Awakening

"After a year of association with Russell, I began to feel pulled toward a new understanding that was both troubling and invigorating. Looking back on experiences and conversations, there opened a new possibility, that he was enacting a broad deception. I started to wonder if he had in fact been feigning his character and its evolution--that the insanity was a front, that the decline and pussification was actually a coordinated and premeditated fiction. Was he all along putting on a puppet show, letting himself fall apart and undergo hideous distortions in order to deceive his target and set him up for a more grave and powerful fall? I'm still unsure, but the idea, I admit, is titillating."
--Ett. Vi., January of 2011