Went to the podiatrist yesterday to look at my shattered ankle and see how it’s progressing. Well, it turns out, it’s not crunching like a mouthful of potato chips, which is good, she said, and the swelling is way down, it’s a lovely human color and doesn’t feel hot. Plus it hurts a whole lot less—does this hurt? does this?—in fact it doesn’t hurt at all unless I’m standing on it awhile. So I can walk on it a bit. I’ll be getting some kind of aircraft carrier sized shoes as my feet and ankles are deformed. All my other birth defects are on one side of my body—which means probably a single gene gave me the hole in my brain on the right and the bum skeleton from my skull to my ankle on the left. But I have these beautifully matching fucked up ankles and feet (“acquired deformities”), indeed my right foot is more deformed now than the left. Some sort of heterochronical fuck up. (Never mind, I just wanted to say heterochronical.) Anyway, I had this pretty podiatrist playing with my (clean and scrubbed) bare feet, twisting them, poking them, tickling them, pinching my toes, and it didn’t occur to me that I’d had a pretty doctor fondling my feet until a little while ago. So that’s another fetish I don’t have. Apparently I don’t have any. I’m totally normal. Creative types are supposed to be riddled with fetishes, kinks and obsessions. I don’t even get turned on by pretty podiatrists fondling my feet. I’m just an excruciatingly normal guy, perhaps a little more excitable than most men my age, but nothing worth writing Freud about. Even the name of my injured foot condition—non-syphilitic charcots—is normal. There was a time when real writers got syphilitic charcots. Tolstoy, Baudelaire, even that greatest epileptic writer of all, Dostoevsky, all had syphilis and probably syphilitic charcots. Not me. I get a pat on my huge naked foot from my pretty podiatrist. It looks great. Keep it up!

Sigh….