The first time I felt lightning

”They eat human flesh when they can get it” -- Norpal, speaking on the dining habits of the Quiname tribes.

Kuru, “the laughing sickness”, is a prion neural disease peculiar to cannibals. It can only be caught from eating the flesh of a kuru sufferer or via opportunistic infection through open wounds when preparing the body for consumption. Amongst individuals in the South Fore area of Papua New Guinea death from kuru killed around 1,100 people (from a population of approximately 8,000); once infected the disease is always fatal, progressing gradually from slow neurological deterioration, emotional instability and outbursts of unexplained laughter to the eventual collapse of all higher brain functions. Death occurs inevitably in three to six months.

Unfortunately kuru victims are highly regarded as a local delicacy, the post-mortem fat layer on their bodies closely resembling that of pork.

A rainy Thursday morning, that's the day that I was born. My mother suffered from severe post-natal depression, she told me she had a reoccurring compulsion to throw me in the open fire. Never talked about it though, said she was too afraid they would lock her up in some mental institute and pump her full of thorozine. But Caleb, it's a good biblical name. When I visited my grandparents I found Jack Chick tracts in my Dad's old room. I guess that explains a few things.

I don't need no supernatural explanations to know that devils and demons are real. I got a genie in a bottle baby. The taste of liquid thunder.

The first time I felt lightning my nose exploded and my face was streaming blood. The teacher didn't do much, made the other guy apologise and take me to the toilets to wash up. Remember thinking, “ah fuck this, fuck this, next time, next time I play the part of Jupiter”. Course I didn't use those words -- I was just a kid -- but that feeling stayed with me, stays and walks with me still.