Have I mentioned that for a brief time as a child I suffered from a peculiar anxiety about where the outside of me ends and the inside of me begins? To this day I've not heard of anyone else ever having such concerns. I was always prone to obsessive thoughts, and this one did a number on me for a while.

Now, without getting too terribly graphic, let me say right off that one particular orifice wasn't, as far as I can remember, troubling. We're talking mostly about the head holes here. I would sit and work myself into a state about my mouth, ears, nose, perhaps a little about regions south, just to spice things up. I would force myself to have these odd visual fantasies, like a PBS science special where they swoop into the body with one of those fiber optic cameras, the POV of a cold virus, say, shooting into the nasal passages and then into the dank interior of Me. Or the eyes, revealed in a most emphatic manner as nothing but bulbous extensions of the brain, dangling gruesomely on the ends of the optic nerves, exposed to the air. My brain, right there for anyone to touch!

Maybe it was that Visible Man toy I was given as a kid, that could've been the culprit. Or Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch, a Saturday afternoon movie staple. In any case, the anxiety-causing issue was the false dichotomy, you could say, between what we consider inside vs. what we call outside. It's just convention, I realized to my horror. An analogy would be a house: if you're standing by the front door, you're close to the outside but still clearly inside. Fine. But what if you're, say, in the garage or mudroom? The body necessarily has these transitional zones, and it's these that gave me worry. To this day, certain visuals that play with this idea can give me the creeps, like that moment at the end of Terminator 2: Judgment Day when the T1000 has been thrown into that vat of molten metal, and he's writhing around in his metallic state, and turns inside out, starting from his mouth.

See? Just talking about it made me feel better!