Brainpower, Myopia

I wonder late at night what I'd be like if I were smart, smart the way Charlie was smart after his operation, after his transformation, after his intellectualization. I wonder how life would be different if I could experience those flashes of brilliance, mind-bending visions of puzzle pieces falling into place and memories scattering into perfectly aligned bins.

More and more, I wish I were a computer.

Parallel processing.

I lost my sunglasses today, the ones I thought looked like a pair Gackt once wore. My mother bought them for me, a smile hiding a painful checkbook back when my father was unemployed, uninspired, inconsiderate. There were hardly cheap, overpriced plastic, but I loved those sunglasses, amber and sharp and ultimately gone.

Everything you own, you end up losing.

Those sunglasses hid just enough of the world from me that I didn't care about my surroundings; they were my rose-colored lenses, tinting the world an aged yellow, a vintage brown, deadening any vivid sights so that I wouldn't have to filter them out with my brain.

But those lenses are gone, and I'm still here, burning away under ultraviolet rays and halogen bulbs and pitiful, flickering floorlamps, waiting for the race between my cellular regeneration and space-borne radiation to finish. I miss those sunglasses a dreadful lot, which is a shame, an ultimate shame.

What is yours, will always be yours.

What was never yours, will never be yours.

And now I'm wondering again what it means for my fingers to strike the keys on this keyboard; outside my realm of language, outside my perception of English, these words--like any other--are utterly meaningless and silly; every poem and verse, every sentence and phrase, every paragraph, page, story, tale--every expression or feeling or emotion I record into ASCII characters and typed text has no inherent meaning. And whatever residual meaning is left, I'm almost certain it's all borne of recycled and reprocessed knowledge, just like the rest of anything I've ever written, want to write, ever will write.

So much for a new perspective on the world; I have so much yet to understand anyone else's.