New Natural Alternative to Water-boarding!
Confessions Guaranteed!
I hate writing shit like this. I think I
hate it because it gives me a kind of guilty, if not downright perverse
pleasure in doing something and saying something that should not be placed
before the public. John Wayne… Gary Cooper… strong silent men—at least in the
two dimensions in which I knew them up there on the big screen…. Throw my
father into that mix, and all my role models are lined up to piss on me for
writing this. Let ‘em piss.
Quite simply, Stage lV cancer has presented
to me, unbidden, an all-natural alternative to water-boarding and I am eager to
share it and speak of its benefits. Lets call it
“water-boarding-for-squeamish-civilian-granola-eating-tree-huggers”… A group,
on the periphery of which, I have been seen upon occasion.
Definition thanks to our friends at Wiki:
“Water-boarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over cloth
covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the
individual to experience the sensation of drowning. I might add that the
experience of drowning is hardwired into the most primitive area of the brain,
what I call the “alligator brain”. The alligator brain has to do with survival
at its most basic and has no connection with thinking or logic or even stored
experience. It just fights for life.
For weeks now, the tumor strangling my
airway and aorta has been producing coughing fits. Recently the coughing fits
have been of such a nature as to trigger the drowning reflex in my alligator
brain, producing such panic and anxiety that I have confessed to murdering
dozens of US civilian diplomatic personnel in embassies around the world,
selling nuclear secrets to the North Koreans and snitching a Snickers bar from
Johnny’s Corner Sore when I was 11.
I have learned to water board myself almost
at will. I am finding it cathartic to confess to any and every sin, real and
imagined—a privilege I feel I have been denied my whole life by not being
Catholic. I have learned to exercise a new neural pathway that sends coughing
fit information directly to the survival center, bypassing all the medical
logic that I am NOT dying and the past the patina of optimism that we doomed
cancer victims are required to show to each and every visitor, or be accused
(though not to our faces, of course) of contributing to our own demise by being
“negative”. Confess or die! Send in your
requests, and I will confess.
