well, smaug you all very much!! (thanks for trying, J..)

it quickly became obvious that I wasn't going to get any satisfaction here, so I went directly to the horse's maw (a bit of a cross-thread just then) and just received this reply from Chris:

Mike,
First, thank you for buying the book [three dollar-bucks via Kindle], thank you for reading the book, and thank you for reading so thoroughly…
If memory serves, which it probably doesn’t, this is an instance of being frankly absurd…
It would be a version of 2 [cf. my OP], with the caveat that this was six or eight years ago and I like to think my intentions are perhaps more tangential; however, I recall discovering the word and grazing on it with some deliberation… mostly, because it is sopping with significance… obscure, but expressively clinical as well…
I happened upon a second spelling – phrenia vs. phenia… ‘phrenia’ - ‘mind’, used for the likes of ‘schizophrenia’, etc. Castro – castrate…
The suffix – phen, a rarity itself, ‘to show’, but hardly used except in the case of uncommon words, and then, applied by neologists like mad… For me, converting a word like this then into an adjective is of course obnoxious, and therefore, truly appealing…
I happened upon apophenia – finding meaning and patterns in randomness; and it as ‘apophenic’ and so, chose this…
This all sounds proper and good, but honestly, probably not an accurate formation of the process (I’m far less systematic and/or scholarly).
Hopefully this is somewhat helpful…
Chris [emPHAsis added]

-joe (what, me annoyed‽) friday