It's common knowledge that traditional Japanese houses were a fairly simple construction using wooden frames and rice paper partitions between rooms. They were easily destroyed by the tsunamis and torrential rains, and fire too on the elemental flipside, but equally easily rebuilt. A caveat of these rice-paper walls that one does not initially consider is the utter lack of sound barrier from one room to the next. Because of the obvious drawbacks of this arrangement, the Japanese cultivated the “thousand paper screen” barrier in their mind: an intentional blocking of audio from adjacent rooms because one could not or wished not to hear it.

There are 1,000 paper screens between my head and my heart, and 10,000 between heart and mouth. As many barricade head and mouth, and we will suffice to say that there are an astronomically large number of pure wooden barriers dispersed between the passages of the the three. My mouth is a gash in a paper bag, and my tongue origami paper steeped in beer for weeks. To try this soaked origami tongue of mine for folding into dialogue is a futile effort, with each fold further bringing me further away from my desired product.

My spine is papermache, and a caricature of its bona fide vertebrae and meninges composed counterpart. It was crafted with enough skill to be recognizable and visually convincing from a far enough distance, but when pressure is applied it falls apart. Take two: it's not so much that it falls apart, or crumbles, and although the word collapse comes close it's still just not right. No, it's more like they compress. I picture a tree being felled in the woods by two lumberjacks with a pit saw. It falls forward, the base having lost the structural support to maintain all that weight, and the sound rings true to me: the creaking and cracking followed by fiber ripped, and I mean fucking torn asunder, from fiber by that awesome downward momentum. But even though I have felt that sound inside of me, the physics of it just don't match up.

This collapse, or rather this compression, starts at the top. Where my seven-times folded paper skull nods on imitation C1 vertebrae, and fails to swivel on its poorly pasted together mockery of the C2. That almost impossibly thickly folded skull gets water-logged in stormy weather and becomes the right hand of a sadistic accordion player gifted with retard strength. He crushes, and the paper mache compresses straight down to my tail bone, clearly making no attempt to resist. I can promise you this though: no light-hearted polka music is created in these instances. My papermache spine becomes an accordion shrieking one tune of destruction while producing no (noticeable) long term damage. When the weather clears, the paper uncrumbles, uncompresses, and some how its shape and more or less integrity are preserved. When the opportunity arises it can and will return to its original paper-masquerade.

The art of discovering the composition of your own anatomy is tricky, and perilous. Do you really want to know what it is you're made of? However, when I began to realize the flexibility (this was the same time I began to understand the risks of my combustible nature also) of this thing that is my wooden byproduct self that I came across a wonderful discovery.

With nothing more than a two foot by three inch piece of yellow construction paper, a common household staple gun, and the patience to fray this paper length wise hundreds of times, I was able to provide myself with a tail. I've always envied and hated that ultimate heart-on-their sleeve quality of animals with tails. The tail acts very much independent from an animal's conscious mind. It keeps an animals balance without being told to do so. A dog does not choose to wag its tail any more than it chooses to tuck its tail between its legs. My realization of this made me hesitant to procede with the “operation,” but what better way to see past all the bullshit excuses and false fronts we put on for others without realizing it?

The tail is there though now. It's most certainly there. It hangs down to slightly above the back of my knees, tucked in my left pant leg. That's it. It pretty much just hangs there. Not once have I felt it wag, and sometimes this concerns me. Because it's not that it doesn't move at all, but from time to time I find it sliding further along the birch tree bark of my legs, moving to my inside thigh, attempting to tuck it self between my peeling paled wooden legs, were it not confined to a single pant leg. So there I'll be, my paper bag face gashed in a crecent moon smile to expose my yellowing shredded pulp novel fragment teeth, showing the world just how fucking happy I am, but I can feel the dry grating of construction paper on birch, it scrapes off the dying white bark with a faint rustling like leaves sound and I have to hide the bark pieces falling from my pant leg. It makes me nervous, because if my tail were to continue this revolution around my leg, from back to inside thigh, and make its way any more forward, anymore around the circumference of my leg, an onlooker would probably mistake this involuntary and unwanted belying of my poor mental condition for...to put it very politely something else entirely. To put it less politely, a raging hard-on running half the length of my leg.

I have a confession to make concerning this whole tail business: part of me wants an amputation. Staple remover: check. Paper shredder: check. But I just cannot bring myself to do it. Maybe this construction paper tail that refuses to play along in my daily game of charades (sounds like...happy?) is refusing me the ability to do so. Sure, maybe. Or maybe I'm just not confident enough to admit that I need it. As much as this paper tail needs the spit ball synaptic messages rocketed through a hole burned into the bottom of this seven-times folded skull, down this papermache spine of mine, and into it to know how to tell its truth, my truth, I need it to tell the truth. And to tell the truth, I really think I need it.