Who will help me avoid my meat suit?

—Dana Levin, “The Waters of Lethe”

I remember watching my baby cousin run on the beach. Her belly was pouched out proud, her mouth open like a faucet, she could’ve swallowed the ocean whole!

It was like she didn’t even have a body yet. No meat suit. Just her life, on a pair of chubby little legs.

Meanwhile, here I am. Here I am! Wrestling with my meat suit, the same one I’ve been trying to shed my whole life.

//

Right now, I’m writing from my daybed. My sickbed. Luckily, I do all my best work horizontal. (I had spine surgery 5 long years ago, but I’m still lying here for one reason or another.)

It’s not that I want to get rid of my body. I just wish mine were better, easier, lighter, prettier, etc. I just don’t have time to take care of it. All its never-ending needs. Its.

Body’s pronouns: it/its? I should give it a name. Griselda comes to mind.

Yes, here’s Griselda on a stretcher, waiting resurrection… (again)

//

You’re not allowed to attend your own surgery. I mean, you’re there, but you’re not really there, if you know what I mean. I realized this when I woke up from the operation feeling violated, asking to see the piece of my spine they removed.

My spine, I’ve decided, is called Jean-Luc. “What did you do to Jean-Luc?” I cry out!

I didn’t get to witness the breach of my body, but I still see myself birds eye view most of the time. Splayed out like a dissection frog.

Before I lost consciousness, I remember seeing medical students. Taking notes on my opening. “Hmm, yes, fascinating case, mmm, yes,” they might’ve been murmuring, had my case been fascinating.

After the procedure, the surgeon held out a wad of tissues with a bit of yellow goop inside. “You wanted to see?” Was that… a piece of Jean-Luc? He threw it out before I could get a good look.

Oh no! A chunk of my meat suit!

I am told that, at this point, what I really need are “lifestyle adjustments.” “Your body is trying to tell you that this isn’t working,” doctors say. Well, I just don’t have time for that. Can’t I take another pill instead?

Griselda is very high maintenance and I’m sick of it.

“Pain is part of life,” says Dr A.

“Pain is just bread,” says Jean-Luc from the trash can.

//

Wise people say that no feeling is inherently “good” or “bad.” This is hard to remember when you are shitting out of your butt, crying out of your eyes, throwing up out of your mouth (sometimes all three at the same time).

Griselda! That is quite enough out of you.

“Don’t worry, dear, it’ll get better,” says Dr B. “Or, maybe, you’ll get used to it.”

//

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and my hands look like gloves, looming in the bathroom mirror. I’m always ruining everything by trying on someone else’s face (anyone else’s face!) but I can’t help it. Griselda just doesn’t suit me.

What I’d like, is a medical miracle. Is that so much to ask for?

Will lobotomies ever come back around?

//

The doctor’s office waiting room is purgatory. A liminal space of plastic chairs and LED overhead lighting.

I’m always bored in the waiting room. Mostly to cover up for how hard I’m waiting. Because I’m waiting SO HARD. For somebody to come save me. To fix my meat suit once and for all.

“You know, you could wake up healed tomorrow,” said Dr C.

A shrug. “Or not.”

There is a gnawing comfort in this waiting.

Before my operation, I heard a woman next to me praying. From behind a blue paper curtain, she said something about “thank you.”

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Your funny bone is the one in your elbow (allegedly).

But is it? Is it really?

The idea of a “funny bone” is not funny to me at all. I think it’s a childish saying for childish people who think that bones can be funny. I don’t think bones are entirely un-funny but I don’t think they are necessarily funny either.

Hitting your funny bone is not funny. It’s unpleasant. It’s funny, in the way that something strange is “funny.”
Like “why is that man looking at me all funny?”

I don’t know if my elbow bones even WANT to be funny!

I do. Want to be funny.

I am happiest when I am being funny and other people are laughing and other people are also being funny so I am also laughing too.

I broke my elbow in Kindergarten. I was playing on the monkey bars in the playground and a bunch of other kids were waiting behind me. I was being slow because I was scared that I was going to fall. The kids behind me were losing their minds. Someone pushed me, I fell, and then, all of a sudden, I was alone and my arm was bent in the wrong direction. Bent in a way that an arm was not supposed to bend. Bent funny, in other words.

I remember a waifish child named Nathaniel nervously looking down at me.“Should I get the teacher?” (Nathaniel was my first crush)

There’s a picture of me in the hospital bed with a stuffed chihuahua.
I look small and sickly like a bruised Victorian orphan swathed in white hospital linens. Waiting to regain the use of my own arm.

I remember the wallpaper in the hospital had animals on it. I was all loopy on drugs, so they looked like they were squirming on the ceiling.

I’ve always secretly loved being sick. Being forced to rest. To surrender! (Is that why I’ve been sick so much?)

The scar on my left elbow is a straight line with two small dots next to it (where, allegedly, a giant medical safety pin was attached).

Now, it feels like there’s an extra little bone in my elbow. A small, triangular lump. I don’t know what that’s from. Funny how bones just show up sometimes.

Comedy comes from the unexpected (allegedly).

Which proves that we are all such sheeple! Always expecting certain things to be a certain way all the time and the crazy thing is, we’re usually right! It’s the same shit over and over and over until a surprise.

A little delight, a mistake, a wonder really.

Recently I’ve been practicing something called “Say It” where I say things that I want to say even though part of me thinks they may be inappropriate in terms of being not funny but also not interesting.

Like at a party recently, I was talking to a very handsome guy (who has a girlfriend so don’t even worry about that) and we were standing by a shoe rack and I said “wouldn’t it be funny if we just scrambled all the shoes up?” but it wasn’t funny, it was just weird, and not at all the tone of our conversation. So he looked at me in this way that I hope means that he was charmed by me (he has a girlfriend) but also like he was confused by me and maybe didn’t totally know what to do with me (he has a girlfriend). I liked it. But it was also a little bit lonely.

I was always trying to make people laugh when I was a kid. A magician’s mustache, a cardboard penis, a horse made of sticks. My mom laughs generously. My dad laughs silently.

“You want to be like your father? Your father is fucking boring!” —Philippe Gaulier, 2026.

My father is not boring, but he is very repressed. He lives with enormous pain in his spine and legs. But if you say something about shit or poop or farts, then he WILL laugh.

Ultimately, I am only writing all this because I don’t really have a crush on anyone. If I really had a crush on someone, I would be scared of scaring them away.

She has a blog? I don’t want to fuck a girl with a blog! (This is not a blog)

But then again, I am lonely a lot.

I think that’s why I like making people laugh.
Because it’s loud.

Drawings and photos are my own (except for the stock image of an elbow, that one is from the internet).

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The body does not begin or end anywhere.

So what comes out first? Usually the head. But sometimes it’s the feet.

In my case, it was my whole body at once. I was extracted from my mother’s stomach via C-section (in other words, I never passed between my mother’s legs). The C is short for Cesarean, which brings to mind Julius Caesar and, therefore, a bloody coup d’état (which is what one might call the number I did to my mom).

In order to take me out, they emptied my mother’s insides into metal bowls next to her hospital cot. An assortment of dishes like an innards buffet. There was a sheet held up to prevent her from watching the doctors cut into her body. I can imagine her lying there, like a scooped-out melon, wanting to pull back the white curtain hiding the puppet show of her insides.

She says she didn’t feel anything.

My mother still has a scar on her abdomen; a shadow of her six-inch open mouth wound.

In school, they say that nothing comes from nothing. All matter is recycled. And, yet, a tiny baby appears like a magic trick. All of a sudden, there it is!

When I give birth, I want to feel everything. A water birth would be nice.

I lived on a dairy farm in France for a time. There was a man who came by every couple of weeks in a small truck, which held an enormous glass vat of milky liquid (which I eventually learned was bull semen). He would choose the most eligible cow in the barn and smooth her back for a few minutes. Then, he inserted a tube-like syringe, attached to the vat, into the cow.

Cows lie down when they are ready to give birth (I learned this from the time I spent living on a dairy farm in French). I witnessed one birth. I remember the mother cow was moaning and writhing on the hay.

The farmer reached his hand into her, fished around, until he felt a small hoof. He pulled out the hoof, then another, and tied a thick rope around the two legs. As the cow mewled and blew her hot air onto my hand, he pulled on the rope with all his weight. The sounds of the cow were not altogether different than what I’d imagine a human would make.

After a few minutes, a small slimy baby cow began to emerge. The baby was completely wet, fur slicked down. Her eyes were all blurry and closed. The farmer untied the rope around the baby’s legs and helped untangle her limbs. After a few minutes, the baby stumbled to her knuckled feet. The momma cow had already gotten up, shaking her head and swatting her tail at flies.

The farmer explained that it was crucial for the momma cow to recognize her baby as her own in the first few minutes after birth. If she doesn’t claim her baby, she might try to kill it.

We watched as the momma cow looked at the baby, promptly turned around and shat on the baby’s head. The baby cow happily scampered around with a hat of cow shit on her head.

Many things have been extracted from me—teeth (wisdom and other), stitches, wooden splinters, hairs, blood, etc.

One time, a small piece of my spine was extracted as part of a surgical procedure. They also removed part of the spinal disc behind that vertebra. I asked the surgeon to keep the bits so that I could see what I looked like inside. He showed me a yellow mucus inside a tissue, before quickly throwing it away.

I once gave birth to a small metal object.

I had an IUD inserted some months before, but the doctors made some pretty serious miscalculations about my anatomy and did not complete the procedure correctly.

Nobody suspected anything was wrong. After a couple months, I began experiencing severe cramps and pains that, I later found out, pushed out the foreign object from my uterus.

The doctor held it up for me; it was no bigger than a small plum with a long tail.

Drawings and photos are my own.

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