Sin... Snapping Synapses...

Why is the number pad on a computer different to the one on a telephone? And why, when I'm calling someone, do I not forget this and end up calling Outer Mongolia instead?

It feels perfectly normal to be entering figures on a keyboard and then upside-down myself to call the local Indian takeaway for a nice Balti or Chicken Tikka. Sweet chilli naans please, and yes, I would like poppadoms. Or poppadums if you have them instead.

Why is that? The human brain is weird in some of the automatic connections it makes. I remember seeing an email in which the internal letters of the words were muxed ip and you were still meant to be able to read it as your brain automatically figures it out as long as the first and last are in place.

If you see waht I maen.

But that's on a small scale. Even upsidising your mind to adapt to which number order you're using, though it probably takes millions of snapping synapses to sync, is small fry - and not in the way of crispy bacon and eggs.

Edgar Alan Peterson. Ed to me and a small number of others and Poo to most of the rest. His synapses snapped along at a crazy rate, jumping from subject to subject, leaping tall bananas in a single bound. The Jack of all Juxtapositions and Master of Madness.

Well, not quite. To say he was Master of Madness was to steal Connors' crown like a thief in the night, sneaking from shadow to doorway to... other hidey thing... until the crown was in your possession. Beware of those thorns though. Not only did Connors think himself as, in here at least, the Almighty, you could be sure there'd be plenty of pricks involved.

Most involved drugs or orderlies, syringe or (though, of course, it never REALLY happens) succubus.

Anywho. Ed. He spoke at a rate of knots the coastguard would have little chance of keeping up with. He'd be a fast disappearing dot in the eye of the river police I think I saw Bruce Willis playing in a film once. And everything he said, however disjointed and tangential, made some sort of sense.

He played a permanent, tumbling, game of word association that had your head spinning as you tried to keep up but, when you attempted to replay the conversation back in your mind later - in the slow motion of a spit flinging Van Damme movie fight -you could, kind of, see how the path managed to meander from its start to its ultimate end.

Somehow the fact that the sun was shining became a discussion on mountaintop dew levels, moving to the number of times he's hit his thumb whilst hammering a nail, then being swiftly overtaken on the outside lane by the fact that he preferred KFC to McDonalds except on Fridays because Friday is Fries-day. Then it was a race for the finishing line between why men's shoe sizes are different to women's and is a bubble stronger from the inside than it is from the outside?

And, during the whole conversation, he would take, perhaps, three breaths.

That was why he was in here. He was a telephone man in a keyboard world, but, somehow, he managed to fit. You couldn't quite figure out why, but you accepted it anyway.

I wonder if that explains me. I wonder if I'm upsidised. The buttons are being pressed in the wrong order. Something in my head is the wrong way round and that's why they all died.

That's why they all die.