Them What Make the Rules and Them What Live the Dream
Channel: Tobias Langhoff
Date: 2016-03-24

Chapter Five: Them What Make the Rules and Them What Live the Dream

Track Five on the Soundtrack:
0:00 Belljar
1:15 Space
2:35 My Daughter's Organ Instructor

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of hearing that Dr. Cham was a madman. Yes, he tried to bury himself alive. Yes, he electrocuted his niece. Yes, in fact, he did dynamite a retirement home. But this was all with good cause and, in each case, I believe he took the correct course of action.

I’m sure you’d like to side with popular opinion, but you’re bound to feel some small trickle of admiration for him once he’s taken time to teach you all about Ruby’s class definitions. And moreso when you learn about mixins. And perhaps, by the end of the chapter, we can all start to look beyond the Doctor’s grievous past and stop calling him a madman.

So if you need to call him a madman, I’d start heading down to the train tracks to smash up some long fluorescent light bulbs. Get it out of your system right now, before we dig in.

But Was He Sick??

You know, he had such bad timing. He was scattered as a novelist, but his ventures into alchemy were very promising. He had an elixir of goat’s milk and sea salt that got rid of leg aches. One guy even grew an inch on a thumb he’d lost. He had an organic health smoke that smelled like foot but gave you night vision. He was working on something called Liquid Ladder, but I’ve never seen or read anything else about it. It can’t have been for climbing. Who knows.

One local newspaper actually visited Dr. Cham. Their book reviewer gave him four stars. Really. She did an article on him. Gave him a rating.

Just know that Dr. N. Harold Cham felt terrible about his niece. He felt the shock treatment would work. The polio probably would have killed her anyway, but he took the chance.

On Sept. 9, 1941, after sedating her with a dose of phenacetin in his private operating room, he attached the conducting clips to Hannah’s nose, tongue, toes, and elbows. Assisted by his apprentice, a bespeckled undergraduate named Marvin Holyoake, they sprinkled the girl with the flakes of a substance the doctor called opus magnum. A white powder gold which would carry the current and blatantly energize the girl, forcing her blood to bloom and fight and vanquish.

But how it failed, oh, and how, when the lever was tossed, she arched and kicked—and KABLAM!—and BLOY-OY-OY-KKPOY! Ringlets of hair and a wall of light, and the bell of death rang. The experiment collapsed in a dire plume of smoke and her innocence (for weeks, everyone started out with, “And she will never have the chance…”) was a great pit in the floor and in their lungs.

Artwork from why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby by why the lucky stiff. Music from The Soundtrack to why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, performed slapdash by The Thirsty Cups.

Both works were originally released under CC-BY-SA http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/