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

by Channie Greenberg

Table of Contents

Chapter Four: Komodo Dragons, Neodymium Flakes,
and Social Studies Teachers

Evenhandedness seemed to Jim-Jam, The-One-and-Only Ariel O’Neily, to be increasingly rare among grownups. As a result, he judged it to be important to ship select computer files to his gym teacher. That man had often declared, in front of other teens, that Jim-Jam grinned like a lunatic and folk-danced like an ape. As for waffle ball, the gym teacher had compared Jim-Jam to an alley cat with hemorrhoids.

That instructor was completely oblivious to the fact that Jim-Jam was ordinarily occupied with matters of greater consequence than with Staffordshire knots or with running for home base. That bright spark’s mind was filled, most recently, with designs for breeding insular giants, i.e. with designs for breeding the “megafauna” that are Komodo dragons. Jim-Jam meant to acquire a female that had already benefitted from superfecundation. In his mind’s eye, Jim-Jam saw it as a sane investment to purchase a pet that had previously grooved with a giant lizard of the opposite gender. He would benefit from her resulting young.

At the same time as it remained beyond Jim-Jam’s ken to divine where he was going to store a thirteen-foot long killer or where he was going to raise those members of her issue that survived hatching, such conundrums were of greater merit to him than was whether he was selected as a guard or as a forward, or asked to sit on the bench. Altogether, his tinker-tanker refuge lacked the space for even a single, full-sized, scaly predator.

Besides, Jim-Jam hadn’t yet made out how to supply that future pet and her clutch of eggs with the heat, dry air, and the monthly equivalent of a goat or a small horse (in fresh meat or in tepid carrion) that each of those beasts would require. Surely, whether or not he attempted a front handspring over the vaulting table was of lesser importance than were answers to those questions of animal husbandry.

By extension, even as Master O’Neily’s schoolmates busied themselves with the correct manner in which to strap on their bracers and with discerning among hen and index feathers so that they could win at golf archery, Jim-Jam called up, on his watch/web browser/Q-tip washer, indicators about how Komodo dragons make do, when overly hungry, with meat scavenged from human bodies that had been exhumed from graves. He also started mentally jiggling equations for the cheapest way to dry air without cooling it, since Komodo dragons prefer ambient temperatures of around 60 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

As opposed to paying attention to the physical education teacher’s instructions on how to sign up for a basketball intramural team, Jim-Jam fretted over the severity of consequences he would face if his mother or local zoning officers became conscious that he was harboring magnificent, scaly giants. He decided his best strategy would be to make his lounge of lizards a clandestine operation.

The spectacular, spectacle-wearing boy frowned. He lived in a region with four seasons. On top of that, although he had killed the social standing of Snorkel Preenberry and of the Giskin Twins, he had never committed an actual act of murder. It was one thing to mess around with his gym teacher’s email accounts. It was something else, entirely, to find enough comestibles for colossi.

* * *

Finally, the bell, which sprang Jim-Jam from Raymond Charles High School’s exercise room, rang. Jim-Jam screwed his face up tighter. Social Studies was next. For a second year, the techno teen, who could carve both mellow and bright bassoon reeds, could unlock doors with a thumbtack, and might even be able to patch a football while it was being passed among players, had been assigned to Emanuel Atkins, the man who had joined Jim-Jam with Snorkel Preenberry and who had, consequently, caused Jim-Jam’s afternoons to be filled with more anguish than experienced by European brown hares held fast in the clutches of American red foxes.

Having been forced — first by Snorkel’s mother and then by the vandals who finessed the black market with gewgaws sold by Snorkel’s father — to kiss up to young Preenberry, Jim-Jam had burst. No longer could The Prince of Suffixes, Prefixes, and Good Enough Fixes suffice with retribution consisting of fine-tuning the software that encoded Raymond Charles High School’s interscholastic sports statistics or with posting Photoshopped fictions of Snorkel’s involvement with the wrong end of a sheep, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Renren (Asia had been the source of the compromising animés, which Mr. Preenberry had sent to Snorkel). So, Jim-Jam began to create phantasmagorias of his neighbor being literally devoured by reptilian hobgoblins.

For Snorkel to get actually chomped on, though, Jim-Jam had to be able to propagate actual, deadly pets. Jim-Jam pondered establishing trade relations with the youngest members of his county’s 4H club. He could glean the pullets and piglets of theirs that failed to ribbon.

Thus, as he approached his Social Studies class’ door, Jim-Jam was chasing down algorithms that would help him decipher whether or not his future lizards ought to be able to spy upon their prey before feasting on it or straight away be given other organisms to gulp. His equations left him with inconclusive results, but good cheer. It was uplifting to contemplate, via discrete definitions, the rendering of bullies into unidentifiable pieces. Perhaps Jim-Jam ought to, as well, let his dragons taste certain myopic editors.

* * *

The underage genius wanted to publish his findings on low-dimensional molecule-based networks, which he manipulated as part of a larger project on paramagnetism. Despite the brilliance of his hypothesis and the resounding external validity of his work, the gatekeepers of Radioanalytical Chemistry in Field Mice and of Organic Nuclear Chemistry, singly, had rejected Jim-Jam’s papers. Those scientists had written back, many months after Jim-Jam had gallantly offered to share his research with their readers, that his treaties on super-strong lanthanide-based magnets, his treaties on achromatic reflecting lens, and his treaties on zero-field splitting were of no interest.

Stoutly, Jim-Jam next sent an abstract of his work on the importance of minding one’s d- and f- electrons, when keeping track of the severity of axial chromatic distortions, to the unjuried, popular, British periodical, Science Day. The scholars on that masthead, too, turned him down, choosing to devote their pages, instead, to piffling pieces on spey casting in fly fishing and on the comparative utility of biological flocs employed to work sludge. Thus, while Mr. Atkins, the Social Studies teacher, called roll, Jim-Jam was dreaming of using oversized lizards to snuff science periodical editors.

* * *

Elsewhere in the same classroom, Lynnie Lola was using her compact to behold her newly fringed orange and blue hair, and Ralph Dupas, closeted ballerino, was playing solitaire on his mini-notebook computer. Ralph’s parents had given him that contraption for passing tenth grade.

For two entire moments, Jim-Jam sat as still as a Leporid fatigued from dodging and changing directions. Thereafter, he tried to envisage the relative worth of readjusting the tape on his glasses and tried to approximate the time it would take for him to redraft the blueprint for the add-on he wished to build to his Make-It-or-Break-It-That-Will-be-Fifty-Dollars-an-Hour-to-You-Mister Workshop, but could not clear his head of his happy pictures of carnivorous reptiles taking bites out of heinous editors, haughty bullies, and bullies’ mothers. It followed that Jim-Jam missed Mr. Atkins’ remarks on the history of literary treatments in pamphlets.

Examining his fingernails in a very ungentlemanly manner and then inhaling loudly, Mr. Atkins strode to Jim-Jam’s desk. It was imperative that every one of his students understand that the contemporary mass media were evil mutations that had grown from the widely distributed, sinful leaflets of the Colonial Era and that those earliest of misshapen vehicles for ideas were blameworthy in their failure to echo greater society’s values. In Atkins’ mind, more than safeguarding the trust the populace had invested in them, those pamphlets had adversely impacted common folks’ homes and markets. O’Neily seemed completely ignorant of those exploitations.

While his teacher crept toward him, the adolescent entrepreneur cogitated over how a recent squall had furred the pine shelves above and behind his workbench with mold, had cast a sticky, grey-pink sheath on his rubber band ball and waterlogged his map of subterranean railroads. To say nothing of the datum that the spillage from that weather had rusted beyond repair his pie pan bingo set and had ruined his favorite pair of yak hair shoelaces. By the time that Jim-Jam had sluiced his junior bow and arrow set from the wreckage’s debris (he could have excelled at golf archery had he applied himself), the remains of that weapon were already infested with leaf-eating ants.

While edging to Jim-Jam, Mr. Atkins whacked Ralph upside the head and then smiled uncomfortably at Lynnie Lola. He judged the boy to be a product of social promotion and the girl to be exemplary in her unwillingness to pierce her face with common kitchen items or with objects originally devised for closing up garments.

Atkins circled Jim-Jam’s desk and raised his hand a second time. He wanted to rouse, in the class’ chief doofus, a feeling of responsibility for searching out the history and decay of civilization’s ethics. Just as he was about to wing a smartboard eraser at the child, Mr. Atkins noticed the bright advertisement on Jim-Jam’s desk.

It was possible to order, from the Pacific island of Rincah, bacon butchered from wild pigs, mozzarella made from water buffalo, and unclaimed Komodo dragon eggs. The media were once more undermining commonplace morality; Stars and Stripes breakfast was being reinvented. Mr. Atkins snatched the bright page from Jim-Jam’s writing table, chuckled excitedly, and quickly returned to the front of the classroom.

From his desk, the teacher announced an essay assignment involving the assessment of local cable stations. “A’s,” the teacher sniggered, would only be awarded to students who illuminated, objectively, all of the ills of inaccurate reporting.

Jim-Jam heard nothing. His mind stayed tuned to his clubhouse’s ruin, a loss which had also spoilt his favorite musical gadget, the one that he had constructed out of horse hair and out of B and high E acoustic guitar strings, and that he had parked next to his umbrella-computer invention. The high winds and rain had similarly reduced to nearly nothing one of his prized superparamagnets, an iconic bit of science characterized both by its unusually high concentration of ferro and by its ability to behave independently.

* * *

At lunchtime, Jim-Jam texted the professor, who was up for tenure, at Maharishi University of Management. Jim-Jam did not make an effort IMing the adjunct instructor in the Microcomputer Support Certificate Program at Montana Great Falls College of Technology as Jim-Jam needed only a single credit card number.

A few minutes before the ringing of the bell, which would admit Jim-Jam to trigonometry, an anchovy-laden pie showed up on the playground. Following the sounding of the next period’s late bell and following the disappearance from the school’s exterior of all but the most dedicated scoffers, Jim-Jam opened the pizza pie’s cardboard box and then placed that full carton beneath Mr. Atkins’ classroom window.

In what seemed like no time, a raven and a ground jay began fighting over the slices. The former dove in from its perch in a tree on the school ground’s periphery. The latter hopped over from its duties at the school cafeteria’s dumpster. Wings and beaks blurred more than cheese and sauce. That ruckus, in due order, brought Mr. Atkins to his window.

Waving his arms in a pinwheel-like fashion, the teacher shooed away both of the skyfish and then slammed shut his room’s glass barrier. The birds and a limited number of their cronies returned for more of the salty fish, the salty cheese, and the salty crust. Their calls disrupted Atkins’ lecture. More indubitably, the teacher’s directive to his tenth graders, to be quick to marry and to have many children, was repeatedly interrupted by squawks and by ripped fuzzes.

* * *

Safe in his trigonometry class, Jim-Jam O’Neily folded his Komodo dragon advertisement back into the sleeve of his Physics book. It had been a small matter to slip into Atkins’ room to siphon that paper while he was stealing Atkins’ attendance paperwork.

His equilibrium restored, Jim-Jam tried to heed his math teacher’s explanation of Euler’s formula. Although that formula lacked the parsimony of the Jacobian matrix, it sufficed in its role of demonstrating a relationship between real and imaginary variables. It sufficed, too, to confuse the majority of Jim-Jam’s classmates.

Those teens mightily exerted themselves to grasp how the exponential function of cis(x) worked when cis was operated upon by complex numbers. If asked, Jim-Jam would have referred them to the Taylor series. No one asked. He returned to his woolgathering as their instructor labored to illuminate the inferiority of real analytical functions.

Jim-Jam again thought about dastardly journal editors. There was no reason why intelligent, book-learned people should fail to twig the grandeur of his experimental techniques, unless, supposed the teen, his mind tossing around impressions of the Preenberry Family as reptile snacks, the media were, as his social science teacher had insisted, culpable.

Proceed to Chapter 5...

Copyright © 2020 by Channie Greenberg