Sometimes my head is just a tube. A cylinder. Like a giant cigarette rising out of my shirt collar. Eyeless but with tufts of hair sprouting from my flat top, like dandelion weeds about to burst. Weeds, so impotent that they will never amount to anything, other than tufts, pretending to be something they will never be. Like thoughts, never able to be actions. Thoughts begging to be fertilized and watered so they can grow into mortality. But they never will. Consciousness, sentience, awareness of self and place, purpose. Little things poking outward, upward from the space where a brain should be. Why upward, in defiance of gravity? Why not sideways? Like life. I am aware. I perceive and respond to sensations. But am I alive or am I just a tube head, self-centered and benign with flippant thoughts? A petulant pretender. A short form of reality. Like you.

I regard the brain as a computer, which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark – Stephen Hawking