I have a problem. For as long as I can remember, every month or so, for an hour, I spit up grayish pink wet matter. As a child I thought slivers of my tongue were coming loose; however, my tongue never got any smaller so I really didn’t know what it was. I just spit them out. My mother told me spitting was a disgusting habit and I should stop it. I couldn’t swallow them because if they were part of my tongue I thought it would be cannibalism to eat my own flesh. Or else they would just form a humongous bowel movement which would hurt like hell and probably clog up the sewer system which would make my father angry.
All went fairly well in my prepubescent years because I was able to spit the slivers out in bushes or other inconspicuous places. If a teacher caught me spitting at school, well, I was a little boy and spitting too much was just something little boys do.
The spit hit the fan, so to speak, in middle school when I started spitting in the middle of English class. Besides the girls groaning that it was gross, the teachers and principal were certain I could very well control this habit and was in fact doing it for attention. My mother took me to the doctor who, after some extensive and expensive tests, concluded my body was sloughing off an outer layer of all my internal organs which had to be expelled through the mouth about once a month. They were grayish pink because at the time they came out of my mouth and for the next few hours they were technically living tissue. He told my mother I could possibly live forever because my organs were regenerating themselves at an accelerated rate but my outside would grow old and wrinkly anyway so it didn’t make much difference.
I spent the rest of my school years carrying plastic bags into which to spit slivers of my organs. When the bag was full I would discretely toss it. This arrangement kept my odd physical affliction a secret until I fell in love and married a lovely girl with good manners learned from years of attending Baptist churches. When I told her about my problem I could tell she understood it intellectually but was having a hell of time with it emotionally and spiritually.
Eventually she would have hysterical fits every month because my baggy of formless, grayish, pinkish matter made her think she had had an abortion, or that she had had a baby and I was trying to kill it. The situation grew intolerable so we decided to divorce. The only problem was she wanted custody of my monthly emissions because she thought they were her children.
A group of fundamentalists picketed outside the courthouse during the divorce proceedings and a legislator introduced a law nicknamed “Jerry’s Kids” to keep my grayish-pink matter from being thrown out. Every commentator on Fox News called me a murderer. The crisis came to a point in the courtroom when the judge turned to my wife and said, “I think you’re nuts.” He appointed a psychiatrist who confirmed his suspicion. The judge granted the divorce and said anyway I wanted to dispose of my spit up every month was my own business. Unfortunately, the judge has received several death threats, and Bill O’Reilly called him Hitler.
Since then I regularly have to endure groups of men with “What Would Jesus Do” tattooed on their large arms who tackle me and force feed me Jello Pudding Cups because they don’t want my “kids” to starve. Ironically, I have had to be rushed to the hospital emergency room a few times because I was choking to death on the pudding cups.
I finally decided how to resolve my dilemma. A local clinic researching causes of cancer contacted me and said they thought my slivers were probably just as good as brain cells for research. At first this caused another round of public outcry for “Jerry’s Kids” from Fox News. Bill O’Reilly said I was a bastard for attempting to make millions off the tragic fate of my doomed living tissue. I signed a contract with the clinic that I would never receive any payment for my spit-up contribution. It worked. I take my monthly bag of grayish pink living tissue to the clinic and hope the doctors can find a cure for cancer. Bill O’Reilly has forgotten about “Jerry’s Kids” and has gone on to rant about someone else.
As a footnote, I would like to add that a multi-national holding company bought out the clinic and is now making billions of dollars a year by auctioning off my “kids.”
Excuse me. I have to go spit now.