NAVEL ENVY

Oh crap! She's called in sick again. Despite not coughing up hairballs. She's curled up in her room with a turkey vulture and a good book, and I cannot close her door, open the windows, and light up my pipe. I shall have to go outside and act like I'm human. While skulking around the neighborhood avoiding dogs, old people, and little children.

Are there any dark corners around here? Someplace where, if I accidentally shape-shift, no one will notice? If there are, they're probably all occupied by violent street people shooting up for the benefit of tourists from the red states, who expect that when they come to civilization.

There's something nauseating about being human. Sometimes I just don't feel like it.
And often I speak in tongues. Murmuring.
No one understands me.
Tongues.

[For an explanation of which kindly see "Confusion of Tongues", delivered by one of Freud's colleagues at the 12th International Psycho-Analytic Congress in Wiesbaden, Germany, on 4 September 1932.]

No, there is nothing growing in my navel. Lizards don't have navels, remember? We come from a giant egg. Brutally we used a temporary projection on the upper jaw that developed from the premaxilla which let us penetrate and break the eggshell from inside.
So I contemplate where my navel might have been.

As Doctor Sigmund Freud defined it, we squamates frequently manifest profound navel envy. In Freudian theory, the navel envy stage begins the young lizard's transition from attachment to the ovipositor to avoiding hungry free-ranging velociraptors. This results in anxiety, we do not wish to become dinner.

On the other hand, there is no eternal yearning to return to the egg either. As Ferenczi (born Sándor Eibenschütz Fraenkel) recognized, one must more actively engage with the young lizard, encouraging him to freely associate and engage with his fears.

The forest floor, the humidity of the wild, the moist and comforting bed of moss, and the dark flitty insects presenting tempting protein in flight. The many Peterson  pipe shapes which are reassuringly egglike, so smooth, so polished, so elegantly and robustly ovoid.


Laundry. Lunch. Wandering about a bit.
Do not engage with Karens.



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