Cancer Humbled Me Part 2

It is a universal truth, that no one ever has had a perfect body.  But what’s to stop us now from achieving perfection?  Science and technology everyday are bringing us closer to our ultimate goal of bodily perfection.  Botox, dietetics, plastic surgery, precision exercise methods are all bringing us near to the possible.  All we need is the leisure time and the money to have the body we’ve always wanted and the life we’ve always dreamed of.

I wish I could say that the desire to be stronger, healthier catapulted me into action.  But it was sheer vanity—a photo of myself in a backless Issa—that startled me into submission to the fitness gods.  The pointy scapulae, the scrawny arms—the message from my clattering bones was “Give this girl some kettle bells!”  So I decided to attempt a body transformation with the following specific goals: to sculpt my upper body and thighs, and to restore some toned flesh to my bony behind, all to add (or replace) curves to my pencil-straight frame.  How tough could it be?  Celebrities change their bodies all the time.  From Cameron Diaz’s chiseled biceps to Scarlett Johansson’s catsuit-ready thighs in “The Avengers,” these perfectly cut specimens make it look easy.  Maybe too easy. For those of us without live-in personal chefs and trainers to monitor our every step and bit, I couldn’t help wondering: Is such a transformation really possible?

Fantasy or Reality?  Did you know sculpting muscle can alter your silhouette?  Did you know that altering your silhouette can make you 89% more attractive to people more than 5 feet away from you and 43% more attractive to people right next to you?  Did you know that making yourself more attractive increases your chances of making best friends, finding true love, and winning the lottery?  Did you know that your silhouette can impact the trajectory of your life so severely?  People with good silhouettes live longer, work harder, make more money, and have more sexual partners.  Their lives are obviously richer, because obviously more of everything is always a good thing.

Emerson said reality was a surface and the true art of life was to skate well upon it.  But Emerson had a deep understanding of artifice, a profound shallowness.  Now imagine a world in which we believe our understanding to be profound…o wait, you don’t have to imagine.  Pick up a fashion magazine, walk down the street, see a film.  The world is more shallow than it ever has been, bedazzlingly shallow.  People are idiotic, stupid, foolish, vain, greedy, and superficial.  We bleed out so slow, having so many band-aids, everything appears tis but a flesh wound.  Plus, blood is so damn ugly, and we’ve evolved the multitasking ability to faint while standing.

In this book, I’d like to collect the most brilliant, bedazzled, impressionistic drops of wisdom ever before rained like perfumed-sulphur upon our ears.  Rilke once heard the demand to change his life echo an alien history from an archaic torso. Now the sight of naked torsos, ripped out of history or flabbed beyond meaning, flash across screens multiple times a day, begetting envy or repulsion, always instilling the assumption that our lives are fucked because our bodies are flawed.  It is amazing that ugliness seems beyond meaning to us, as if it never had a history. We must change our lives.  What is there not a cure for?  O sure, many products don’t work, but we just have to find the right one.  Make more money, work more, stress more, you’ll have to try quite a few pills before you find the right cocktail, and then all will be gravy (but remember gravy is awful for you, don’t eat it). 

There is no smell we haven’t made artificially we do not wish to eradicate from our world.  I put my fingers down my pants and finger myself before being intimate. What if my pussy smells like my pussy?  How horrid. 

The sight of a man wearing a bluetooth repulses you with its robot-flavor.  Robocop is laughed at as a ridiculous action movie.  But you get off work and train and dream of a better body, a better body and then a better boyfriend or girlfriend who has a better body than your boyfriend or girlfriend right now. You take your cocktail of vitamins.  You try to balance probiotics, antibiotics, triptans, and uppers.  It’s just a happy medium ya know?  You just gotta find the sweet spot.  The logic of your dream ends in Robocop.  You won’t admit it, for no one, including you, o wise one, ever admits the end.  The end has no surface and diving is a lost art.  But let’s not assume the bottom of the ocean has anything but shells.

Through that time of uncertainty regarding my health and future, I turned, desperate, to many resources of reassurance: the face of my ten-year old son crying, writing poetry, drugs, or a head-clearing jog.  But by far my most enjoyable moments during those trying months were spent browsing the pages of VOGUE. All of the eye-catching layouts and interesting articles shifted my mind away from the difficult reality I was facing.  VOGUE reminded me of the power and potential of the human spirit to create a beautiful world—whether through designing exquisite clothes or writing fascinating articles—and gave me hope.  As I began to focus my outlook on something wonderful instead of everything I dreaded, I watched my body heal. Today I have been cancer-free for many months, and I continue to look forward to all VOGUE has to offer.

Cancer Humbled Me

Cancer humbled me, first with its awful, white, splitting tits.  It spread them over my face and made me motorboat sounds of acceptance between them.  I went “Pppppppppppprrrrrrrrrrrrr I’m a make it alright.  Livestrong.  Ppppprrrrrr.”  Cancer humbled me that way.  I was on some kind of metaphorical knee before all kinds of things.  There are so many kinds of things one can find one’s knee sore before.  For example:  Cancer humbled me before a tree, before a lee, before a bee, before Crocodile Dundee, before Chablis, before a golf tee, before Bruce Lee, before Germany, before another’s knees, before sickened patrons of Hubee D’s, before disillusioned patrons of Weaver D’s, before the most awesome sets of titties.  But most of all cancer humbled me before me. 

Cancer humbled me into taking a time management class.  Every day is so precious, so I decided I shouldn’t waste it.  Lists were necessary.  Cancer made lists necessary-this humbled yet totally empowered me.  30 mins a day to personal hygiene, at least, and at most 1 hour (including showers, shitting, pissing, pruning, and preening).  4 hours to productive work.  2 hours to cardiovascular and toning exercise.  8 hours to sleep. 1 hour to meditate on how your to do lists have failed or succeeded in their execution.  1 hour to making more lists that are more successful.  1 hour for time management class.  1 hour for reviewing one’s to do list after class.  That left about 5 and a half hours per day in which I could call my own.  In that time, I could read the classics, contemplate great truths like dying, the value of friendship, man’s brutality to man, etc, or I could

Cancer humbled me until I couldn’t realize what was important anymore.  I was satisfied with thin gruel, water, the occasional chewy sliced ear of dried fruit from Trader Joe’s.

I wish everything would go ahead and die.  I don’t necessarily want to have to kill it myself.  Cancer humbled me into laziness.  Like the tree, cancer humbled me into the desire not to be me, to be anything but me, to be a tree, without mind, without the need to find another mind not a blank white orange rind, without the need to need to feed  or breed or have a creed, but to be ok with being treed.  Cancer humbled me, like a pack of coon dogs.  I sit outside my parents house, high up in a tree.  I’ve painted my hands black and I handle shiny dinnermint wrappers and broken mirrors, daydreaming about nothing, about glitter, about a nothing so vast and glittery I may as well be an ancient astronomer enamored with the oblivion of gazing at night-skies.  I wish everything would go ahead and die, or at least we decide on everything being deep-fried.  Cancer humbled me into liking everything deep-fried, even broccoli, nature’s little trees, even baby carrots, nature’s parrots’ knees.

Cancer humbled me into leaving that ignorant, lying piece of shit.  I got so cancer-humbled I mumbled, “I don’t like that little shit not one little bit.”  But I fumbled it, and God heard, “I done licked that riddle-shit like a riddle-tit.”  Cancer humbled God, so he didn’t give a fucking sod, and only acknowledged what I said with a sleepy nod of his humbled head.

Cancer humbled me into shutting myself in a room and reading yr novel with a shit-ton of humbled gloom. Doom gloom in my room.  I couldn’t find a broom so I swept what I wept into yr buttocks’ cleft and declared my doomgloomroom upkept & yr buttocks unkempt.

Language is so awful that my paw-full of my craw-full is plain unlawful.  I don’t give a fuck about Tuck or his rucksack of ruckus.  He can kiss my tuckus or buck us with a fuck-crack I’ll suck back and buck back until his luck backs downtown and his fuckcrack looks like a frown on which I wouldn’t go down. Fuck Tuckus!  Why won’t Tuckus fuck us? 

Cancer humbled me.  I shrink into my own head.  Around crowd thoughts of being dead.  What shall I say before dying that shall be memorable?  Shall I die lying? And not just lying down.  I mean being untruthful in a way which is rueful.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish between a science experiment and a scene in a splatter movie. To conduct some ghoulish tests on spiders, scientists constructed forests of "frankensquitos" — made from parts hacked off their mosquito compatriots.

What do you do with a 65-foot-long coffin? Undertakers in Truskavets, Ukraine, erected what they claim to be the world's largest coffin, and now run a side business you wouldn't normally associate with funeral homes: a death-themed restaurant.

And yes — death to a cardiologist means that your heart has stopped, and he can't get it to restart. But to a neurologist, it might mean something else. In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School put forth an article stating that there is a second kind of death: brain death. Even though your heart is still pumping, and you're still able to breath on a ventilator, if your brain stem is down, you're dead. This theory was made law in all 50 states in 1981, so now in the U.S. we have two kinds of death: real death (cardiopulmonary death) and what some doctors call "pretty dead," or brain death. A cell biologist, on the other hand, may have a standard more rigorous than cardiologists or neurologists. They might want to see all one's cells dead, which we call putrefaction.

We Put So Much Work Into This

Recently we wrote a song which can be performed an infinite number of ways, but which will most likely be performed only a finite number of ways.  We performed it once.  You could perform it again and again.  We have the notes.  It has lyrics, which you can sing or not sing, depends on if you like em.  And there are guitar solos you can play.  But some people don't have guitars.  You don't have to do it anyway.  It's just a skeleton, so I guess any which way, or not at all.  Here are the notes.   So can you!

“We Put So Much Work Into This”

--An Epic Song In Moveable Parts

Subtitle: “Work Will Make You Free”—inscribed above the gates of Auschwitz.

Verse 1:

I’m not saying we’re rich or anything

But we can get by as a full-time band

We did it all by the dirty dirty sweat of our hands

We put so much work into this

If we weren’t so lazy you’d almost think we did it by plan

If we weren’t so bland you wouldn’t think us half as grand

Look at me Look at me Look at me

Now don’t look at me

Cuz we’re just one man

With a kindasorta band

But lets be real girl

We’re gonna make it big

Pitchfork dug our latest jam

Dontcha think this shit’s a banger

Like the Son of Sam

Pitchfork dug our latest jam

Whole interwebsblowin up

Sayin we’re going HAM

Are you really gonna get upset by this?

We’re just performing Stardust or was that something you missed

CHORUS:

Hey plz don’t diss

We put so much work into this

Don’t be a jerk, get to work

Don’t be a snake, don’t hiss & get pissed

We’ve put so much work into this

Hey c’mon, just pretend you like this

Verse 2:

Happy Birthday. I’m sorry that I love you.

Blobs of poo and globs of goo

How’d this shit get on my new Sea-Doo?

This is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you.

We’re the smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

Parents, reddening the deckchair of the dying day,

Live inside you, stinking, forever exploding the parking-lot of love

Into yr heart’s tangle of dry grass and locked bicycles.

Okay you don’t trust me.  It just breaks my heart.

Thank God I don’t make art cuz

Can’t start a fire

Can’t start a fire

With this here art

O yrlil world’s already fell apart

Cuz u can’t start a fire

Can’t start a fire

Even now we’re just prancing in the dark

Chorus X2

Verse 3:

All flowers are here working great mmmmmmmmmmmm

Everybody is so honest hey heyhey

I wanna be a bastardized hawk

Full of chicken, full of duck sauce

Cannibals are cool

We teach em our tools and hang out in the pool

Yeah yeahYeah

Yeah yeahYeah

Drink till u wear yr faces like masks

Give yrself productive tasks

Work till u wear yr faces like masks

Prison is a rumor

Work is freedom

Love is a tumor

Sometimes u gotta cut it out

Babyboomers, petgroomers, late Bloomers

Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors

Act yr age not yr shoe size

Work is the real prize

Grow up don’t throw up

Blow up big

Get an expensive geetar rig

I’m not an idiot

You’re an idiot

Legalize armadillos

Smoke cigarillos

I hate yall. Follow me:

Tweet tweet!

Chorus x2

MF Global freestyles:

I am Cynthia Rothrock, I am Matthew Pulver
I do roundhouse kicks, I knock down buildings
I crunch numbers, I'm motherfucking Batman
I eat bagels, I know some stuff

Konami confused me as a child
The game is Double Dribble, but that's explicitly against the rules
I blame Kobe, I'm not the first woman to do so
I divorced chicken nuggets, the breakup was hard
Now I'm vegetarian, now I'm single and McLovin' it

I dabbled in witchcraft, I am not a witch
I am Christine O'Donnell, I am Ellen Degeneres
I am Rosa Parks, I am Mike Tyson
I'm a fuckin' Studebaker, I'm a brickhouse.
I invented swag
swag
swag
I am Freddy Mercury, I am Bono
I am Chaz Bono

Here's the first shot like Han of this guitar Solo

GEETAR SOLO

Verse 4:

This finger’s fat enough to be yr workforce Gretel

Gingerbread dishpit.  I’m dumb on a professional level.

We got a new kind o’ dignity dontchu know

Our dignity’s got a camel toe

If you’re not paying attention you’d think we’re just saying words

Love tumor bosses dishy totes rat turds

Most people are fucking rotten

Why were they begotten?

Why can’t they just be forgotten

They’re so ugly

And they’re not hard workers

And they totally make fun of me

Well they’ll get on their knees

When they see our bling

And how we appear at the top of Bing

Pitchfork dug our latest jam

We’re coming for you

&You’regonna come

When u see our 3.4 from Pitchfork

Pasted outside yr door

O Everett True where are you?

We wanna go to Honolulu

Work is freedom from pain & nostalgia

Work is freedom from the Lusitane& neuralgia

Institution? No I’ve never fought the Institution

We’ve put too much work into this

Not to get our restitution

Now shut down that MySpace & open up a Beebo

Load yr vid all up on Vevo

Watch my man geetar solo

Everybody sing along with us

Now here we go

CHORUS W/ Guitar Solo x2

Verse 5:

In America, prayers are ATMs.

I hope I overdraw & loans crawl thru me like scabes

For I am the Holy Ghostwriter of all Hollywood memoirs.

I love you and hope regret fills all yr days.

True Blue is so froufrou

Truest Blue frou you froyofroufrou

I’m just a small man-child

But I’m still wild

Call me Maurice Sendak

If I give ya a 10-back

Golden-rod in the moon’s venice sea

Rust auburn, blond showfolk& me

Hogtowns, cowtowns, cockcrow 2 moondown

Droogs don workboots 2 stomp on downtrod hobos

Droogs don leathervests& kick it with bolos

I stepped on a poptop& blew out my flipflop

But then I got some dip’ dots

The moon is black

Black nasty

From pink nasty

& lilac grey hoorays

Hey heyhey

I’m a deathshark, I’m a blood-eagle

I’m a fuck-hippo, I’m a shitweasel

I’m a death-shark, I’m a rabid-beagle

Fuck blood death shit hungry hungry hippos

Fuck rabid blood death hungry hungry hippos

Holiness HolinessHoliness!

CHORUSx1

VERSE 6:

You’re never too late to be aborted.

Feeling alive was your last mistake.

Abortion is the Jimmy Dean sausage in Heaven’s Waffle House.

Fuck timelessness & savaging to redeem.

In the beginning was the Word

And God sent it by text.

The word became flesh

So that text was a sext.

Laziness is a demon that haunts us all.

O wait, a demon that haunts us all

Is not a demon.

Fuck yr inexhaustible bag of literary tricks.

Love is a literary device, a manipulable bag

Of electronic monkey dicks.

Bounce bounce rain bounce.

Blastoff yall. Drink coke.

Don’t tell jokes.

Who on facebook

Still pokes?

I looked u up on my iPad

This is so damn bad

Fuck timelessness & savaging to redeem

I redeem nothing, for redemption

Is a literary device

Bitch u got lice

On the mice

Living in yr old rice

Everybody’s so nice

Like Bo Bice

I saw you I knew I was a fool.

I wasn’t even yr favorite tool.  God fuck us dead

There’s nothing to take pride in anymore.  One’s body

Always falls short, as if off a glossy high-protein bean bag.

One’s mind can’t compete

With a pair of pretty feet,

And “living” is for money

Which leaves no room for Cunny.

CHORUS x1

VERSE 7:

I want someone to beat me up.  Punch me,

Please, right in the gut, right in the butt,

Rip my nuts out and throw them into that stew they have at the Butt Hutt.

I want someone to beat me up, Kick me,

Slap yr knife out and more than nick me.

I want someone to beat me, slit me,

Whap out yr clit into my eye

Until I sigh, “Aww dang it bit me!”

I wish everything would go ahead and die.

I don’t wanna have to kill it all myself.

I wish everything would go ahead and die,

or at least we decide on everything being deep-fried. 

Cancer humbled me into liking everything deep-fried,

even broccoli, nature’s little trees,

even baby carrots, nature’s parrots’ knees.

CHORUS x2

VERSE 8:

For a tid bit

Of topshelf

Liquor

U can lick her.

Cancer humbled me into leaving that

ignorant, lying piece of shit.

 I got so cancer-humbled I mumbled,

“I don’t like that little shit not one little bit.”

 But I fumbled it, and God heard,

“I done licked that riddle-shit like a riddle-tit.” 

Cancer humbled God, so he didn’t give a fucking sod,

and only acknowledged what I said

with a sleepy nod of his humbled head.

Takin turns lickinyrrazorburns

Both of us be makin fuss

Fuss that puss I’m a make ya cuss

Fuss ya on a truss I’m a make ya cuss

When ya ride my chocolita bus

I’m a fuss that puss

Water so good I can’t no brood

Arby’s in mah mouth dat good mood food

Got some sneakers I’m a damn new tweaker

World so new I feel like doing you

True in a blue church pew.

What’s the point is the name of this joint

I anoint my point with a big fat joint

Punch ya in the pussy and scream “Aroint!”

CHORUS x2

VERSE 9:

Biscuits & gravy

Damn I be lazy

Hazy, crazy and wavy

Shit got real

Cuz I don’t like to feel

Like a deal on heels

There’s nowhere I won’t go

Like theres nothing that I won’t show

In the right mood

If you give me some tude

I’ll give you sum food

If you eat in the nude

I’ll telecommunicate like the ood

Don’t be a prude

You know, like Dr. Who

We’re all alone in this together

Like contents in a purse made of pleather

From a foreign country                 

Where cunts is the shit that grows on trees

Harvested by all the boys

Used for fun like tired ass toys

Getting all tired                 and thrown out

Because they won’t        put         out

Makin us shout                 GET A NEW ONE              

So wuddo we do              GET A NEW ONE

Yea that’s right

Got a new one

Cut it down

From a tree

Yea that’s work

Yea I sweat

Ed           it hurt

Just like real work

Its got a purp

Burr burrburr burp

Guess that means I got a beer

Looks like about now its getting real clear

Yo           this shit itsall about work

That’s the purp                 the purppurppurp

Labor                     labor                     

But not like that Aesop rock album

But just what     about it I told him

All the sweat      the sweat            the sweat sweatsweat

And the tit          the tit                    its ititit

Its all I want it my tired ass life

When I get home from my daily strife

Of talking to you

All you fools

Just like I              fucking wanted to          

When I don’t

I really don’t want anything but what I got

A place for          my fucking cock

To get wet          maybe thrice a week

If a play my cards rite and eat my wheat

Thins     its what im in

Cuz fat chicks can’t dance on a pin with my

Im an angel

The ideal of cap’s cuntdulation

Her discracion

Its what imin      a masturbatin

To           maybe her          with a kangaroo?

Now that sounds difficult             worth paying for

So what               

If its      

A fucking bore

This        is             a free economy

So its all about me meme

Meaning the me

That’s not the me

That works for shit          for he hehe

Or she sheshe

Who gives a fuck about a pee peepee

If its not on me

Or on my clock

What the fuck is it gonna do for my cock

Big Hurt’s up to bat

Did you meme to say that?

Cuz that’s what matters

Show me some tatters

                And the type     I can eat off of

Tater tots with ketchup doves

Just like I think of

When im alone                 imagining pink

And probably one for the stink

To go up in after I make it work

Get wet’ntwerk

Nuthin if it doesn’t hurt hurthurt

Cuz that’s            how       to evaluate         a worth worthworth

And make           me         a                              spurt spurtspurt

CHORUS x3

VERSE 10:

Work is what I need Work is what I need

I flagellate my mind into sexless chicken feed

Children got no work ethic

Children are so pathetic

Fiber feral ferment fever

Fast fertile ferrule flint

Macerate the logbook logic

Remancipate the lawtook pocket

FlexshirtSexdirt

My damn pecs still hurt

I don’t get on that scene without my Dramamine

As an expert in karate I chop my shit off in yr potty

As an expert in karate I exert Tecate is a dessert

Necropolis Galapagos hippopotamus

I’m a deathshark, I’m a fuckbeagle

I’m a pus-turtle, I’m a clit-weasel

I’m the dung rolled by dung beetles

I’m minimum wage

I’m underage

I’m full of rage

It’s rude 2 act my age

Holiness HolinessHoliness!

Tired of lying under a man one night

you tore off your chemise violently and got on top of me

to ride me naked.

You stuck my prick into your cunt and began to ride me

up and down.

Perhaps the horn I had was not big enough for you for

I remember that you bent down to me face and murmured tenderly

"Fuck up, love! Fuck up, love!"

Well, I wish you good night

 But first shit into your bed and make it burst.

 Sleep soundly, my love

 Into your mouth your arse you'll shove.

 Cuz, obviously, put so much work into this.

CHORUS x until we get tired of it

Chapter 1 of "My Blood Doesn't Have Muscles: Diseases of the Child"

Hello, my name is Laureen A. Kelley.  My blood doesn’t have muscles and a heart attack is from the sun.  I am the mother of Tommy, a five year old with semi-moderate semi-incestuous hemophilia.  My previous books include “Raising a Child With Hemophilia:  A Practical Pop-Up Book for Absent Parents,” an introductory gynecological textbook entitled “Fruiting Bodies and other Extraterrestrial Fungi,”  and two illustrated children’s storybooks:  “Must You Always Be a Boy?” and “Dear Lonely Hemophiliac Bachelor:  We Know Your Pet is Your Family.”  Excuse me, I just queafed venison while buttdialing.  Fuck you.  Fuck you and your happiness.  What is a heart attack?

You might not can tell from my accent, but I was born blue-faced and dead on arrival in Springfield, Massachussetts.  But the doctor spanked me back to life and ever since then on cold nights I die in my sleep and my husband, kind man that he is, spanks me back to life.  Often, on the nights I’m revived by my husband’s hand, I stare at our microwave into the wee-wee of dawning hours and cry not for the childhood sexual abuse my father’s mother inflicted upon me, but for the fact that my microwave, like my uterus, shoots rays that overcook all flesh but my own.  My husband, Kevin, is a clean-shaven process scientist for a biotechnology company.  He hates the smell of Funyuns and I suspect that last Christmas morning he beat off the pony we bought Tommy for Christmas.  My blood doesn’t have muscles.  When I buy lightbulbs, I buy General Electric Extra Soft White 60, in the 8 bulb value pack.  At our house, we go through lots of lightbulbs.  I am afraid that in the dark Tommy will bleed out and I will not see it happening and he will not notice it is happening because ever since Tommy saw American Idol on TV he has wet the bed.

Raising a child with hemophilia is hard on the stuff that non-doctors like to call “the nerves.”  As an expert in developmental psychology, international business, and the micro-economic systems of anthills and benign tumors, I am here to tell you that “the nerves” can be calmed by using a variety of methods.  1:  Pharmaceuticals.  2.  Masturbation.  3.  Alcohol.  4.  Pilates.  5.  Hugging a silent domestic animal that will not run away from you like your offspring, your parents, or your husband who has threatened, on occasion, to never spank you back into life again.  6.  Writing books for your grotesque child with a genetic disease you feel guilty about giving him. 

Like most recessive sex-linked, X chromosome disorders, haemophilia is more likely to occur in males than females. This is because females have two X chromosomes while males have only one, so the defective gene is guaranteed to manifest in any male who carries it. Because females have two X chromosomes and haemophilia is rare, the chance of a female having two defective copies of the gene is very low, so females are almost exclusively asymptomatic carriers of the disorder. Female carriers can inherit the defective gene from either their mother or father, or it may be a new mutation. Only under rare circumstances do females actually have haemophilia.  The room is dark, for a change.  I am trying to get over my fear.  Tommy’s face looks like Popeye’s fried chicken.  I am wearing my fuck mask.  Last night I dreamed I was a sea anemone stuck in the kudzu of Tommy’s face.  I want to die, with a clitoris like a belly swollen with 10,000 Arabian measled snakes.  It snowed a lot this winter, and I really enjoyed that.

Once I achieved my first menstruation I began achieving the manipulation of abstract thought in my head.  I began asking myself,  How does listening to loud noises make your head hurt?  Do germs listen to a lot of loud noises and then begin to hurt and make your organs hurt with them?  I achieved my highest levels of understanding in this stage.

Finally, another pitfall of our adult thinking is our use, and misuse, of listening tools.  I was a victim of shoddy listening tools when my son became a victim of stuttering.  After consulting with a speech therapist, my husband and I applied FOUR simple guidelines at home which provided us with the bountifullest dramatic results.  1.  When our son spoke to us, we made direct eye contact.  2.  We reduced conflicting stimulation like radio, TV, our twice weekly disco-swinger adult parties, and other interruptions in the smooth flow of daily boredom.  3.  We paraphrased, or summarized aloud, what our son said and hired a Japanese grad student to train an old Furby to do the same.  4.  We modeled a slow speech pattern based on John Wayne for our son to imitate.  We made him watch Westerns twice a day.  When he spoke too fast we stuffed dinner rolls in his mouth and yelled at him to “SLOW HIS ROLL!”  There were farts the color of orphaned tabby cats in the fear of his eyes.  Have you ever not wiped enough after a shit and not had a chance to wipe again for hours?  If you are an active person with a considerable ass, like me, it can hurt, the chafing, quite a lot.  I reflected on how often we heard Tommy tell a story or ask us questions while we were distracted by TV, the newspaper, tater chips, or each other’s naked throbbing genitalia.  With genitals, dishes, and work we barely had time to hear what he was asking, much less understand why he was asking or why Tommy had such desirable genitals.  We forget, having genitals that jiggle beyond our will, that adults can juggle like balls many tasks while listening, but children cannot.  Sometimes we dismiss our children’s questions and explanations as simple childish prattle, when their speech could provide us with the answers we need to help them enhance their knowledge and improve their ability to think, speak, and touch their genitals simultaneously like a real grown-up.  Sometimes we lack ideas on how to listen, or how to encourage our children to relay their thoughts.  My husband and I came up with a game we could play with our son to generate more brilliant effective ideas on how to get our son to relay his thoughts.  We call this game “The Slow Roll Relay.”  Every full moon we set up a series of 12 track hurdles in our carefully landscaped backyard, but not in a circle like a traditional track.  Our family doesn’t believe in circles.  Teaching children to arrive back where they’ve started is a wrong-headed approach right from the get-go.  Having a track that goes in a straight line teaches children that progress moves forward and can help children from an early age understand intuitively the real truest nature of the world and how to grow up successfully to be a success.  For Tommy, we construct the hurdles to resemble words that his stutter caused him to stumble over or avoid.  Often there is a whole phrase which we inscribe on a hurdle.  Past hurdles Tommy has now overcome thanks to our game include: “I love you Mommy,”  “I love you Daddy,”  “supercallifragillisticespialligosious,”  “I’m not crying because you touch me Mommy, I’m crying because I love you so much,”  “I will never want you to die again,”  etc.  7 days before the full moon of every month, my husband and I consult a list we have been making over the course of the previous month of the things we want Tommy to say.  We choose the top 12 things we want to hear from his mouth without a stutter the next month and we record our voices onto a CD-R repeating these phrases, slowly, intelligibly.  Five days before that month’s “Slow Roll Relay,”  we burn Tommy the CD of us, his adoring parents, repeating his upcoming speech hurdles and every night while Tommy sleeps we play the CD on repeat.  To ensure that your child listens to the CD carefully, it is best to use a Walkman.  Tie the hands carefully to the bedposts each night so as not to cause discomfort but tight enough to prevent headphone removal and allow unimpeded motherly/fatherly access to the desirable child’s genitals.

As children associate life and death with their blood, we must be careful how we explain infusions and diabetes tests with them.   Some children may think that infusions could harm them fatally, since they see a needle puncturing them, tearing through their skin, and blood—the squeezed-cranberry of their life—entering the tubing of the butterfly needle.  Though each child interviewed knew he was receiving help through infusions, we should realize that some children (the dumber, deafer, diddlier or proto-neurotic NY Jewish ones) might fear an infusion.  Let us not get too caught up at this point either speculating on what sort of children prevent and sabotage their own good through their fear.  Teen suicide, especially among children of the New Age, is a complicated matter.  It is important, sort of nevertheless, to reassure children and to explain what is happening to them during medical procedures.  For example, I have long been convinced that due to heightening levels of gross atmospheric microwave and cellular radiation, Tommy, and soon enough, most children of the ever-expanding First World will develop Morgellons disease. 

“Disease” is a vocabulary word too abstract for comprehension.  For most preschoolers, hemophilia is when you get hurt and need a needle or have to go to the hospital.  The children mention perceptual things—the bracelet, an injury, needles, bruises and bumps—to help them explain hemophilia.  Robbie replied that hemophilia was when, “You have to wear a bracelet and take factor when you get hurt.”  In this way, we can see that like “disease,” “children” is a vocabulary word too abstract for comprehension, for indeed, most “adults” and even “scientists”, when asked about HIV, Morgellons, cancer, or paranoid schizophrenia mention only perceptual things—blood cell counts, baldness, alien dermopathy, brain chemistry, serotonin uptake inhibitors—to help them explain a particular “disease.”  After introducing the heart, never believe it’s not possible you never had one, i.e. questions may focus on veins, but all but two of the children could point to his veins and could name them.

“What’s a bruise?” is a question I hear a lot.  Michael, a child (age 6) my husband found wearing bronze shoes in mysterious Baltimore, explains the bruise thus, “It’s a disease I have.  I get a bad bruise and a needle helps it.  What’s a bruise?  When somebody hurts you and punches you, you can get hurt real easily and have blood everywhere.  When you put a flashlight on your hand and you see lots of red stuff—that’s blood.  It looks like skin!  What does it look like without the flashlight? Red. It’s gushy, like rain.”

All sixteen children interviewed knew that everyone has blood, like bad breath, deep down inside and all described blood as red.  Except for two children, who were a snotty four years old each, they all correctly identified a vein on each hand and a bubble of snot popping “like popcorn” in each right nostril.  But not all children could describe blood in terms other than its color, or explain its function.  Many stammered.  Two touched their anuses inappropriately and smelt their own hand, and three children seized, foamed, and defecated an as yet unidentified teal-colored liquid of medium viscosity and high-fructose content which smelled not unlike but not like berry-flavored Slushie syrup.  Some said blood is “something,” or “stuff”, and one child, raised a Mormon in Arizona, said blood was “erotically diffuse, as if it were the flow of procreative hope, knowing no earthly bounds or moral canals of desire,” but most compared blood to another liquid, like Kool-Aid, juice, sex-thoughts, or water.

But what is a bruise but a fame upon the body, an infamously famous fame, shallow, only yet still the visible iceberg, the surface contusion of the superficial heart’s profoundly eventual fatality?  Ah, fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise to scorn delights and live laborious days.  Ah!!! Fame, fame with her sultry, goaty horn, battening our flocks of media-obsessed children with the ivory head-phallus of pop-star desires!  Is this then not a bruise upon our body politic?  This desire to be adored, worshipped, famous?  May a clear spirit exist amidst the influenza of the present day?  May the spirit be clear while all’s noses are yet clogged green with youth and snot?  For Tommy, I fear for the knife that will split his heart.

Serology is the scientific study of blood serum and other bodily fluids. In practice, the term usually refers to the diagnostic identification of antibodies in the serum^. Such antibodies are typically formed in response to an infection (against a given microorganism), against other foreign proteins (in response, for example, to a mismatched blood transfusion), or to one's own proteins (in instance autoimmune disease).

Serological tests may be performed for diagnostic purposes when an infection is suspected, in rheumatic illnesses, and in many other situations, such as checking an individual's blood type. Serology blood tests help to diagnose patients with certain immune deficiencies associated with the lack of antibodies, such as X-linked agammaglobulinea. In such cases, tests for antibodies will be consistently negative.

There are several serology techniques that can be used depending on the antibodies being studied. These include: ELISA,agglutination, precipitation, complement-fixation, and fluorescent antibodies.

Some serological tests are not limited to blood serum, but can also be performed on other bodily fluids such as semen and saliva, which have (roughly) similar properties to serum.

Serological tests may also be used forensically, generally to link a perpetrator to a piece of evidence (e.g., linking a rapist to a semen sample).

Some people ask me “What made you such an expert?”  To that I say, I was born an expert.