The Ill-Advised Adventures
of Jim-Jam O’Neily

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Nineteen: Privation

The government delegates, who had been electronically tracking O’Neily, noted his request for ammunition and for an ammunition belt. They failed to realize that James Jackson O’Neily, who was talking in analogies, was tired of being deemed a responsible teen, and was seeking a platform for his repertoire of witticisms. The kid’s cerebral strongbox had flooded to the extent that his lame postings on the Internet were just his attempt to access mental retarding basins since his psychological bund walls had ruptured.

* * *

Adding to Jim-Jam’s hurt was that his benefactors at the Maharishi University of Management and at the Montana Great Falls College of Technology were singly charging him with defrauding on longstanding agreements. Those professors claimed that the owner of Upper Buckwheat County’s Make-It-Or-Break-It-That-Will-Be-Fifty-Dollars-An-Hour shop had intentionally deceived them for personal gain. They were serving him with court papers.

While awaiting their court date, those academics blocked Jim-Jam from reentering the worldwide university library system. None of his frantic emails to the newly tenured Associate Professor of Sustainable Living or to the adjunct instructor of Microcomputer Support were answered. More particularly, those emails bounced back.

Jim-Jam stopped offering ghostwriting services. He rerouted his energies into pie baking, square dancing, and designing leashes for walking large lizards. Given those new activities, not to mention his former ecologically-based ones, if he hadn’t broken off communications with the tourist ships, he might have been able to help Mom and her colleagues frame his deeds as a boon to humanity.

The high achiever pulled on the strands of facial hair that had begun to sprout above his lip. Mom had said that Ralph and Scooter had stated “copperheads,” despite the fact that forensic evidence pointed to Komodos. If the latter was proven in court, Jim-Jam might be rubricked as an accessory to Ralph’s disappearance. It made no difference that Jim-Jam had no clue as to where or as to why his cousin had bolted.

Jim-Jam let his fingers fly over his keyboard. The degree to which people understood a set-up as difficult often had much to do with their perspective as it did with the actual goings-on. For instance, individuals who believe that the universe unfolds as it ought to are usually happy with their lives. Individuals, who hold the opposite perspective, contrariwise, are usually unhappy. George seemed to fit the first category. Mrs. Preenberry and Lima seemed to fit the second.

It follows that explanatory styles vary from person to person; two people could be equally pleased or equally displeased about the same real or anticipated event but could experience those identical feelings for vastly different reasons. Doris and Lynnie Lola were of that sort. Mr. Atkins and Mr. Weaver, too, could be similarly defined.

Jim-Jam sighed. He needed to work on judging people more compassionately.

The Prince of Translational Neuroscience texted Doris to ask if she liked the hat that he had crafted for her from the newest type of Khitty Khleen bags and that he had decorated with pink and purple taffeta ribbons. He imagined that her sallow complexion would be enhanced by pastel shades. It was fortuitous that the most recently launched size of Khitty Khleen was packaged in mauve sacks lettered in baby blue.

The gold and purple outfits that Doris and Mac had been wearing did not compliment Doris’ skin tone nearly as much as had the hollowed pumpkin she had worn as Harvest Queen. Yet, that gourd, too, was less than flattering on Doris’ bonce that were Khitty Khleen-sourced hats as dull orange was not a shade that someone with spring coloring ought to flaunt.

Doris didn’t answer Jim-Jam’s text.

Jim-Jam sighed, again. He was neither an athlete nor prepared to be a wilderness survivor upon the advent of society’s breakdown. He had to have access to existent human systems to be wealthy or powerful. Although he had been facile at manipulating those structures, very recently, government agencies were suppressing his activities. At the moment, the best that Jim-Jam could do to improve his lot was to pick the gnurr from his pockets, meditate on fictional alliances, and hope that Mom would be able to spring him from the narrow place in which he found himself. Even investing in pie-baking, square dancing, and lizard leash making were proving to be insufficient resolutions to his problems.

* * *

While Jim-Jam cogitated in his backyard hideaway, Mom sat at the kitchen table and tried not to fall asleep in her coffee. Legal declarations, which had been shoved forward by her friends in the prosecutors’ office, that same office that the government had hired, raised many questions about her son’s activities and about those of his associates. Those declarations had thieved her of any ability to sleep.

For one thing, Jim-Jam’s professor pals, the ones who taught at regional centers of higher education, had been documented as having underworld dealings. The prosecution’s suspicions about those contacts had enabled the government to request and receive the records saved on Jim-Jam’s mainframe.

Mom was flummoxed. Before the feds actually got hold of her son’s computer, she would have to find a way to insist that the government procuring of those materials was illegal. The problem was that Mom had no idea how she could make plain that the feds’ search and seizure order was improper or, in the least, that any discoveries resulting from those actions were inadmissible in court. Somehow, she had to make the exclusionary rule work in Jim-Jam’s favor since investigations of his files would likely lead to the discovery of incriminating records.

Second, Mom and her team had to reposition Jim-Jam’s case such that the opposition would be forced to explicitly show which international treaties they were defending. To date, there was a convenient vagueness in the accusations that had been filed.

Third, the defense had to make the judge believe that Jim-Jam, beyond all reasonable doubt, had had opportunities to defraud those problematic professors and the institutions for which they worked, but had not utilized those openings. Whether opposition argued that Jim-Jam’s affairs were mitigating or justified, Mom’s team needed to make those others worked harder.

Keeping Jim-Jam out of jail would depend on her team’s maneuvers since plea bargaining was increasingly looking like a poor option. If Mom could help it, no two-faced group of repugnant fundraisers was going to send away her baby.

Mom poured herself another mugful of coffee. Her people had already conceded, in the judge’s chambers, that her son had had no qualms about charging high fees to folks, especially to duplicitous corporations, such as the ecology organization that had been discovered to have been cashing in on him. Mom was not willing to grant, though, either behind closed doors, or in a courtroom, that her child was a criminal. She certainly would do everything in her power to prevent him from being tried as an adult, whether or not the nature of his acts had already taken him out of the juvenile jurisdiction.

The good lawyer shook her head. Her team would have to present Jim-Jam as a boy and, to be more precise, as a good boy. The judge would have to be shown repeated testimony that young O’Neily was unaware of the gravity of his actions and that he was a well-meaning and beneficently acting teen. To wit, one of her colleagues was cataloging the ways in which Jim-Jam had sacrificed his time and energy to help Lynnie Lola Jones heal. Jim-Jam had garnered only nominal earnings from the hats that Mrs. Jones had commandeered but had nonetheless donated his limited time to the Joneses. Such altruism is uncharacteristic in adolescents.

By the same token, there were documents, both online, and at Raymond Charles High School, of Jim-Jam’s magnanimity with Snorkel Preenberry. Not only had Jim-Jam tutored that child, but he had also supplied Snorkel with models for rudimentary interpersonal communications.

Counselor O’Neily was particularly well-informed about Jim-Jam’s friendship with Snorkel. From the time that she had taken shelter in the Preenberry house, when she had fled from the unrestrained Komodo dragon, going forward, Mrs. Preenberry had subjected Mom to narratives about Jim-Jam’s influence on Snorkel (and had subjected her to pleas to use her legal might to restore Snorkel to Raymond Charles High School).

Mom smiled at her cold coffee. Since Mrs. Preenberry wanted Mom’s help, Mom might be able to call on her to testify to Jim-Jam’s high-mindedness. That stretch wasn’t too much of a conflict of interests.

Similarly, Mr. Weaver could bear witness that Jim-Jam had lent a hand at the Harvest Festival Dance. Few kids would willingly stand aside from the fun to serve punch and cookies. The judge did not have to know that Jim-Jam’s service had been involuntary.

A tear dripped down Mom’s face. Persons familiar with Jim-Jam could share tactical narratives about him. The child’s mystique among local teens, for instance, could be used to paint him as a hidden do-gooder. Also, his dalliances with Dr. George Q. Washington could be reframed to show Jim-Jam as a kid who aided the homeless.

* * *

On balance, the prosecution had already submitted documents testifying that Jim-Jam’s smarts were indicative of his ability to carry out frightening behaviors. They had also turned over a tape of one of Jim-Jam’s jailhouse visits to Mr. Atkins. Jim-Jam had been inadequately informed that every word he had spoken to or had heard from Atkins, in the jailhouse, would be recorded.

Mom had cried when she had first read that damaging email from the opposition’s office. She knew it was lawful to log, to store, and to retrieve virtually everything said in prisons’ visiting rooms. Also, copies of conversations were admissible because Atkins had no privacy rights and because Jim-Jam, who signed all of the paperwork required of prison guests, had foregone his. Maybe her child hadn’t understood what he was signing. He was, after all, a minor. Yet, if Counselor O’Neily couldn’t accept that her scientific genius of a son had acted without using his smarts, neither would a judge.

If only her team could demonstrate that Jim-Jam’s actions were not treasonous, but merely the lesser wrongdoings of a short-sighted minor, he might yet receive exoneration. Fortunately, in keeping a record of those conversations, the county jail had inadvertently provided the defense with rectifying documents. That is, although Jim-Jam’s talks with Atkins reinforced the wisdom of incarcerating the latter, and although those talks corroborated that the Jim-Jam was guilty of sheltering illegal beasts, those talks also evidenced that Jim-Jam was trying to develop a weapon that could increase the USA’s military power. If Jim-Jam were to be locked up, their country would be bereft of his invaluable insights.

With much tutoring and a figurative strip of tape over his mouth, Jim-Jam might yet excise himself from some of the looming penalties. Nationwide, there was a trend towards granting leniencies to socially responsible persons.

Jim-Jam needed leniencies. He needed to finish high school and to matriculate to college. Whereas absolute clemency was unthinkable, given his aiding and abiding of a criminal engaged in seditious acts, Jim-Jam might yet receive some portion of pardon. Maybe, the same government agencies that were indicting him could become interested in employing him.

* * *

Mom rang up a crony. Her office needed to become immediately familiar with the biochemistry studies that concluded that the brain is still growing during adolescence, in general, and that concluded it’s not fully developed at age sixteen or seventeen, more exactingly.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg