Technical Difficulties

The other night I woke up in a panic because I thought I might be a robot. Right when my head hit the pillow it slipped immediately into a dream in which Godzilla was splashing around in the waters of an island beach. The island had a volcano and as Godzilla approached it you could see the rim at the top was also a giant donut. He climbed to the top and then jumped in, disappearing into the darkness. As soon as he was gone, the inside of my head became a completely blank screen, all white except an error message blaring across it: “SYSTEM FAILURE”.

Afterwards, I stared at the ceiling and thought back on other moments where I had technical malfunctions that left me waxing philosophical on the possibility of being inorganic. Your standard Phillip K. Dick/Rene Descartes questioning. Is he the man who thinks he is a machine or the machine who thinks he is a man? Or is he the man thinking about being a man thinking about being a machine while the machine smokes a cigarette outside in the street?

Once in high school I was awoken in the middle of the night by a sudden, incredibly loud and jarring “POP!” on the inside of my head. It had a similar effect on me as the error message did, except more dramatically. I actually sat up in bed, my head hurting, smelling smoke, feeling exactly like a fuse had blown.

Then there was the time when I got into an argument with some idiot at a party. I was mid-sentence when I suddenly my voice got stuck in a loop repeating the same words for 15 minutes: “stupid plaid shorts stupid plaid shorts stupid plaid shorts stupid plaid shorts…”

And the time I fell off my skateboard and instead of my usual deep red blood coming out of my body a phosphorous silver liquid came out.

And the time I got really drunk and threw up electrical wires.

And the time I sneezed and motor oil came out of my nose.

Or the time when I got an erection and it made a spring noise: “BOING!”

Or when that mad genius took control of my thoughts and made me rob a bank, narrowly escaping the police by riding rocket-powered roller-skates.

Or one of my earliest memories, wherein my parents had me strapped to a table and my father was making some kind of adjustment to the inside of my chest with a crescent wrench, sparks flying around the welder’s goggles he was wearing, electricity dancing along the wall of scientific devices that decorated my nursery.

Hello I Love You

I just want to tell you how wonderful it is to see you, how terrific you look, how amazing you smell, how the sight of you reading these words fills me with a warm goo that can only be described as L-O-V-E. What is that fragrance? Did you roll in a soft bed of flower petals before you left the house? Did you buy the adrenal gland of a pixie from a wandering gypsy shaman and squeeze its juices onto your wrists after you got out of the shower? It brings a tear to my eye. Not just the thought of a pixie dying in the forest without an adrenal glad, but the enchanting heart-shaped smell bubbles that are rising off your body, popping around my eyes.

And what is that you are wearing? It reminds me of a documentary I saw on PBS once. It started off showing an unbelievably fashionable and sexy outfit like the one you are wearing right now and worked backwards to show its origins. It showed how it was shipped across the Pacific by a band of rascally sea dogs who drank rum and sang all day and never seemed to steer the ship, only let the kind winds blow them in the right direction. Then it showed where the clothes were made: a commune of wizened women, well fed and treated like queens, sewing the days away, given jugs of wine and tea cookies laced with ecstasy. Look how sharp you look in it! Have you been working out?

The sight of your eyes sliding delicately across these sentences is nothing short of enchantment. What a dreamy moment this is.

How lovely it is to see you.

Now go away.