Terminal Flight Remix by rfcl

We had heard him about him often before we started our study.
We managed to get our hands on some of his old notebooks and we started our research.
Those that knew him personally affectionately called him Crunch.
He was always seen walking up and down the streets of San Francisco.

"The idea of moving completely unencumbered through space and time is tantalizing.
It is liberating. It is terrifying."

Crunch had never been a nuisance or caused any troubles.
He showered regularly, he liked clean clothes.
He had been a local personality since the mid 1970s.

"Populations of neurons interact through excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters.
My own biology challenges me on many levels,
it challenges my own cherished beliefs and deepest fears.
I cannot predict my inner world
any more than I can predict the world around me."

Crunch stuffed his core items in his pockets.
Passports, credit cards, a small notebook, a toothbrush
and a clipped map of California, covered with markings.
We believe that he endowed each one of these marked places with a religious significance.

"Moving to the next destination is as simple
as getting out of bed and pointing to a dot on the map.
Each place sends particular electromagnetic frequencies
to particular parts of my brain."

Crunch walked his route daily looking to see if he had a new esoteric assignment.
Nearly every day he walked Market street from end to end, for hours at a time.
Locals can’t recall him ever befriending anyone.
He never started a conversation.
If someone said hi to him, then he would stop to talk.

"The origins of my own individuality can be found in neurological correlates.
A tangle of genetic, neuroendocrinal, and neurochemical roots
underlie many of my behavioral anomalies.
I can reach complex visual and emotional hallucinations,
such as typified by dream imagery or psychedelics.
These experiences I am having were once called witchcraft or demonic possession."

In the final years, he started to change and get a little weird.
He started to get more and more disheveled.
Sometimes he was seen talking to himself.
People said they could see a crazy blank look in his eyes.
Our impression is that he was seeing something extraordinary
and he imbued these perceptions with tremendous religious and emotional feeling.

Often it is difficult to determine where normal stops and abnormal begins.
We had to abandon our study when we agreed that we had hit a brick wall.
Our questions were about to turn upon ourselves.
What was outside had crawled its way inside of us
and we had begun to feel the urge
to simply start walking, to follow the dots on the map.