My 6th Cousin 4x Removed

Oh, New Englanders. Is there anyone you aren’t going to prove me eventually related to?

In this case…

So, that makes a guy who sold his soul to the devil, the bad guys in The Crucible, and the most infamous ax murderer in American history.

I Have to Join a Cult Before They’ll Mutilate Me

My trip to the doctor this morning was fine, except for the whole “you’re fat” part. I got to hear about the wonders of Weight Watchers and I got told that she wouldn’t recommend me for lap band surgery until I had tried on my own to lose weight.

It was as if you thought you were in the same car with someone going in the same direction and all of a sudden, the car splits in two and she is going down a road you are not on.

I feel like I totally failed to advocate for myself, but I’m sure the look of dawning horror on my face as she described chipperly how she’d be happy to let them mutilate me once I’d shown, through my adherence to the cult of Weight Watchers, that I was trying. God, that trying nonsense.

I’m a bad fatty, because I don’t even fucking bother to try. But you know why? Because no trying is enough. Eat “right.” Exercise. Eat less. Exercise more. Eat less than that. Exercise more than that. Join this program where they take your money. Join that program where they take your money. Make it your second job to lose weight. Let them cut you open in a “minor” way and mutilate your insides. Let them cut you open in a major way and mutilate your insides. Turn your whole body into a source of constant deprivation and suffering.

And for what?

All the health problems I had, I had when I was a “normal” weight. They just remained undiagnosed because they’re conditions fat people have. Well, now I’m fat.  The heart issues that are lurking, are coming down both sides of my family tree like a slow moving lightning strike aimed straight at me at some point.

So, basically, I should get thinner so I look right.

I fucking hate it.

I hate it so much.

That we can sit there and she can, in her chipper voice, talk about what I’d have to do to prove that I deserve to be mutilated.

Like it never occurs to her that I don’t want to be mutilated at all. I don’t want to join a cult to get to deserve that.

I just want to feel okay in my own body and not like I don’t deserve to exist as I am.

The Polk Building

Oh, I forgot I was saving up this weirdness from the Southern Festival of Books to tell you at Halloween time! And now it’s time.

Okay, so I’m reading and I finish and I’m kind of standing there, talking to people and signing a book, when a woman comes up to me and asks me if I know about that building right there–and she points to the Polk Building–and how it’s haunted.

No, I do not.

Well, she tells me, while it was being constructed, a man fell down the elevator shaft and died. And that dude apparently had some opinions in the afterlife and there was a period where it was a very regular occurrence that the elevator would arrive at your floor before you called for it and that assholes in the building would find themselves trapped in and shook around in the elevator for no reason.

She said that, eventually, it got so bad that they had to redo the elevators, which resulted in them no longer shaking assholes. However, apparently, there are still times when the elevator will open to let you in before you have called for it.

Creepy!

Nashvillians, can you confirm?