I'm too easily disgusted. My cringe meter is in shaky equilibrium, ready to dip into the eww zone at the slightest provocation. It's a problem. I want to be made of stronger stuff, it's rather emasculating to shriek like a girl and turn away so often. Don't show me your wound, or a ghastly picture you found on the net, or ask my opinion about this weird growth you have. The world is full of horrors, it's hard not to feel waistdeep in them at all times. Nothing exotic, I'm talking about quotidian horrors, the kind of sights, sounds, and smells other people take in stride. The sight of people eating often does it to me. Certain people, or certain foods. Sickening. Or too many people in a room all eating at once, audibly, with no conversation to mask the dreadfulness. Meat torn from the bone, saliva, down the gullet. The sound of moist devouring begins to throb in my head at deafening volume. Public restrooms. I don't mean the nastiest truckstop nightmare, even only slightly less than spic and span ones will horrify me. I've been known to hold it for hundreds of miles for this reason. And it can't be just my stall that's clean, if I can see the adjacent ones they need to be clean too. Preposterous. In sixth grade summer camp at Marlu Ridge there was a half-squashed potato bug stuck on the wall, at eye level if you were sitting down, right above the TP dispenser. I didn't shit for a week, and when I went in to pee, I looked away and counted backwards from a hundred till I was done. I had also forgotten to bring a toothbrush, so you can just imagine what a charming young fellow I was that week.

I was once rooting blind under a couch cushion for misplaced keys and came up with a not-that-small translucent piece of human skin or skinlike tissue, like someone picked at a scab and let it fall in the crack. It took me days to get over it. Toenail clippings piled neatly on a coffee table, any kind of unexpected bio-detritus makes me recoil. The smell of something revolting being cooked, it seems to linger in my clothes for hours. Horror movies are wasted on me, since I'm already horrified and disgusted by half of what I see in daily life as it is. Making me feel dread and unease is like making a stoned person laugh, it doesn't count.

I need to start inuring myself, this has gone on long enough. I want to live! My first project will be to smell egg salad without gagging.