or not. Some of them were broken ex-prisoners who probably hadn’t actually read a book in years, while others were friends of the owners. Very stupid friends. Friends who had no money, housing, and absolutely no education that really mattered now. But it wasn’t like I didn’t care. The really sad thing was that the only reason why they were even here was because Mr. and Mrs. Fillmore actually cared. I wasn’t really ever sure how the Fillmores even knew about the prisoners’ locations before they landed here, and even more so, how they persuaded them to work in an old orphanage in the first place.
Every morning, I would be woken from bed, fed breakfast, and then allowed to watch television for half an hour with the rest of the kids at my age. After that? What schooling that was to be provided was provided. Not much to say, but this went on for 2 years. After those 2 years, the story suddenly got interesting. Yet, there are different meanings for interesting.
Typical new born b*****d eh?
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