It is uncomfortable to think about

I had the grossest, the most visceral awful ugh oh gross, dream last night. Really, it was a random moment in some longer dream narrative that has passed away with the morning, leaving just this moment of looking down at my leg, and the feeling that still rushes through my body as the image comes back to me... it makes me nauseous.

So I look down at my leg, the left one, on the inside-fleshy part of my left calf. And there's this giant clot of dirt, with mossy things growing on it, covering basically the whole area where my calf muscle should be. So I sort of try to clean it off, and pull on the top part, and the whole giant clod comes off in one piece... leaving behind a sort of hollowed out pit in my leg, which is sprouting with this horrible colony of flat-capped grey mushrooms. They are growing out of my leg, which is a filthy pit running with blue-grey veiny lines and stinking of fungus. My leg is suddenly estranged from me, I can feel the distrust of my own body running all up and down the nerves of the whole left side, it makes me feel sick.

even now, as I think about it again.


***
In "Mimesis and Alterity," Michael Taussig writes that to create an image of something is in some way to exert power over it - and these images, of course, include text. So I guess what I am saying is that I hope by writing this horrifying dream memory it will stop coming at me in flashes all through the day (I have checked my leg a couple times to ensure its skin and shape are intact) and that in some way I can exert my power over it.

Also, it seems pretty clear to me that this most hauntingly viscerally repulsive image is about my being out of shape. Particularly because my left calf muscle, for whatever reason, is currently the weakest link in my whole body. When I work out, the left calf will be the first thing to give out in jellylegs and drop me unexpectedly. Afterwards, it tightens up so much that my left foot gets pins and needles - not as horrible as a pit of rotting fungi, but still a sensation of estrangement from one's own body.

On that note, I'm going to go outside into the sunny day and get my poor neglected grad student body moving. I will try not to get eaten by mountain lions.