cyborgs.

ah. the enhancement of technology. the neural network of detachment. the fear of morality drives the imagination to prevent our eternal sleep. why lay down at 80 when you can run at 100? o your knees don't work? no worries. we have a pair in stock. bit by bit. you're replaced, "enhanced." 

where is the line. when your hips, knees, hearts, and eyes have all been replaced. when are you no longer? is it your fingerprints? your voice? your thoughts? where is the line of uniqueness. the specific part that can't be upgraded or replaced because it defines you? is there one?

so now i can leap a 100 feet. hold my breathe for 10 minutes. see in the dark ( i know you're devastated that those stars on your ceiling would become obsolete). my daily sustanence is a grape and quart of motor oil.  i am efficient and equipped. all happiness and opportunity at my feet. but if i limit my unhappiness. my obstacles. my hinderances. does my joy diminish? 

happiness and hinderance are correlated. i can't summit without a mountain. good is dependent on bad. in my limitations i am unique. eliminate my faults and i become merely a wave pounding the surf. 

there will be a day. when the enticement of enhancement will no longer exist. it will become a necessity for survival. and all men will become super. 

and if we were all supermen. than we would lose the man. 

 "...I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin...I'm claiming the right to be unhappy...not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphillis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."

-Aldous Huxley, 

Brave New World

erasers.

i have pencils. the tools of sanity. i remember the first one i learned to write my name with. it was yellow and triangle. apparently  egronomical. at 7 i thought that meant cool. at 20 i still do.

but its ergonomics (though duly noticed and appreciated) aren't what always strike me about pencils. its the pink nubs of power at the end of each. the freedom to write with the rubber rationale of simple and effective redos. 

we often hold this tool where words, thoughts, fears, hopes can crawl from our mouths, down our arms, slide through our pencils and drag themselves onto the paper in their dull and annoyingly smudge prone characters. but with our hearts in our hands we are never truly defenseless. never truly vulnerable. 

is that what gives us courage? the awareness of an escape if needed. does it opens our minds. does it free our fingers to pick up that splinter of aromatic nostalgia. is that my armor. my shield. my lubricant. my empowerment. not the pencil but the eraser. the awareness that regardless of my vulnerability, its never permanent. 

so i sit. with a pencil. and paper. eraser ripped in half on the floor. begging to protect. and my heart steps out. timidly. hesitant in the first letters. but those first twists and scrapes of graphite onto recycled lines. liberate. 

my respect for speech now deepens. for the truth that James emparts. 

the power of my tongue. to love or kill. without a net to stop the drop.

i step through each day. with an eraser on my pencil but only lead in my mouth. 

and its more than liberation. 

its responsibility.