AMPUTATIONS

I Am a Turing Machine

I am a Turing machine, better yet, I am the simulacrum of a Turing machine, the template from which it was engineered and hammered. I predate the computer and punch cards, sleeves of flimsy cardboard into which holes and divots were mauled and driven. You can drop me on the floor, the entire decimation of me, and never once have to put me back in order, for I am always in order, I am order itself. Neither am I a systemic numerology, or an alphabetized compendium of flat, interchangeable words. I am not a thought process thought up by mathematicians or idiot savants, nor am I a calculator of equities or false judgments. I am none and neither of these. I am all of these, but in a confabulation of interlacing parts and enmeshments. I am the continuum of all of these, yet no one in itself, not a single definite one thing or the other, but all or none at all, whether I wish to be or not. I calculate and enumerate, but not with an eye to logarithms or tautologies, Aristotelian syllogisms or catchalls, but rather with an ear for stuttering and mental leaps of irritable logic. My logic, one might suggest, one faulty and ill informed, but mine nonetheless. I count and recount, hash and rehash, as a way to lessen anxieties and oedipal reutilization, not to determine which vector or diorama will best serve the needs of mankind. I have no desire or wont to ease mankind’s suffering, because for the most part, he or she or it deserves what it gets, more perhaps, and with much harsher penalties. Why do I tell you all this, all this nonsense, because if I don’t, if I withhold it, keep it hidden, I will castrate myself or flay the skin from the rectory of my ass. I will cram my mouth to bursting with cat’s-eyes and the blackest black jujubes, and suffer the consequences. I will repeat and reuse every last thought or yet to be thought I have thought in the last few minutes, and in so doing, suffer the direst consequences. I will experience such incalculable anxiety and bad humors, that even Aristotle’s proctor couldn’t redo the wronging. I am a larder: I glut the culinary of my thoughts, my emotions and worse nightmares, with nary a hope for a grocer’s fair warning or heads up. I eat hay bale size bricks of cheese, fomented and arrogated in brines and concupiscent oils, a fine and mottled urinary infection soon to follow replete with sharp pips and razor burred edgings. I will lay a harsh beating on myself, and feel none the worse for it. I will seek out further punitions and harassment’s, never once calling it a day. I will grind myself into a bloodied pulp, then look no further than the mirror for an excuse to torment and variegate my selfsameness. These are the ‘things’ and yet to be ‘things’ that I must contend with daily, without my wont or permission figuring into it. I must contend with my own contentiousness, my inability to find either a rationale or raison de ere for my self-punishing beastliness. I am, as I said before, one of Darwin’s miscreants, a sad and pathetic Lamarckian mistake. If you haven’t surmised by now, which you should have if you hadn’t been preoccupied with other less savory ‘things’, I am figment of my own imagination, a mistake in logic and reasoning. I am that which occurs when seritonin falls in arrears, seeking refuge in the arms of a less gluttonous and forgiving neurotransmitter.

Hard drugs are for the feign of heart. Free base, crack, heroin, brown or white, amphetamines, in handfuls, uppers, downers, sidewayers, injectables, skin poppers, suppositories, tinctures, landline, mainline, combustible, smokable, inhalable, digestible, indigestible, swallowable, unswallowable, eyedropperable, like Bill Burrows, crushable, uncrushable but smokable just the same, drinkable and any other way thought possible or seemingly impossible. If there is a want, there is a way. Enough said. Cloister rooms and inner sanctums, nunneries and Masonic temples, Mosques and Episcopalian sanctuaries, Buddhean sitting rooms with rice paper room dividers, crack houses and shooting-up galleries with nary a renaissance painting or bust in sight. If there is an enclosure, there is a gallery. Or a house or a temple, or a sitting room or an inner sanctum with flowerpots and drinking faucets that drool fetid water mixed with high-grade chlorine, the stuff they use in public pools to kill the bacteria and urine stench. Or a one-room rooming house room with no windows or fresh linen or breathable air. If there is a demand, there is a supply. Windows blacked out with tarpaper and old newspapers like London or Berlin or Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where no windows stood after the emasculate explosion. We still have our Auschwitz’s and Dachau’s; there just not as efficient at killing in such great numbers. Gas chambers and slag ovens, bone kilns and convex microwaves with little windows in the front to afford a decent view of one’s weeping children and murders. We have not come very far, nowhere, if the truth must be known, which it must, and will soon reach the back end of evolution, cussing our bad manners and eugenic indelicacies. We deserve what we get, and much more.