i took a bullet and i looked inside

[Anselm de le Poer]

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!@#$%Anselm was one of those particularly dangerous fellows (that seemed mighty common in Inferni), for he possessed the crazed paranoia of a madman but he was still very clever and in control. Fortunately or unfortunately, his paranoia had saved him on a number of occasions--a reward, obviously, that encouraged the behaviour all the more. Perhaps stranger and more obvious forms of insanity existed--he wasn't delirious, he wasn't dissociated from reality, and his thoughts were not disorganised--and it wouldn't be fair to say he had an outright mental disease. Perhaps a sampling of personality disorders was more accurate, but he was smart enough to work with them (and hide them, if need be). !@#$%In some ways, he considered himself more grounded than the others that were allegedly "normal." The fate issue she brought up was but one--to him, it was silly that anybody could think that they didn't have choices. "Pah, what of it? It's just an excuse for others to choose to be miserable, and a way of denying self responsibility." Oh, it was fate that my children died, not my fault that I wasn't watching them carefully enough. This also held true for the good things... he refused to believe that whatever nice happened to him was because of somebody/thing else and not his own hard work. If others wanted to be satiated with that lie, more power to them (not really), but he preferred his own way of doing things. !@#$%"Certainly some things are beyond our control," he decided to elaborate. "But that doesn't make them the working of some supernatural power or thing like fate. There's no proof for that. Everything in nature seems to follow a certain pattern. Those patterns tend to be logical enough if you know how to look at them right." The sun rising every day was not an act of god, for instance--it was merely a convenient result of rotational and gravitational physics. And he found a strange amount of comfort in this, just as others might in their religion or other hocus pocus beliefs (which was one thing he failed to understand).

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