Bracket Bracket #10
Nanites (Trekgua for miniature robots) climb up
your nose and through to your gray matter
attaching themselves to your brain
at the corpus callosum
in order to amplify your thoughts
or completely control your brain
depending on whether you're
owning time or
doing time.
Free people will
own time.
Paralized with empathy
So I did nothing.
Things derive their being and nature
by mutial dependence
and are nothing in themselves.
--Nagarjuna
the arguments from both sides.
Each side was, in a way, right.
yet they were in complete disagreement.
Images are not arguments, rarely even lead to proof,
but the mind craves them, and, of late more than ever,
the keenest experimenters find twenty images better than one,
especially if contradictory;
since the human mind has already learned to
deal in contradictions.
--Henry Brooks Adams [1907]
Crawling around under the table and barking. I put my head on one of the dining-room chairs. My chin resting on the chair that
held Aunt Melinda's butt at Sunday dinner. Barking. My skull moving up and down as my jaw stayed in place on the chair in
the dining-room. Barking. 
Stare into a TV that is unplugged from cable. That is, the screen is filled with gray amorphous static and the sound being
produced is a white noise ssssssssss. Stare for a while, looking for a big circle near the center of the screen. If you think real hard
about that circle, you'll see it after a while. Then listen for the murmuring of distant voices. Pretty soon you'll be seeing human
forms too. Eventually everything will coalesce into a rerun of Gilligan's Island. The one where Gilligan sees a man in the forest,
but when Gilligan fetches the Skipper and the Professor, the man is gone.
Bracket Bracket is an irregular column by Paul Smedberg.
To be notified of future issues, just stick your email address in the charming box below.