Darktrain, how does that limb counting game go again?

I’m going to have to cut you off….

How? Why didn’t I know about this up until now? Stuck in the wrong body, indeed.

Holy crow.

When I was very young, a woman visited my mother who was missing four fingers on her left hand. I couldn’t stop staring at that smooth plane of skin. Even now, I can remember how she held an Oreo cookie with just her thumb.

I’m gearing up for a new writing project, in which I was asked to come up with a signature character. My first thought was a man paralyzed from the waist down.

And yet, I have no desire to lose any of my limbs.

Maybe this is some kind of backlash against the very comfort of our culture. It’s certainly plausible that an urge to seek challenge could make its way into the genetic code. It’s not hard to imagine survival advantages in that… When one is raised in perfect comfort, perhaps the idea of making life more difficult becomes appealing — even to the point of pathology. If, indeed, one can claim that the desire to have one’s leg sawn off is “sick” while the desire to have one’s nose reduced is not…

What freaked me was the discusion of how these people had an alternate body image, like a transsexual, that their born-body didn’t match, and so they had never felt physically right in some instinctive way. This suggested that:

A) They are souls reborn.

B) In their last life, they were not human.

Perhaps they are fallen angels, and need amputations to suit their vague concepts of their severed, phantom wings.