My innards are in serious pain. Currently submerged in a rickety bathing trough fill of razor-trimmed ice chips; my mood is growing dim. Being pursued for so long by such an irate fellow through a Mississippi swamp on a Mississippi night and being caught in the back by Mississippi buckshot thoroughly succeeded in dampening my otherwise pleasant day.
You’ve never been to Mississippi. You don’t know where Mississippi is so you can’t save me. But it’s all right; I’m performing makeshift repairs on my body. I’m cauterizing my missing lungs with my Zippo and I’ve wedged the lower half of a shot-glass to seal my liver. I halfway replaced my left eye with a pinball and I’ve filled in the majority of my teeth with the candycorn the kind fellow who’s interning me slips under the door every other day. The real problem I’m encountering is what to do about my lips. You see, every day they seem to unravel just a little bit more. At first, my bottom lip was just an inch or two to the left. But now my lips curl down the floor and wrap around a leg of my tub.
But the point I was trying to make, before the fellow’s banjo interrupted me, was how I plan on compensating for all this. It’s not like you’ve never been here done that. So get over that — it’s my own unique experience.
This article appears in January 27, 2010.