The Story of My Brain Going on a Cross-Country Ride

My brain hops out my window and onto the cold tar shingle roof, slithers out to the edge, and makes the leap into the narrow patch of green grass below.  A little too far out, and it would have been splattered on the pavement, a little shy and it would have slammed against the railing on the porch and splatter the Jehovah's witness lady knocking on my door and making the dogs bark.  It is just the distraction I need for my brain to make it's exit, on it's never-ending quest to the next railroad track, the next box car, to make it's way back and forth out and across this great land of ours.

You see, folks, my brain is a true American patriot.  It expresses it's gratitude for this great nation and sets out to live on the land and survive as far a hard day or two of labor will take him.  Some people pay him in food and clothes or maybe cigarettes, a wayward sip from a flask every now and again.  He loved the land, and could sleep anywhere out in the wilderness, away from society, and feel at home.  Is my brain a Thoreau, you ask?  Perhaps, I say, perhaps.  It is hard to judge with it's absence.  I need a brain to think and since I haven't got a brain, I can't think, you see my dilemma?

It tips back a sip of gin and looks out of the open bar car as it zooms past some manure patch grown up around the tangled remnants of an old apple orchard.  My brain hops off, too much tempted by the later, but my brain was the type who could stop and sniff a pretty flower for hours, rolling a cigarette and landscape to pass it by and let it become nothing but a fleeting memory, which was bound to happen sooner taking a splash of gin from the flash someone had traded him for an extra pair of shoes he had found in the trash out behind someone's house in some suburb.  It never occurred to him that they might have been evidence of a crime or something.

As it leaps from the side of the box car it doesn't see the approaching barbwire fence until it is too late...




I sleep like a rock the whole night.  I don't remember tossing or turning, and I woke up, my limbs taking a moment to catch up with the rest of me, and so I shake them back into cognizance again.  I stretch and get out of bed, I have sleep for three days straight.  I missed two days of work.  No one woke me up, nothing.

I get out of bed and something has changed. Something is missing and I can't quite figure it out.  I try to come up with an answer, but I look around and look around and look around and everything seems the same as it always has been and always will be.

Oh well, I say, and go downstairs and turn on the Kuerig and get the coffee out of the cup, empty out the replaceable filter and put some grounds into it.  I have my own filter to make it run on regular coffee because those damn k-cups are so expensive, and I am a coffee addict.

I turn on the television, my eyes gloss over and....

I wake up 54 years later and in some secret military hospital hooked to some machine.  Wait, no, I am some machine.  I am trapped in a machine?  I try to look and realize I can't.  I have parts and base units and means of communication but I am no longer a human being.  I am hardwired, humming, computing, alive.