Every night, while watching whatever with Mrs. Blue, I pick skin off of the pad of my big toe and/or finger tips until there is barely a yellowed layer left. 7 out of 10 times I bleed, and go to the bathroom for a band-aid. Dress the wound to the sound of Mrs. Blue's perfunctory "Babe!" while the Great British Baking Show echoes through the screen door, letting any passers by know that we are Normal People participating in Normal Nightly Brain-Rot, with a couple'a cats to boot.

I've learned to hop on one foot to the bathroom once the bleeding starts, lest I be chastised for the thousandth time for leaving candle-drip stains along the carpet. I have tasted my own blood so many times it has come to be as Ritual as the daily gulp of dill pickle juice. Its flavor is so familiar that I often wonder whether a stranger's gore would shock the palette, or instill the notion that we are all truly One under the sun? I have no interest in drinking anyone else's blood to find out. Makes me think of AIDS or rabies or The Craft. Fairuza Balk's monster mouth. 

I've picked my toes for as long as I can remember. Switching to vaping, and now toying with lowering the nicotine content, has exacerbated the shit out of it. I have to watch out if I wear open-toed shoes in public. If waiting at the DMV, I'm sure to absentmindedly repulse like the basement dweller I could and should have become. Don't bleed on people, people. Don't leave a mess to be mopped.

All this is to say that I need to grow up. I'm 35 and almost married. I tried reading something that well-adjusted, principled, well-meaning people read (The Argonauts) and threw it across the room. I spent $16 on it at a Parnassus Books! Am I supposed to care as much as Nelson does about the cultural and ethical repercussions of every instinct-based decision I make? To be a walking mirror? Is that how the good people live? The wisened ones? It must be exhausting (though I am a cis white male so take all this in brackets and apocryphalia and blarney. Consider me Divine, eating shit).

Sometimes I tear a particularly long piece of calloused big toe skin off with my teeth. It is very satisfying to masticate and swallow.