A New Man

If the lower Americas were a person, she'd be trembling with seismic anticipation. Surely she feels, as I do, the thick, electric tension like two young lovers only just now seeing eachother across the room. Today, I am empowered and invigorated. Today has defined a new man, eager to be thrust into the tender embrace of new lands. I am now under the guidance of a new passion from deep within the guts of me... there is a reason they call it wanderlust!

What brought this on? Today, the doctors began filling my body with holes. They tell me the outside world is savage and brutal. Your mere presence within it forces your body to eat its very self from the inside in a hundred different ways. Their solution to this problem is to fill it with glue. Oh yes, they have all kinds of "medical" names for it, but I know they're gluing all my parts to eachother so that when the spider monkeys or latin women tear great furrows into my flesh, all my organs remain more or less where they were. Besides, if it were something other than glue, they wouldn't need to put so much of it in me.

Today I bear a fresh hole in each arm, and in a week or so, I get another 5 or 6. For those of you who don't know me, this is a big deal. Since I was a wee lil' Tyler, one of my most defining weakness has been the absolute terror I have of needles. I HATE them. I haven't in fact been to a doctor in most of a decade due, in part, to this very weakness. Last time they took blood, I passed out (and they didn't take that much). The time before that, my mother and two nurses had to hold me down.

Today, I tried so hard to be a man and hold my tongue, but in the end I had to quietly share my shameful weakness with the doctor... and the nurse... and another nurse who didn't have anything to do with me... and the two receptionists, a couple of patients in the waiting room, several people in the parking lot... I thought about calling the new Pope, maybe he could get me out of this,... but I dunno, I don't think I'm his kinda guy... y'know, politics and stuff.

Well anyway, I got two shots and with them, a much bigger swallow of humility. I mean, they're like nothing. Literally nothing! I even had to tell the nurse afterward: "You know, there probably isn't one waking minute of my life where I haven't done something more discomforting to myself than what you just did to me." To be honest, the charge I got out of having a pretty woman touching my naked arm far outweighed the other thing she did to that arm.

Of course, the human condition is to always have something to fret about, and today the good Lord provided. Once I got over my needle phobia, I started thinking money. These shots are so minor and small, why do they cost so much? I'll probably end up dropping 300 dollars before I'm done. That's at least a week in Argentina. Here's the real kicker... I have health insurance! My company and I have been paying two hundred and change every month for years now, and I've incurred no (and by no I mean absolutely zero) expenses for them to pay out. And now, the first time I have a health concern, they inform me that it doesn't happen to be one of their concerns.

Hey, I don't need to bitch, my life is beautiful and wonderful in every way. I just figured I'd find out if anyone else feels like someones screwing them too. And they didn't even buy me dinner first! In fact, I bought dinner!