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To Brian McCandless's previous piece

My Love is Nature's
Newest Way of Turning Sunshine
Into Shit

Mom?
I've met a girl!  She's--well,
she's 32, stands five feet nine, weighs 126 pounds.
Don't tell her I told you that.
She sloughs off half a million epidermal cells each day and
her intestines would, if stretched out straight, reach almost
30 feet. (About like dad's.)
Well, yeah.  She's got ectoparasites.  Armies of 'em!
They live in her eyebrows, nose hair, and scalp, where they mostly
eat her skin.  Her armpits are home to
creatures that resemble bloodless lobsters and
her brain weighs 3.13 pounds--minus, you know, the basal ganglia.
Her feces?  Ab-so-lute-ly normal.  Mostly mucus,
bile from the liver, swarming cities of unseeable bugs.
(Hey, there's plenty where they came from!
Something like 10 billion live in her colon alone.
It's like Kowloon in there.)
>From glands shaped like scallions, her feet secrete
almost a pint of fluid as she sleeps each night.
In her travels through this vale of contagion
she's subsumed herpes simplex, gardnerella vaginalis, various off-brand 
streptococci,
a staphylococcus you wouldn't want to meet in a bar fight and
several of the common rhinoviruses.
In fact she journeys with them still,
buried in her mitochondria like acorns in a forest floor,
waiting for some immunological springtime
to come bursting out of the loam,
ready to choke us all in blood and pus.
Just like anyone does! Just like all of us do!
She's a walking, talking, microbial nightmare,
spewing filth with every sneeze,
oozing herself from every pore: a sexy, saucy
ad for Phiso-Hex and abstinence.
What's that? Oh no.  Don't worry.
I know how you feel about
Catholic girls.

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