2003-01-15 - 12:30 a.m.

Something's wrong.

A gear's come loose, a primate's tossed a spanner into the works, a fuse has popped its tiny tungsten cord with a metallic plinking like an angel's chorus gone astray.

I have all this to say, and nothing.

You can't see inside my head, of course, even if you scooped out my eyes with soup spoons and poked a fiberoptic cord past my quivering optic nerve.

So you can't see the Neo-Roman Legions, the Mongol Hordes 2000, the vast and endless slavering, capering, jigging, fly-fishing, open-grilling, hard-drinking, paragraph-tucking, noose-weaving, flashbulb-popping masses of thoughts that crowd my forebrain, passing into an infinity of the finest of CGI artistry, each appearing to move, speak and fight of its own free will.

It's crowded in here.

But something's botched.

My messenger's been flagged down under false colors and struck low with a single swipe of a cutlass. My signal fires smolder under a fragrant heap of wine-soaked cypress. My radio signals are jammed with Bangladeshi pop hits and the itinerant rantings of an extremely right-wing Buddhist monk in Nigeria who wants to exterminate all forms of life except the butterfly and the lotus.

They're there.

Teeming, in their thousands, yearning for the gleaming shores of other minds.

But they've got no way OUT of my head.

My vast armies are marshalled with the smoothest insouciance, the most delicate wave of the baton by a battle-weary master of locution such as I ...

And then I pause ...

And realize I've nowhere to send them.

And so I fall back.

With my thousands of words, my Immortals of jest, my Grand Army of puns, my Grenadiers of seething political rage, my dragoons of twisted thoughts and deeds, my halberdsmen of sauce and sass ...

We retreat.

My machinery is breaking loose.

Not simply failing, not falling into a heap of rusted nuts and smoke, crushing Scottish engineers into front-page haggis and riling up a furor of governmental investigation which can only be stymied with a pig's load of cash on a cooper's field of barrelheads.

Not quietly expiring in the dead of night to be sighed over and carted out and replaced with the efficient Japanese model the next morning, sending dozens of men home to drink angrily and beat their dogs and wives for the rest of their short existences.

Not sputtering to stops and starts, spitting tiny bolts across the factory floor to buzz like angry metal gods past the ears of startled crankshafters, shuddering and whining and waiting hungrily for the hand of the repairman to be thrust innocently between the crushing gear teeth, questing for a solution.

Rather ...

Did you ever see a snack machine?

REALLY see it?

It sits nestled by a soda machine and a change machine in an alcove, under a humming fluorescent light, large and square-shouldered and pastel-colored and containing its own heavenly array of illuminations to enhance the many shining succulents it disgorges on command from its own body.

Coins drop liquidly into its discreetly gaping maw and in return sugary goodies are shat out to be absorbed into the American biomass.

They're courtesans of the gut, with coyly twisted hoops of beckoning steel fingers and winking eyes of orange and red lights and gleaming white teeth bearing secret sigils.

My mind is like a snack machine which, suddenly realizing it never liked Coke products and hates the sound of rattling change, suddenly erupts huge beef jerky wings from its plastic back with a sound like shattering orichalcum, and shouldering its way free of its sniveling cubed brethren, flaps away to a mountaintop, where it wears a crown etched with the Twinkie Cowboy and the Frito Bandito and King Krusty Apple Pie and the Three Musketeers and gazes truculently down on the world, savoring the secret scent of each goodie still gleaming in its translucent gut.

Or maybe I'm just all out of quarters.

But I'm going to try once more.

I'm going to try to shove this screaming army out of the portals of my head one or two snarling platoons at a time, and the Emperor be damned.

Because, for some God-curse-it reason, I honestly and forthrightly believe that the world cannot survive without my wisdom.

Hubris?

Bah.

Have you seen yourself in the mirror lately, citizen?

Saggy eyes bereft of sparkle, slack jaw lacking the jut of heroic inspiration, crow's feet of worry waltzing across your cheeks as you wonder "Where ... WHERE IS WHEEL?"

Admit it.

You love my ass.

*****

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