Somehow some way there had to be a solution to this somewhere that someone knew. And yet the kind of problems weighing on Hal’s mind didn’t even make sense to him, so if he couldn’t explain his own predicament to himself what chance did he have laying it all out for anyone else to help with?

Simple, he wouldn’t. He’d just deal with it himself as he did with everything else and get the same… dubious results. Sometimes he proved to be his own greatest ally and other times his worst enemy, and it all essentially came down to a coin flip which way it would go.

Confused yet? He asked his imagined audience of readers or listeners in the ongoing drama that was his existence, punched up in his own mind to make things even a little interesting to the party concerned, himself.