Postaday for January 27th: Embrace the Ick. Think of something that truly repulses you. Hold that thought until your skin squirms. Now, write a glowing puff piece about its amazing merits.
Well, no, I’m not going to do this one. I’m not going to respond to this prompt. The first thing that came to mind was some kind of worm thing I saw on a brief video. Some sort of deep-sea worm, although it was being held in a person’s hand, so I don’t know how it was still even alive. It squirmed around a bit, you know, the way big fat pink worms with pointy orange heads do, sightless and shiny. And then it seemed to spit out this white fluid that spread and branched like fast-growing roots, instantly coating the hand of the person holding the worm,.
There’s no way I’m going to “hold that thought until my skin squirms.” That’s not happening today. Do you even know how the brain works? We see things, and they enter short-term memory. Later, they enter long-term memory by way of dreaming. That’s what dreams are: cognitive interpretations of our brains’ making novel connections between recent sensory input and already stored memory. That novelty is our organization and retrieval system. For all I know my brain will arbitrarily associate this spit-worm’s branching proboscis fluid with, I don’t know, a bike ride through Stanley park, and every time I think about Canada, I’ll get queasy. No thank you.
That’s all I need, having a dream in a few days where I’m sitting in front of my computer, pounding out my 32nd blog post in five days, fingers numb until they elongate, branch out to cover all of the keys, and then intertwine with them while I try to describe the four-person bike I road though North Vancouver on a warm day in 2005. The shade-dappled asphalt, the smell of the sea and garlic fries from the kiosk where we stopped for a snack, that fat worm wriggling around with one pink end wrapped around the guy’s ring finger and the other end slowly opening at the end of a brief reverse-peristalsis shudder and a phlegmy ejaculate groping, reaching for prey.
To think that the same evolution, over 2 billion years, led to my brain and its ability to see, absorb, memorize and use a thousand different disparate facts a day, led as well as this deep-see worm’s ability to see, sense, pursue and capture microscopic plankton to sustain itself for the sake of survival and reproduction. It’s incredible. It’s disgusting. I want no part of it. Count me out.
Nor will I write about spiders, the smell of freshly cut mangoes, the Republican party, or a crazy person’s toenail collection. Not going to happen.