flesh
Take a deep breath.
Breathe in.
And out.
And in again.
Steel yourself.
This is why you set up a secret blog...
Since adolescence I have been a hypochondriac. It's etiology could be traced back to third grade, when I came down with acute appendicitis. For over a week my condition remained undiagnosed. I laid in bed in immense pain, vomitting every few hours and when finally brought to the emergency room X-rays showed that my appendix had burst. On the X-ray, shades of gray flooded my trunk from lung to bladder, representing the swill of bacteria and pus my guts were swimming in. I was rushed into emergency surgery, only a few hours before my body went into shock.
Two surgeries and four weeks of convalescence later, I was physically fine, though I had developed an acute distrust of both my body and the world. It's machinery could fuck up at any moment, and I could not trust the outside world and its authority figures--parents, doctors, modern medecine, to fix it quickly and promptly.
At the age of twelve I became convinced I had breast cancer. No doubt influenced by an episode of 20/20 on breast cancer during which Barbara Walters interviewed a man who was suffering from breast cancer--yes, men could get it too, though it was much rarer. My tits were big with baby fat but behind it, my fingers, kneading them during my nightly self-examination, could feel harder lumps, near the rib cage.
My mother took me to the doctor, who confirmed that I was merely going through puberty and that hardenings in my male mammaries were a common, but often unnoticed part of the process.
At thirteen I became convinced I had diabetes. My frequent trips to the bathroom to urinate were the primary source of my self-diagnosis, combined with the family medical dictionary, whose crude drawings of triage and cross-sections of the human body did not cease to enthrall me. In the hospital after my appendix operation, I had become fascinated by what was happening inside my body and indulgent relatives had bought me copies of Gray's Anatomy and pop-up books of the human body and tomes on organs and chemical processes. My mother, who was rather indulgent of my hypochondria, perhaps feeling that it was better to take me to the doctor and have my worries dispelled then ignore them as if they didn't matter, indeed brought me to the doctor, who, after I explained to him my diabetic symptoms, confirmed that I had only a small bladder.
I was probably slightly disappointed. Diabetes was a manageable disease that would get me attention, special treatment. I wouldn't have to take gym class! In addition, my own powers over my body had let me down.
The only other serious case of hypochondria as a youth was the thought that I had become schizophrenic, like my father. I was seventeen or eighteen.
Freud deals little with hypochondria, subsuming it under the larger heading of Narcisism. For Freud, hypochondria derived from a profound wonder of the body and its many systems and marked a withdrawal of the libido from the outside world, repositioned on the organs and systems of the body. In its own twisted way it represents an eroticization of one's own body--internal and external.
I think I can remember the first time the fear of catching death through sex with other men caught me by the throat. I had been dating a cute, dynamic, uberintelligent boy named Montreal Jason. A week after meeting (and fucking profusely), we drove to Montreal together for a week, just for kicks, twenty-four hours, all through the night, to spend a week in a glorious city neither of us knew, fucking like rabbits and spending days and nights out in the city. Soon after our return, the mirage faded and truths emerged--he had another boyfriend, he had lied to me, etc. Soon after my glands swelled to rock-hard peas. Non-Hodkins Lymphona, surely. It was brought on through acute exposure to unrequited love. Like going outside without your jacket on.
And then it was HIV.
Since then its always been HIV.
Cum and cocks. Love them. But to get their full flavor, for them to touch you in the way you want to be touched, they've got to pass through a membrane, both literally and figuratively. At this point I'm more interested in the physical lips, the anus, the mucous membrane, the semi-permeable chains of molecules that let in some cells, keep other cells out. At a micro level, swarming at the gates--love and something dumb and blind yet personified by our culture into an insidious agent that hates gays, hates love and freedom.
There is another theory of hypochondria. Taking Freud's theory of Delusions of Persecution, in which the subject feels as though the world is out to get him, kill him. Its irrational--sinister spies on every corner, a global conspiracy to target and kill him. The delusion of persecution is the twisted doubling-back of a blunted libido--the unrequited desire becomes poisonous, turns back on the desirer. Transmitted along the lines of physical contact that pierce the body at various points (ass, mouth), the delusion of persecution becomes internalized. For someone like me, I wanted to be loved, to be held by men. And when that didn't happen, that want, a tender-nerve, turned back against me, became internalized. The men I wanted to love me didn't love me, so instead were trying to make me sick. All so that I could hate them.
Powerless as well. When the cock is in your mouth you are powerless. It has pushed its way past the membrane, it has shattered the defences. Some love the feeling. I hate it. I want to patrol my own borders, ruthless monitor the comings and goings. So a few months ago when the guy I knew to be HIV positive pushed his cock into my mouth, and I tasted the precum, and my thought was, (there is HIV in this precum), I freaked. Said I couldn't do it anymore. Walked outside into the backyard and sat naked in the cold grass. It was August first, 2005. I walked with him into the woods, deeper and deeper, the branches picking at our bare soles, barely any mosquitoes, and we walked until we couldn't see the lights of the house anymore and we stood their in the hush and heard only a distant freeway and didn't say anything and then walked back to the house.
I was fine for a while and then the panic attacks started. I would search the web for the symptoms of seroconversion. Every cough, every puffy gland in my neck was a sign, a symptom. I broke out in sweats, couldnt' concentrate at work. Three months passed and I was negative.
The rash came suddenly across my arms and torso last week. Itching in bed. Red spots up my forearms and across my sides, my thights, covering my ass, extending down to the webbing between my toes. I surfed the web and began thinking back...to the eighteen year old suburban boy and to the Monday night orgy. The eighteen year old boy had talked, post-coital, about the older men who fucked him, one of whom was HIV positive. I thought back to the orgy, and how, poppers under my nose, I had sucked that one big dick as deep into my mouth as it would go. Dude was probably a meth head. The web confirmed my timelines, gave weight to my imagined symptoms. I visited my doctor and he said he wanted to do a blood test to determine a viral loud count. The sweat broke out immediately. He was old and had a gray ponytail and he was in and out in fifteen minutes. He didn't know me. He didn't know my risk. Viral load count. Should I worry? I asked. I'll worry, he said, for you. He smiled and scooted out.
Is he worrying for me--really? Is he up late at night?
I left the doctor's office on Monday and drove to a gas station.
Bought a pack of Camel Lights.
I quit smoking about ten months ago.
I drove along the interstate, smoking and listening to Aimee Mann.
The interstate ended and I took a random off-ramp, traveled down some dark suburban streets, turned left into a cul-de-sac of McMansions. The lights were blazing in all the windows.
They were not yet occupied.
I looked through the vast expanses of living rooms, populated with golden furniture, at the black backyards.
A sign read, "No driving practice allowed."
At the end of the road I turned around and headed back onto the interstate.
Test results tomorrow afternoon.
Breathe in.
And out.
And in again.
Steel yourself.
This is why you set up a secret blog...
Since adolescence I have been a hypochondriac. It's etiology could be traced back to third grade, when I came down with acute appendicitis. For over a week my condition remained undiagnosed. I laid in bed in immense pain, vomitting every few hours and when finally brought to the emergency room X-rays showed that my appendix had burst. On the X-ray, shades of gray flooded my trunk from lung to bladder, representing the swill of bacteria and pus my guts were swimming in. I was rushed into emergency surgery, only a few hours before my body went into shock.
Two surgeries and four weeks of convalescence later, I was physically fine, though I had developed an acute distrust of both my body and the world. It's machinery could fuck up at any moment, and I could not trust the outside world and its authority figures--parents, doctors, modern medecine, to fix it quickly and promptly.
At the age of twelve I became convinced I had breast cancer. No doubt influenced by an episode of 20/20 on breast cancer during which Barbara Walters interviewed a man who was suffering from breast cancer--yes, men could get it too, though it was much rarer. My tits were big with baby fat but behind it, my fingers, kneading them during my nightly self-examination, could feel harder lumps, near the rib cage.
My mother took me to the doctor, who confirmed that I was merely going through puberty and that hardenings in my male mammaries were a common, but often unnoticed part of the process.
At thirteen I became convinced I had diabetes. My frequent trips to the bathroom to urinate were the primary source of my self-diagnosis, combined with the family medical dictionary, whose crude drawings of triage and cross-sections of the human body did not cease to enthrall me. In the hospital after my appendix operation, I had become fascinated by what was happening inside my body and indulgent relatives had bought me copies of Gray's Anatomy and pop-up books of the human body and tomes on organs and chemical processes. My mother, who was rather indulgent of my hypochondria, perhaps feeling that it was better to take me to the doctor and have my worries dispelled then ignore them as if they didn't matter, indeed brought me to the doctor, who, after I explained to him my diabetic symptoms, confirmed that I had only a small bladder.
I was probably slightly disappointed. Diabetes was a manageable disease that would get me attention, special treatment. I wouldn't have to take gym class! In addition, my own powers over my body had let me down.
The only other serious case of hypochondria as a youth was the thought that I had become schizophrenic, like my father. I was seventeen or eighteen.
Freud deals little with hypochondria, subsuming it under the larger heading of Narcisism. For Freud, hypochondria derived from a profound wonder of the body and its many systems and marked a withdrawal of the libido from the outside world, repositioned on the organs and systems of the body. In its own twisted way it represents an eroticization of one's own body--internal and external.
I think I can remember the first time the fear of catching death through sex with other men caught me by the throat. I had been dating a cute, dynamic, uberintelligent boy named Montreal Jason. A week after meeting (and fucking profusely), we drove to Montreal together for a week, just for kicks, twenty-four hours, all through the night, to spend a week in a glorious city neither of us knew, fucking like rabbits and spending days and nights out in the city. Soon after our return, the mirage faded and truths emerged--he had another boyfriend, he had lied to me, etc. Soon after my glands swelled to rock-hard peas. Non-Hodkins Lymphona, surely. It was brought on through acute exposure to unrequited love. Like going outside without your jacket on.
And then it was HIV.
Since then its always been HIV.
Cum and cocks. Love them. But to get their full flavor, for them to touch you in the way you want to be touched, they've got to pass through a membrane, both literally and figuratively. At this point I'm more interested in the physical lips, the anus, the mucous membrane, the semi-permeable chains of molecules that let in some cells, keep other cells out. At a micro level, swarming at the gates--love and something dumb and blind yet personified by our culture into an insidious agent that hates gays, hates love and freedom.
There is another theory of hypochondria. Taking Freud's theory of Delusions of Persecution, in which the subject feels as though the world is out to get him, kill him. Its irrational--sinister spies on every corner, a global conspiracy to target and kill him. The delusion of persecution is the twisted doubling-back of a blunted libido--the unrequited desire becomes poisonous, turns back on the desirer. Transmitted along the lines of physical contact that pierce the body at various points (ass, mouth), the delusion of persecution becomes internalized. For someone like me, I wanted to be loved, to be held by men. And when that didn't happen, that want, a tender-nerve, turned back against me, became internalized. The men I wanted to love me didn't love me, so instead were trying to make me sick. All so that I could hate them.
Powerless as well. When the cock is in your mouth you are powerless. It has pushed its way past the membrane, it has shattered the defences. Some love the feeling. I hate it. I want to patrol my own borders, ruthless monitor the comings and goings. So a few months ago when the guy I knew to be HIV positive pushed his cock into my mouth, and I tasted the precum, and my thought was, (there is HIV in this precum), I freaked. Said I couldn't do it anymore. Walked outside into the backyard and sat naked in the cold grass. It was August first, 2005. I walked with him into the woods, deeper and deeper, the branches picking at our bare soles, barely any mosquitoes, and we walked until we couldn't see the lights of the house anymore and we stood their in the hush and heard only a distant freeway and didn't say anything and then walked back to the house.
I was fine for a while and then the panic attacks started. I would search the web for the symptoms of seroconversion. Every cough, every puffy gland in my neck was a sign, a symptom. I broke out in sweats, couldnt' concentrate at work. Three months passed and I was negative.
The rash came suddenly across my arms and torso last week. Itching in bed. Red spots up my forearms and across my sides, my thights, covering my ass, extending down to the webbing between my toes. I surfed the web and began thinking back...to the eighteen year old suburban boy and to the Monday night orgy. The eighteen year old boy had talked, post-coital, about the older men who fucked him, one of whom was HIV positive. I thought back to the orgy, and how, poppers under my nose, I had sucked that one big dick as deep into my mouth as it would go. Dude was probably a meth head. The web confirmed my timelines, gave weight to my imagined symptoms. I visited my doctor and he said he wanted to do a blood test to determine a viral loud count. The sweat broke out immediately. He was old and had a gray ponytail and he was in and out in fifteen minutes. He didn't know me. He didn't know my risk. Viral load count. Should I worry? I asked. I'll worry, he said, for you. He smiled and scooted out.
Is he worrying for me--really? Is he up late at night?
I left the doctor's office on Monday and drove to a gas station.
Bought a pack of Camel Lights.
I quit smoking about ten months ago.
I drove along the interstate, smoking and listening to Aimee Mann.
The interstate ended and I took a random off-ramp, traveled down some dark suburban streets, turned left into a cul-de-sac of McMansions. The lights were blazing in all the windows.
They were not yet occupied.
I looked through the vast expanses of living rooms, populated with golden furniture, at the black backyards.
A sign read, "No driving practice allowed."
At the end of the road I turned around and headed back onto the interstate.
Test results tomorrow afternoon.
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