Yes. That H. Splintons. The one who argues with the pizza driver about his “delivery radius,” sucks a radioactive-green smoothie through a sippy-cup straw, and calls a busy night at the Pentagon a “Level-Three Pepperoni Surge.” The cartoon is on the cover. He leans into it. It’s good camouflage.
But he signs off on the containment testing. Nuclear-grade, when he wants to be. His actual job is keeping track of the most dangerous inventory in the country — and his actual notebook, the one he keeps misplacing, is immaculate. Every pin a public record. Every number sourced.
He does not guard it. That’s the maddening part. He sets it down and wanders off, and some stranger ends up holding the whole map of the nation’s spent fuel:
- On the bar at Moze recovered · sticky
- Back seat of a taxi driver called it in
- A park bench next to the donuts
- An abandoned cart at the grocery store he went back for it
Somebody always finds it. Somebody always opens it. And that, honestly, is the point of putting it here: this page is the notebook, left on the bench on purpose. Go ahead and open it.
Because it makes you hold two things at once. You look at the notebook — careful, sourced, dead serious. Then you look back at the man in the mustard tie doing a bit about democracy and pizza. Then back at his title. And you go huh.
That reflex — keeping the bumbling ear and the nuclear-grade mind in your head at the same time, refusing to collapse one into the other — is a named discipline around here. The Jenkins Method Library calls it Contradiction Holding. H. Splintons is the demonstration you didn’t ask for. The joke is real and the work is real, and you don’t get to pick just one.