Dr. Proton and Mr. Brown
in detroit the diapers collect like dew in the dumpsters, and I know my childhood is over because can I no longer stand the smell.
I am looking for Dr. Proton, alias Mr. Brown, alias world science hero on the streets where the manhole steam comes in ones and zeros.
He came in naked, screaming the sad subliminal hexadecimal that is the magnum oops of life and left just as dramatically--
like the snowglobe from Citizen Kane, I saw the magic eight ball roll out of his dead hand, down the stairs, out the door to stain the snow and piss of Detroit, reading "Answer Hazy; Try Again."
It was the end for the prophet of logic, that quintessential sin,
but it's on these streets that I'm looking for him, a geek chic bumblebee, grownup 3-D orphan boy plain of
math-nerd tone Jello-O shot
Willie-Wonka-meets-Twilight-Zone.
Dr. Proton, photon-man, a man who took his whiskey with milk.
The whiskey warmed his insides while the milk reminded him of mother-- all any woman would do for him anyway, he would say.
He would steam his tightey-whities over a teakettle for that extra-fresh feeling, and I remember thinking, if Sancho has ever needed a bandage for his master's wounds, I would have presented him these: the underroos of innocence and experience----
for it's Detroit, the crumbling motor city, number 88, the one house that looks the same as all the others, which means it's crumbling, holding on, crumbling, a brick necropolis with an iron corset, and it's here, somewhere near the toe of the body-bag of winter that Mr. Brown had his house, some would say, a laboratory, some would say,
a needle in a stack of needles.
I've set aside this day for Mr. Brown, a day in his attic, hoping to find his dust in the dust of his inventions.
A commodore 64 rigged to run off of adrenaline. A colorblind robot that's been trying to solve the rubic's cube for four years, the hamster wheel that powered it and the hampsters, still high on diet coke and reruns of All My Children.
An old russian typewriter built to run off of power based on the curvature of the earth. --"Perpetual motion is simple," I heard him say. "You just gotta use the energy that's in no danger of dying—
the earth will always revolve around the
sun;
clowns will always be scary;
converse will always be good shoes. "
Mr. Brown was like that-- he let chaos be his nervous muse.
he said, mathematicians live in a city of scaffolding, my friend.
the fraggles are always eating it,
we're always building it up again.
I heard him talk about the two equals one proof, the Archimedes spiral and the snail shell, cold fusion, universal field theory, and his plot to assassinate Mickey Mouse thinking "at least he has something to believe in. Most of us don't even have that."
I was looking for Mr. Brown upside-down in funky clown town... Detroit, land of assembly-line raisins in assembly-line suns. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, so by the law of averages, the times were fuckin' mediocre. But it was the mediocrity of kings.
Mr. Brown, you're my math car 54, where are you, man? You are one mute voice in an ocean of ears, flyin' high over the pale Euclids, flyin' high over the wiry plain on your magic carpet-sample, Wherever the fuck you are, may you lie in a bed of lost left socks, may your heaven be playing the theme from legend of zelda 2.
Mr. Brown, Nanu nanu in the most holy of holies! For ours is the kingdom of chewed-up erasers and masking tape and too much Pepsi.
The line between madness and genius has always been thin, but that never stopped you from tying your shoes with it.
You are everything the Backstreet Boys are not-- ugly, unpopular with girls, and playing beautiful music.
It occurs to me the more I talk about Dr. Proton, the farther away he gets. it's been a long and complicated equation, friends, so press enter; he time for talk is past! Now is the time for geek rock and argyle socks! [[it’s time to trickle down to the post-binary pound-for-pound insound:]] Let the number-haters hate all the want, because there are only three kinds of mathematicians--those who can count and those who can't.
It doesn't have to be all drills and headaches and playing go and wall street journal like that guy in Pi-- I'll find Mr. Brown in source code in the telco dumpsters, I'll see the cereal-soggy sun dissolve his ghost after an all-night stoned marathon of Donald in Mathmagic Land.
Bring it on! It'll be like the geek chic revolution, baby! Are you with me? Are you with me? Screech, inspector gadget, Marcy from peanuts, Velma from scooby doo, I salute you! Yahoo Serious, Young Einstein, trench coat guy from Parker Lewis, that girl from weird science, I salute you from the bottom of my pocket protector!
If you saw the way Doc would pray at this Nintendo, in the lotus position, clutching his controller like he clutched his conspiracy theory which was like he would've clutched a teddy-bear if Childhood ever was for him more than a distant city, you would know.
because knowledge is power,
and power is pressure,
and pressure is paranoia,
and paranoia is a dirty, dirty, glorious, holy disease of the imagination.
tonight I see a star in the east above a farmouse in La Mancha,
I see a candle burning over Ahab's grave that will never go out,
and I see mr. brown, bowing with the rhythm of of a rabbi in his underwear, controller in hand, Donkey Kong his sacred song, praying, playing, hoping that in the end when he falls asleep, his glasses around his chin and his drool around his glasses, he will have hit the bonus round, the fifty-third level, and flowin so far into the prime nmbers that his head burst with the echo of the final countdown: 13, 11, 7, 5, 3, 2, 1.
I see a new kind of beauty
In equations aloud,
A structural a symmetry
Mr. Brown would be proud of,
Let’s feed the computers some electric
eels,
Let’s you and me frolic in the digital fields
Let’s split the atom to put bubbles in beer,
Because tonight I’ve looked for Mr.
Brown,
And tonight I’ve found him-- here.