I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. ![]() Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. ![]() My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Honestly, Thalia Grace, I don’t know how to explain it any better."Dave, stop. Different manifestations of the same truth.” “I don’t get it.” I spread my hands. “But some other deity from some other culture is also the sun god?” “Exactly. We Olympians have always been used to living in close proximity to, ah…the competition.” “So you’re the sun god,” Thalia said. Each country, sometimes each city, had its own pantheon of gods. “In ancient times, this was common sense. “How could it not be possible?” I countered. Not, mind you, that gods were much better. Sometimes humans seemed as stuck in their thinking as they were in their meat-sack bodies. I was often surprised by mortals’ limited imaginations, as if the world was an either/or proposition. He mentioned the Yoruba, though I admit I know very little about their ways.” “How is that possible? Other pantheons of gods, side by side?” I shrugged. “He is from a different tradition and parentage entirely.” Thalia’s short spiky hair rippled in the wind, as if reacting to her uneasiness. He’s not even, uh…a Greek-Roman type, is he? I mean, he’s not a legacy of you guys, the Olympians.” “No,” I agreed. Seems like a good guy, but I don’t think he’s Hunter material. “Olujime was a pit fighter, an accountant, a magical warrior, and an ostrich whisperer. "Vary your adjectives," I grumbled, then continued for my audience: "We travelled west in search of another Oracle, along the way fighting many fearsome foes! The Cyclopes we brought low!” "Like the skills of Lester, most worthless of teens!" "From the Oracle of Dodona we received a prophecy - a limerick most terrible!" He looked like a hallucinating ballerina in boxer shorts, but the blemmyae politely got out of his way. Meanwhile, Leo was making his way towards the bulldozer under the guise of an interpretive dance routine, spinning and gasping and pantomiming my words. I resisted the urge to push Calypso into the flower bed. "Like the breath of Lester Papadopoulos, most worthless of teens!" Her evil stepfather had poisoned her mind!" ![]() "We secured the Grove of Dodona, an ancient Oracle, and thwarted the plans of Nero! But, alas, Meg McCaffrey fled from me. "A twelve-year-old girl! Behold her pathetic slave, Lester, most worthless of teens!" "I overcame many challenges with my companion, Meg McCaffrey!" I glared at her, but I didn't dare stop my performance again. "I arrived at Camp Half-Blood as Lester Papadopoulos!"
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