The Blob

A properly overdetermined metaphor begins at home. On Election Day, in the early afternoon, I went to a doctor’s office in midtown Manhattan so that a doctor could cut something useless off my chest. It was a cyst, a benign shtoinker I’ve worn around for more than a decade, and if I may be immodest for a moment you could definitely tell that the doctor and her assistant were excited to see how hideous it was once they got it out of me. It was not imminently dangerous, just a protuberant lump above my heart that I’d become accustomed to. Removing what the doctor called “your blob” would take about 45 minutes, she told me, and would be fairly easy for her. It would surely have been easier and faster if I’d addressed its presence at any time prior to that, because it would have been smaller. But I had other stuff going on, and I had gotten used to it. Again, this is a metaphor, and also it is not.

During the procedure, which wound up taking about half an hour, the doctor mentioned that she found this part of her job “so relaxing.” We had talked about the Knicks championship run for much of the time that she was very carefully and very precisely cutting this stupid thing off my body. The surgeon told me that she liked how little Jalen Brunson was, and how clever; she also liked that he and his former Villanova teammates really seemed to enjoy each other. I remember saying that Brunson “has been a winner everywhere he’s played” at a moment when she cut into an insufficiently numbed patch of my chest; the ensuing jolt of pain arrived as instant punishment for having said something so trite, and she said “oh did you feel that?” A milder version of this should happen to me every time I almost mention Ryan Arcidiacono in a conversation with someone who doesn’t already know who he is.

They injected more lidocaine and carried on carving. I could no longer feel any of it; we were talking about administrative bloat at hospitals and universities by this point. I could, I guess, feel the thing coming loose, and coming off. I could feel her cutting and tugging it out and then was aware of the idle friction—what would a boot feel when you lace it up?—of being stitched back together. But I could only feel it as a sort of painless jostle and pressure; it was my body that this was happening to, but as far as my nervous system was concerned it was not really my problem at that moment. I saw the blob before I left, sitting impertinently on a fluffy pillow of bloodied gauze, a hideous soft-boiled quail egg wearing a rude little patch of my stubbled skin like a jaunty hat.