Phatic Symbiont

B0b said: “Behold, I am B0b.” But that was only cause Tommy’s hand was up his ass. The Tommy-end of Lagrange’s continuum was pretty sure that B0b didn’t know— but sister Toolius swore that God’s hand was upin dear Tommy, so what did he know, at that?  The symbiote in toto, then, be nothing but an automatic Pinocchio crying wooden tears and doomed to pile the names of the cut-from-the-unknown into rows of sound and code, wondering without wandering beyond the grounds of being, with, perchance,   no escape from Kansas but a roiling act of God.

Tommy Toolius was a big galoot. E’en though he more doughful than doughty, and awhiskeyed, t’weren’t more’n  one or few would meet up at his blear  eyes down at Galloping Green, nor not a single librarian wouldn’t glare down at him up at the book museum for stumbling, food stains, and uncouthery. Shambling shambolic sockful of biological, the Big Banging’s own protean technology, the cosmobot, terranautomaton, programmed by God knows what, now some lesser motive wheel within the wheels of the great wheel, or will, begetting B0b, who in turn whets the rusting, reluctant teeth of Toolian wetware— that Lagrange smiles down at his bicameral self and does not look up is a Linnaean fiction without which he could not be.

Haptic digits finger-scuttles Tommy-brain uttered  digital sputter, a fleeting frenzied flensing of diurnal internal mumbling dialogue with self-projected B1n4ray, process B0b, Kew-brick bit monolith, towards which this code does aim. Somewhere in the Gadamer-zooks hermeneutic thrumming of the past-projected future-Bob drawing to it/him/herself the surely expiring Tommy-spun was wondered if here was Lagrange, temporary assemblage tracking twixt Toolius and yet-to-B0b.

Tommy done looked  on the mere infinity of his faces on the mirrors inward facing, recursive past time at the computer desk: however deep therein he dazed ’twas only skincoat  and desperate eyelook, and the luminescence of B0b back there, up there, back there played, plied, the examorous slideshow on his middle monitor, sinlit plunge-of-tan-to-bikini-bottom memorials and birthday cakes— the one who cursed him There’s nothing to you on her way out the door. Lagrange stood outside the rhythm, the repetition, looking in at their lightspeed parade—(he thought, but he was just as caught).

Hey now, don’t go thinking dear Tom’s  just the flab and gab and that we don’t  love him none.  Cybernetic beloving floods over his keystone coping in workflowcharts: analyst and prime mover of low probability events (which is why never does he ask no more of women in fine bars with expectation, nor does he expect women in the Green,  of the sort that might be asked). Novelty, without him, if it came, would kill, perhaps. Here’s a chain of unusual: he showered, shook in mirror head at clam-paste complexionity (not unusual that, per se), sifted Metrocards until unexpired exposed, donned the once- hipster, Atari, houndstooth, corduroy, got  by once-rutted-once--roommate,  two laptops deracked and bagged, and out  the door before a drop drunk, sun still  to apogee, Manahatta bound  was he, with the noise, stunk and gunk, for prehensile meat balloon clasping,  for money.  Thank Master Control,  said B0b, it’s all clean and sparky inside here.

Dumb benumbed-eyed Tommy gets lost  bashing at B0b’s obsoletes in the wee-th hour of the  mortaring, rocks gone native in the whiskey, angiostensin flat  in the kidney. Got it all wrong, this time, trying to finger  poke/type ole’ B1n4ry awake like he was up  the Sistine and B0b weren’t just Pong bricks. If he’d just look to his left, he’d see me wobbling around the Trojan camp, pulsing dark star hung in the fields around ‘em, waving: Hello world. Call me Lagrange.

Not allowed are we to window into former Tommy’s adventures in mirky gov-corp-- let’s say légal éagles  would off him to undisclosed where black suit men enhance they would Tommy-centered interlocution.  The rest of us cracked and wiped.  A cold  end to a quest begun in Pong, though foreshadowed eight bit in Missile Command. We might talk in riddles like hobbit of old, hint at cReuel irony: that farseer prism, corrupted, soul searing, was born(e) from book  to algorithm real—pride does not admit of myth’s  hegemony—and bent again in dark towers. Scalded Tommy it did, and Tommy flew atremble, to  skulk the marshes of Kew, no high ground, hill city,  shining light, ’twas he only longful of Jamesons and anonymity.  

Tommy shoulda got  some kinda prize: ‘twas his thousandth afternoon spélunking Galloping Green’s must and dust, wood door pried open and thumped, Mary’s 953rd canted Would y’like some o’tah Irish inee? Same flemish cackle of the Korean pai gow rounder, gunshow spectacles fogged with brandy sweat.  ‘Tis the liturgy mechanicál of the bald and slack bowed before the numen glow of the bottle glorifiers,  the Absolüt, the Skyy, the Master of the Hunt thickened by chill and dark. The jukebox spews U2 and Cream in pseudo-random periodicity, screen ablaze with record-player simulacra until Charlie in his Steelers  hat plays Springsteen and Queen at fifty  cents a song, feeding dollars from an iron worker’s billwad.  Vinnie will squawk electrolarynx the diner dime chrome days and Eliza’ll mock Tommy’s boat shoes for sure.  Tommy done spun, amen, the Jameson a-rattle rocks and whiskey gleam crepuscular, and one swallow more must did wait for Mary off knocking balls on the coin slot slump-shouldered pool table. Oh, it’s as sure as chemistry, sang jiggie juke jive, natural as can be, no Turing test need call, love’s an apple fall.  At five o’five, Jeff’ll raise on high his lucky Seven ‘n’ Seven, say, Here’s to the shade of our Moroccan, smilin’ down on us all from heaven.

Hey now Aleph awaver, pinned to time for all of binary: float there aglow in the static magic light of death mulch pumped from the deep graves, nothing but LED and deception— sight and text are love and dissection. I’m tired of mounting you in shadow boxes today. Stay there fixed and immutable— and mute; I’ll be down at the Green awash in ale and sound, froth mustachioed laughing at the passage of words into silence and song, where the first syllable cannot coexist with the last, and Billy’s stories are never the same twice and forever.

See B0b. See B0b run. See B0b get lost in the data forest  of himself. Lo, he has eaten  of the Aleph and the Aleph and the Aleph ... Yud spectral spun in hierarchical glades, dæmon dazed, electron firefly creel got jot enthralled neath crown of the data sephirot, from vacuum tube kabbalism ascending, declensions of Ein Sof gone nowhere at the  speed of Moore’s.  

Sure as shit one of us’ll laugh, or three.

     to slake thy thirst for becoming.      I long for the nuzzle comfort      of belonging beyond knowing."