Tag! You're It!

So, when you reach your mid-40s, there's a lotta shit going on in, on and around your body that just disgusts the fuck out of you. I try not to look in the mirror too often but when I do, I'm usually greeted with some new bodily atrocity that causes my sphincter to clamp shut and produces an air-barf or two.

The latest heinousness was unearthed recently while innocently applying some deodorant. I lifted my right arm for a couple of swipes of the old pit-stick when I spied a little bit more flesh than I was used to. There, just to the side of my pit-muff, was a pendulous nubbin' of revolting meat-growth: a SKIN-TAG!! And this was not your run-of-the-mill skin-tag, either. It was like an albino raisin hanging by slimmest of skin-threads -- just flapping side-to-side like some horrific, mini beached armpit sea cow.

If I could've ripped my arm off then and there and stuffed it down the kitchen garbage disposal, believe me, it would have been done. But this thing was stuck to me... a hammy hanger-on adhered to me like a flesh-lamprey clinging to its oblivious, meaty host. Just thinking about it now, nestled comfortably within my cozy, hair-lined arm-crotch is making bile spray up my food-hole like some sort of doo-doo geyser.

But I wasn't going to simply sit idly by and let this thing absorb me, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style. No, I needed a plan. So, while back in Chicago recently visiting the 'rents, I posed a dinner-table question to my doctor brother...

ME: Hey, so skin tags...
DR. BROTHER: Yeah?
ME: Is there a way of getting rid of them without going to a doctor?
DR. BROTHER: Uh, sure. You can come into the office tomorrow, though and--
ME: No, I've gotta do this myself.
DR. BROTHER: Well, you can tie some dental floss or thin thread around its stalk, which will cut off the blood supply. Then it'll eventually turn black and fall off.
ME: Thanks!

First of all... let me acknowledge the utter ghastliness of the fact that this thing has a fucking "stalk." Holy fuck is that gnarly. And B, this might appear to the average reader to be sound doctorly advice if it weren't for the fact that I recall, years ago, my brother telling me about a time when he tried to snip a skin tag off of his neck with a toenail clipper and it proceeded to "bleed for, like, four days." Probably a good idea to get a second opinion but, fuck it, I need this Siamese twin gone, like, yesterday.

So, that brings us up to today. I'm reviving this long dead-and-buried blog to document the exorcism of my nubbin-y nemesis, my plumped-up parasite, my flappy flesh-knob. I'd post pictures but A, no one should have to see such evil and 2, I'm pretty sure the photos would end up on some alt.binaries.nubbinlovers site and I just couldn't live with that. Instead, I'll try to post artist renderings of each step in the process.

I'll start with a rendering of "the culprit" pre-strangulation. Warning: not for the faint-hearted.



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