Recently I spent a couple weeks camping in central New York state with my girlfriend Lisa and our dog Bodhi. We enjoyed hot summer nights snuggling in our tent and carefree days avoiding news and politics.
The drive to New York carried us across long stretches of highway through Virginia and Pennsylvania. Instead of our usual podcasts, we listened to audio books by David Sedaris, whose compelling satiric voice was welcome company. Whiling away the miles, we became intimately acquainted with David and his quirky family. We realized affinity with him in our addiction to Duolingo, step counting, and dressing in women’s clothing (more on that soon!).
While listening to his collection Calypso, we were especially fascinated by the titular essay, in which Sedaris recounts having a lipoma (a harmless fatty growth) removed so that he could feed it to a snapping turtle.
Sedaris spends vacations with his family on Emerald Isle in North Carolina, in a beach house he and his husband Hugh own that they named the “Sea Section.” At a nearby canal, David, along with some of his neighbors, enjoys feeding junk food to a bale of snapping turtles. He ponders the odd human-kindness that inspires people to share Pop-Tarts, potato chips, dog food and marshmallows with the creatures. Feeling that the turtles deserve better, he brings them chicken gizzards. Eventually he develops a rapport with a turtle who has tumors on its head, distinguishing it from the others, and reminding Sedaris of the lipoma growing at the base of his own rib cage.
“But it’s my tumor. I made it!” ~David Sedaris
How he came up with the idea of feeding the tumor to a turtle is anybody’s guess. He is a strange little man. But once the thought occurred to him, his path was set. When he proposed the idea to his surgeon, the bemused doctor told him that federal law prohibits giving patients any tissue removed from their bodies. “But it’s my tumor. I made it," Sedaris replied. The surgeon wouldn’t budge.
(I suppose that’s why we don’t hear about the tumor fairy anymore.)
Sedaris hones his craft by touring around the world, reading his stories to large audiences. He gauges his crowds’ laughter or listlessness, and night by night tinkers with his essays until they are indefectible. It was at one such event that he mentioned his idea to feed the tumored turtle his lipoma, his surgeon’s response, and his resulting disappointment.
As fate would have it, there was a doctor who came to his book signing after the show and offered to remove it. After the event, they made a midnight journey to her clinic, where she removed the tumor, put it on dry ice, and mailed it to David’s sister. His sister kept it in the freezer until the next summer’s family vacation at the Sea Section.
Returning to the canal with slices of the lipoma, David spent several days waiting for his turtle friend. Eventually he heard from local kids that the tumored turtle had sloughed off its mortal shell. Saddened but not defeated (albeit defatted), David fed slices of the tumor to the surviving turtles, who ate it with expressionless faces.
The Human Printer
Returning to our home in Asheville, I drifted inevitably back into getting my news fix from a handful of left-leaning podcasts. My go-to’s are The Daily, Up First, The Weekly Show, Real Time, and Pod Save America. Yes, I exist in a lipoma-shaped liberal bubble.
The breaking story that greeted my return was initiated by a speech that Democratic U.S. senator Jon Ossoff (from Georgia) gave during a rally. He cleverly sparked a viral shitstorm with this comment about the president:
"He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn't want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar." ~ Jon Ossoff (about Donald Trump)
The traveling Natalie he referred to is Natalie Harp, known to associates as the “human printer.” She is President Trump’s executive aide, and travels with him everywhere. She is a conventionally attractive blond woman, half his age, who leaves him intimate notes that have, at times, “alarmed” the Secret Service.
“I never want to bring you anything but joy. I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life” ~ Excerpt from a card that Natalie Harp wrote to President Trump.
Like most other Americans, I'd never heard of Harp before the speech. Thanks to the feigned outrage coming from the Republican Party and it’s media empire, now many of us know her name. These hipocrites call Ossoff a misogynist, as if he’s implied impropriety. “Traveling with Natalie” is apparently hate speech.
In the midst of a war that was likely initiated to distract us from the Epstein files, and the president’s obvious connection to them, it is laughable that the Republicans try to defend his honor. The man who has been accused by at least 18 women of sexual misconduct. The convicted felon who paid off a porn star to keep his affair with her hidden from the public. The pussy grabber.
We don’t have any evidence that he has any sexual relations with Natalie Harp, and it doesn’t really matter. What we do know is that she prints news stories that paint him in a positive light for his consumption. Thanks to her curation, his ego grows and festers.
Trump is the turtle with tumors being fed dog food and potato chips. He comes back again and again for the junk news; his sycophantic aide giving him fatty tumors grown from her own dark longing for the proximity to power. They are his favorite snack.
The Human Photo Booth
I lived in New Orleans in 2011, and for Mardi Gras came up with an idea for a costume. The human photo booth. I modified a cardboard box to hang from my shoulders with a battery-powered printer inside. The printer could output 4x6 inch glossy photos from my Nikon point-and-shoot camera. I walked around the French Quarter offering to take photos of people in their own costumes for $5, giving them a print to take with them.
It was in this era that I also had a little kink for dressing up in women’s clothing. It wasn’t something I did in private, but it did give me a strange feeling of pleasure when I did it publicly. I was not into it enough to become a drag queen, but I was queer enough to enjoy exploring my feminine side.
It started in 2006 when I went to my first Burning Man and didn’t have any fancy costumes. The easiest thing was to borrow clothes from my female friends. Scarves and stockings and dresses. I enjoyed painting my nails, too. I kept them painted even when dressed in my native dude attire. I am more muscular and scruffy than the average woman, so I ended up looking a bit disturbing, and that was part of the thrill.
I figured that the human photo booth could identify as a woman, so I wore a dress and stockings with the costume. The photo booth had curtains in front, which most certainly matched the drapes.
The costume was somewhat successful, I made a little money and met some interesting people. I spent a special evening with some gay guys who took a liking to me. My fascination with dressing like a woman peaked that year, and by 2013 it was gone. I look back fondly at that era, but what happened in the photo booth stays in the photo booth. I don’t kiss and print.
These memories came rushing back when I heard about the human printer.
You are what you eat
Sedaris’ Calypso story stuck with me, and I rolled it around in my brain for a while. There is something unusual about it’s flavor that I like to savor.
For me, listening to the story coincided with the equally weird news cycle that revealed Trump’s unhealthy relationship with Harp. Later, as the cycle grew like fatty tissue, we learned that Harp hid in a food cart with the president during a visit to Turkey. The secret service used this movie plot device to move him from Air Force One to a decoy military plane due to a reported Iranian assassination threat, leaving reporters and people more important to national security aboard the original plane. I imagine the deluded liars, snuggled up in a food cart, feeding one another delusions.
Interestingly, the name Calypso means “she who conceals.” In Homer’s Odyssey, Calypso is the goddess who keeps the Greek hero Odysseus on her island, feeding him and using him for sex (sounds a little Homer erotic to me).
If Sedaris’ Calypso essay reveals something universal, then I wonder who the turtles represent? Who are the residents and tourists feeding them? And who is the strange man going to great lengths to feed his lipoma to them?
Maybe we're all at the canal snapping up the offerings without much thought. We return again and again to our favorite media sources to be fed biased news from tumors cut off the body politic. Our stoic turtle faces devour whatever is offered. Our hunger fuels our clicks, our tribalism, and our outrage.
The media companies and their algorithms are the residents and tourists feeding us. They are the billionaires with dark agendas and insatiable hungers of their own. We keep coming back to get more, even as it shortens our lifespans, breeds fascism and destroys our democracy.
Finally, dear reader, I am the strange man bringing you my worldview. These words, growing out of my being, delicately sliced for your convenience. A little something that stands apart from the generic chunks of content you are being fed by the usual suspects. Something more nutritious. A part of me.
It is benign. I promise.
Addendum (removendum?)
In January I will be having an actual lipoma removed from my back, at the bottom of my left shoulder blade. While it is harmless, the area around it itches a lot so I want to see if it will itch less when it is gone. I have no plans to save it. The doctors tell me I shouldn’t lift anything heavier than a turtle for two weeks, so I will be out of work. More time to write! See you around.