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Jim vaguely understood, in way the reptilian life-forms understand something, if "understanding" is the right word to describe this neurological phenomenon - I mean, do lizards truly understand stuff the way we understand understanding, or do they operate by some rubric of stimulus-response sevo-mechanism that has nothing to really with higher cortico-cerebral function?, that it was pretty much all his fault the way things had come down for him. Here he was in in the Ogden, Utah municipal jail, picked up for vagrancy and public urination, with no one to call with his one allotted phone call. And since this was 1845, and phones had yet to be invented, this didn't bother him, and even if it should have, it still didn't. He felt numb, his emotional novicaine wearing off, the dull ache of his mental dry-socket life throbbing with every pained memory like a root-canal performed by an idiot clown, like the guy in Waiting for Godot or the sub-IQ fence-janitor who was his cellmate when he did a stretch at a prison in Nigeria. What a purgatory-hole that was! The guards didn't have enough to eat, so they'd steal the food off your tray, and would smack you HARD on the back if your neck with a short length of solid rubber as you walked by for no good goddamn reason save for their own twisted amusement. There was this one bull, a fireplug of a man named Ngomo or Nbomo - something like that - who was especially evil.