Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

I managed to keep up my habits performing cut-rate abortions in subway toilets.

(Latah is a condition occurring in Southeast Asia. Otherwise sane, Latahs compulsively imitate every motion once their attention is attracted by snapping the fingers or calling sharply. A form of compulsive involuntary hypnosis. They sometimes injure themselves trying to imitate the motions of several people at once.)

‘And what do you conclude from that?’ ‘Conclude? Nothing whatever. Just a passing observation.’

A functioning police state needs no police.

I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants – a body – after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is only the colorless no smell of death.…

(A simopath – the technical name for this disorder escapes me – is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army, and discharge cures it.)

You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them?

Homosexuality is a political crime in a matriarchy. No society tolerates overt rejection of its basic tenets.

Junk is a pain-killer, it also kills the pain and pleasure implicit in awareness.