Meat suit

Been spending too much time in medical complexes, not enough time on the bus lately, gotten tardy in my posting. Strange how the whole howling world wants to focus down to a single point when the animal envelope - the meat suit I put on every morning at the end of dreamtime wandering - malfunctions.

Tomorrow I get to spend a day inside darkened rooms, dully illuminated by glowing displays of my innards, breathing and seething and going about their innardly business, charcoal-edged light glinting off shining surfaces.

Yesterday I sat in a hard plastic chair on Institutional Green carpet, not enough to hide the unspeakable stain of something liquid splashed under my feet. A woman stands behind a little podium and calls names, a ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair and her fatuous seventy-year-old daughter, "Joyce called me a pistol today. A pistol! Well, I guess I do have a sort of energy, you know, I think people are attray-acted to something like that..." I could just about hear the old woman's eyes rolling around in her head at her idiot-child, her own comments dry and and spare.

Another plastic chair in another waiting room, an hour earlier. A giant man, massive head, thick lips, Central European accent, also in a wheelchair, and dark blue hospital jammies. "Not a milyon dollarss - a milyon dollarss over twenty yearss, not like you have it all right now."

"...but it's good to have money when you need it, for healt' reasons, or whadever," his mantis wife leans forward reaching one emaciated arm out to lay a hand on her husband's knee. Sitting next to her is a young woman in scrubs, Our Daughter the Doctor, smoothing the way for Daddy in this trying time.

"But the house, beaudiful things, I have a wife who likes fine things, I work hard all my life to give her those things, it makes me happy, people come to the house, they can' believe the beaudiful things..."

Different chair, in the hall this time, earlier yet in the day, reception area renovation, plastic sheeting, dot-matrix printed signs directing patients back through a dark inner hallway, receptionist squeezed in behind her desk, edging out past patients in line to use the copier, laughter bubbling out from behind the door of the break room.

It's too quiet, everyone too submerged in their own broken-down meat suits, no-one meets your eyes, no-one talks, except to their own family, to the receptionist, the nurses, only to say help me, help me.

I'll be back on the bus soon.