The skull face trick

Draft sections from earlier manuscript: "How to Live Life as a Robot"

If you want to open up your mind to the way of thinking about human beings that I am talking about, then here’s one trick you can do. You know how kids make “a funny face” by pulling their lips and eyelids out at odd angles? Go look in a mirror, and then, using your fingers, pull out on your lips to open your mouth as wide as possible, exposing your teeth all the way to where the teeth meet your gums and below that your jawbone. (You should be able to see the hint of your skull…) With the remaining fingers, now spread apart the top and bottom of your eyelids—not left and right, the top and bottom of your eye lids—so that you can see the curve of your eyeball and its apex and then the back part going back down to make the sphere it is, which is usually hidden from view.

With the jawbone of your skeleton hinted at in your newly strange mouth and with your bugged out eyes revealing the sockets in your skull, the normally expressive human face stops expressing humanity. You now look to yourself like a meat android on a robot skeleton; the tenderness of the mouth is gone, replaced by a grimace more reflective of the cyborg endoskeletons of the Terminator movie franchise. The face and eyes no longer convey a soul endowed with free will. If you do it right, the eyes will have no more hint of a soul in them than does—to borrow from Burroughs—a crab’s eye on the end of its stalk.