I’m not going to apologize if I end up sounding like a child.

Or sad.

Both are probable, I reckon. And anyway: This website — this thick slab of granite and rubble, this thing – is a never-ending public conversation with myself. I only ever write anything because I feel compelled to do so. Otherwise I’d pop like a latex glove filled with jellybeans, no kidding. What I mean is, I’m not writing for anyone. I’m not even writing for myself.

I am simply talking to myself.

So, if it helps to satisfy your aggression and disbelief, you (that is, me, Ryan Litton, the person typing this) can liken this sprawling labyrinth of garbage to a homeless person having an argument with himself at the bus stop.

It may help!

Look: For first, I will discuss a wound on my arm. It was not an accident. I paid good money for this wound.

It cost me twenty-five U.S. dollars, don’t you know. That’s the going rate for wounds this nice.

I think I’ll look at it now.

Still marvelous! Still an exceptional wound. Though it grows smaller and smaller all the while. I think that soon it won’t be a wound anymore. It will be fleshy pink skin, brand new. I absolutely cannot wait.

I eat between two and three apples a day, so my immune system is a force to meddle with, no kidding. A wound on my body doesn’t stand a chance. Which is why I’m sad to see this little one go. So long, little one. So long forever.

This thing sprang up on my arm around July. I’m not sure what it was. I had thought, at one time, that it was a stubborn bug bite. There were three more like it, all up and down this right arm of mine. I love my right arm. I’d give my left arm to keep it. Hah!

Really: I love my right arm.

The other three red dots vanished and became small little pink fleshy marks, brand new. They looked terrific. I was happy to have new skin, it didn’t even bother me that it was pink for a while. (If it were up to me, I’d be pink all over.)

So, this other son of a bitch stuck around for months and months. It would begin to heal, wither, look angry, swear at me, insult my mother (and my cooking!), and then begin to heal again. This process went on for a good long while. Occasionally we’d bicker, and sometimes it looked unsightly (to me! — I could care fuck all about anything other than my own opinions (hah!!)), but I didn’t mind my new roommate so much. It was a parasitic relationship and sometimes I felt used, but we got along all right.

Later, I flew to Texas. I wrote about this adventure in an obscene number of words and sentences. I met a terrific human being there, and he asked me, “Have you had that thing checked out?” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “You might think about doing that.”

“I might,” said I.

Two weeks ago, I thought about the mark on my arm again. It looked downright ferocious. It glared at me and bubbled over with liquids I hadn’t realized I could create.

I called some skin doctors. Their receptionists told me, “We won’t have openings until January.”

Well!

“I want this thing off my arm!” I told them. They told me simply, “January, January.”

One woman asked me, eventually, “Would you like to be put on the wait-list for cancellations?”

God damn, woman! Yes, of course!

Two days later, I saw a skin doctor. He was a nice man.

He was tall and kooky and zany and clownish. He wasn’t scary at all. He said soft little sentences with big flashy smiles. He adjusted his glasses and straightened his tie.

He said, “Let’s have a look at this thing on your arm.”

Fifteen seconds later, he sliced it off of my arm.

Ten seconds earlier, he placed a small needle in a patch of skin he wished to lob off. He asked me if that bothered me. I shook my head, told him I was a pro.

A dime-size chunk of dermis and blood and gore was lobbed off of my favorite appendage. The spot where it had once lived bubbled over with pain-dulling syrup. It turned yellow and foamed like a wild dog.

He held a razor blade up to my face. He seemed downright delighted, said, “Here it is!”

Had my arm been in a non-bubbling, friendly mood, I would have clapped for him. I would have sang him songs.

I knew about as much of this guy as I ever would, knew he would have bowed and done a back-flip for me.

Instead, he smiled a big flashy smile and dunked that fleshy hunk in a little bottle of effervescent science. He huffed like a cartoon buffalo and wiped his brow with a free claw, said his work was done. Here is where I would have clapped, too.

“If it’s all the same to you,” he said, smacking his rubber gloves together like hot sexy sex, “I’m going to send this off to the lab for a biopsy.”

“But,” he scrunched his nose up like an accordion, “I think it’s safe to say that this little ol’ thing didn’t do you any harm.”

He shook my hand and commended me on my field of studies. “I have a daughter in Boston who is just like you.” I sincerely doubted that she was a black-bitter, friendless old mule like me, but I smiled a real smile and shook his massive hands. He gave me a half-squeeze palm-pump and winked so powerfully that I expected nearby birds to drop from the sky from the shock waves. I half-wished for him to put a lollipop in my pocket and pat me on the head. He didn’t. He zipped out of the room on wiry legs, off to save the day for someone else.

A nurse with a permanent frown applied some sort of greasy gel to the moon crater on the most important part of my body. “Keep it greasy,” she said. I didn’t understand what that meant. I didn’t want to do that, anyway. I decided I wouldn’t. A small, circular bandage was placed on top of the wound I’d paid top dollar for.

Since then, I have eaten approximately thirty apples. The healing is even and beautiful.

And–

Let me just say something, because I’m both frightened and delighted at the truth in this:

The healing of a wound is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened on this planet. It is really, truly the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.

A scab quickly forms over a massive, gaping wound, effectively creating a tarp-like surface. It’s not permanent, but it “tents” the wound until the new skin has formed beneath it. Hot damn!

It reminds me, a little, of the way polite construction workers go about their business. In Japan, a construction site is blocked from public view, and covered in paintings and plastic banners that say nice little things. When the construction is done, the paintings and the plastic banners go. We don’t need them anymore; we can look at the completed building.

They do this in Baltimore too, but the ambiance is usually blistered by the fact that you are guaranteed to have a construction worker burp in your face if you’re within one-hundred-yards of the site.

So, thirty apples later, and it’s not so much a wound anymore. It’s really quite a pleasant little thing.

Which is all very exciting in itself, but of course, there is context we must adhere to!

* *

The context is this: I am gut-quakingly soupy-silly, right now.

I am melted plastic.

I made the mistake recently, of allowing my brain one second of free range.

It went wild.

Before I knew what was going on, I was listening to a video on YouTube that may as well have stapled me to a graham cracker and held me over a fire. The sound of the thing literally choked me.

I have written about Legend of Mana before. There was this guy that I used to care about a lot, and we played Legend of Mana all the time.

He blew his brains out last Thanksgiving over something that was frankly very stupid. I miss him a lot.

His over-powered, purple-hatted hero is still saved on my memory card. I last loaded it the day before Thanksgiving, last year. It felt wrong to play it alone. It felt like being electrocuted.

The other person related to Legend of Mana is alive, but– I don’t know. That guy is somewhere else, now. He’ll be somewhere else for the rest of his life.

I got Secret of Mana for my fourteenth birthday. It arrived in a big brown box. I opened it and felt excited. The earlier versions of human beings I now sometimes and never talk to were with me. They felt excited.

We all felt excited.

We played Secret of Mana until there was nothing left to do in Secret of Mana. We talked about Secret of Mana. We loved Secret of Mana.

I went to the mall one day with this guy I used to know, the early version of this human being I never talk to. We found Legend of Mana in a discount bin. It was twenty U.S. dollars, which is five dollars cheaper than getting the top-layer of your skin skillfully sawed off by a skin doctor.

It had Mana in the title. It had a nice colorful cover. We bought it.

We took it home and lit incense and played it like it were Secret of Mana. It wasn’t Secret of Mana, but then, it never claimed to be.

It had some of the most pleasant music I’d ever heard.

Of all of this music, I remember the song called “Home”.

When I foolishly relinquished power to my brain, gave it freedom to do whatever it would like to do, it chose to listen to a nice guy named Caleb Elijah play “Home” on his acoustic guitar, which he’d been nice enough to upload to YouTube.

As I have said, it nearly choked me. There were vivid movies playing out in my mind. I felt like dying, if dying meant I could time-travel.

Thirty apples later, on-purpose-wound healing up on my favorite appendage, I am listening to “Home” as I type this in black and white and inverted colors. I miss the earlier versions of human beings I now sometimes and never talk to. I miss the old RB, and the old EL. Hell, I miss the old RL. I miss my dad. I miss Phoebe.

I miss Phoebe.

Jesus Christ, how long has it been, old man?

Poor Phoebe.

That won’t heal.

That’s around for the long-and-never-ending.

“Home.”

I miss that, too.