The Memoirs of Dr. Sex: Multidimensional Love Can Counteract Racism & Sexism in American Culture

By Andrew M. Barclay

"The Memoirs of Dr. Sex" discusses the problematic nature of two-dimensional thought, and how it creates problems that lower self-esteem for people raised in America. The text supports multi-dimensional thinking which can be used to enhance our relationships and find a more realistic, life-long love. Although the book begins with the grossest physical expression of love, it evolves through various stages of development to mental and then spiritual manifestation of self and love.

This book begins by taking readers through the easiest level and moves through various stages of development. Reading this book is like taking a pill with long-term side effects that are beneficial for the reader. We use love as the vehicle for understanding but the underlying process examines how energy is formed, how it is expressed through behavior, and how the energy returns to you in a different form. After reading this book, you begin to see why "what goes around, comes around," and learn how to bring better energy into your life. This book is meant to be entertaining and light-hearted, but the core values are serious and focus on human beings and what it means to be human. At the end, we understand that we are invincible and cannot be defeated. We are the world, and as we gain understanding and love, the world becomes a better place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098374396

Book preview

Afterward

INTRODUCTION

The Birth of Dr. Sex

I wasn’t always Dr. Sex. I started out as Andy, grew up and went off to school as kids will do. I enrolled in a course at Yale in 1962 taught by Dr. Michael Kahn called Human Sexuality. Like any typical undergraduate, I thought You can teach a course about sex? And I can get credit for it? I’m in. Mike Kahn changed my life, but I didn’t know it at the time. Isn’t that the way it is? Your life changes but because you can’t see the future, you don’t know that it was irrevocably altered in that moment, or over some length of time, really. His class demonstrated that you could discuss sexual behavior in a scientific way from a psychological point of view. I can’t remember a word of what he said that semester, I just remember him and the guys that were with me in the seminar. I don’t even remember the books we read. Thank you, Mike.

Through a series of painful events, one of which was having to retake Organic Chemistry at Columbia University summer school, I wound up enrolled in the Experimental Psychology program there a year after graduation. When I signed up, I was thinking: I got a degree in Culture and Behavior, I like psychology and I like doing experiments. Clinical Psychology is in Teacher’s College, it’s not for me, I am not a teacher. I am a scientist. There you go. I was so naïve.

It turned out we studied sensation and perception, which I won’t go into here, but it didn’t seem like psychology to me, at least not my kind of psychology. But I did have a chance to enroll in a course on projective tests with Professor Joseph Zubin, another guy who changed my life. We learned how to score the Rorschach Test, we gave the test to another student and then scored it, a process which took about three weeks as I remember. It was painful but it was science, wasn’t it? In later years when I would attend meetings of the Society for Personality Assessment, all I had to do was casually mention that I had studied under Joe Zubin and people would want to touch me. I had seen the face of God. I had scored the Rorschach by hand. Wow!

Experimental wasn’t my cup of tea, to say the least. I was complaining to Ralph Haber, my undergraduate advisor, friend to Mike Kahn at Harvard, and he said, Why don’t you get into the Social Psychology program at the University of Minnesota? He called his friend, Elliot Aronson (another Harvard grad) at the Social Relations Laboratory in Minneapolis, I took the Miller Analogies Test and then off I went to Minnesota. Talk about culture shock.

Like most New Yorkers, I thought there was nothing outside of The City. Well, New Haven was just a brief jaunt up the tracks on the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad and was part of a larger city which I thought of as Boswash, right? Then, if you traveled west, you went across the nothing and wound up in Los Angeles. Then I came to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in September and it was closely followed by Winter.

Winter in Minnesota wasn’t just winter, it was WINTER!! We used to joke at the Human Relations Lab that the only thing between us and the North Pole were two trees and a barbed wire fence. You had to plug your fucking car in at night so the battery wouldn’t freeze, and the oil (5W-20) would stay liquid. Actually, I was driving a Saab 93 then which had a two-stroke, three-cylinder engine where you put a quart of 30-weight oil in the tank when you filled up so you only had to trickle-charge the battery at night. (Just as an aside, did you know that 42 below is -42 in both Fahrenheit and Centigrade? Yup, and it is still joint-freezing cold, regardless.) When I felt sadistic, I would pull into a gas station and tell the attendant: Check the oil, and go to the bathroom while the car was being gassed up.

I loved Minneapolis. Three seasons of the year, short seasons, it was beautiful, then it was the Dark Winter, the Cold Winter followed by the Snowy Winter, oh my God. We worked on computer dating in the Lab with Elaine Walster and Ellen Berscheid. They were students of Leon Festinger of Cognitive Dissonance fame. I got to meet Leon. Another one where I am at a scientific meeting and I mention that I used to go to cocktail parties with Festinger and people want to touch me. Just lucky, I guess.

Two things happened to me at the U, I replicated my undergraduate senior Honors Essay¹ and I got to substitute-teach Social Psychology for Elaine while she attended a meeting somewhere. I came in with my lecture notes, ready to go, and immediately was struck dumb. Have you ever talked to 400 people sitting with their notebooks open waiting for you to dispense Knowledge? What do you do?

I know what I did: I opened my mouth, and the Lecture came out, poured out, really. I had no idea what I had said, at the end, I walked off the stage soaking wet and I was surrounded by students asking questions, tall blond Swedish men and women, I was lost in the crowd. They wanted to take me out to a student bar, buy me a beer and ask more questions. That was it. I was hooked, big time.

Then there was the day Elaine called me into her office and asked me what I wanted to do with my life, thought I might work for Industry, you know. She said, Have you ever thought about being a professor? No, actually, I hadn’t. And if you asked any of the guys who knew me at Yale was I professor material, they would just laugh. So, yeah, I hadn’t thought about it.

She introduced me to Lee Winder, her advisor at Stanford who had gone on to Chair the Psych Department at Michigan State and I went to East Lansing for an interview. The rest, as they say, is history. You have to know that my first question to everyone I met was, How are the winters here? Turns out they had winters, but they were not Winters and definitely not WINTERS!! because the Great Lakes tend to moderate the climate (until they freeze). I learned a lot over the years about what is called Lake Effect snow but that is another story. It puts East Lansing in a class with Buffalo and Syracuse, New York. As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, It’s always something.

Don Grummon, a colleague who was in the department and at the MSU Counseling Center, wanted to teach human sexuality to MSU undergraduates. Can you believe that in the late ‘60s, he had to invite noted experts to give guest-lectures and get the community involved before the administration would OK talking about sex in public? The students loved it, though, and they all asked: Why can’t you offer a course like this as part of the curriculum? Make Kahn was just ahead of his time.

Don and I edited a book on The Sex Colloquy. We edited the experts’ papers into book form, added several chapters and published it as Sexuality: A Search for Perspective in 1971.² Then we began teaching an immensely popular course on human sexuality. It was so popular, we never had enough seats, even in the largest auditoriums so we discussed putting it on TV. This was not so unusual at MSU with 30,000 undergraduates, many introductory courses were recorded at an early hour and replayed during the day. This type of televised course was a great format because students could drop in any time at their convenience, take notes, and attend common examinations in the Main Auditorium.

My idea was to do what everyone else was doing, teach the lecture on TV and replay it during the day. Then two colleagues reached out to me, Bob Davis who was an Assistant Provost for learning and Larry Alexander, both psychologists, Larry was at the Center for Human Learning. We had a meeting and they asked me what my plans for the course were, I told them. They were not impressed. Their idea was to break the material into segments to foster easier learning and to make lecture less boring, right? Motivate the students to learn, get them to talk about what they learned and spread the course message through what we called a magazine format. Many people read magazines in the doctor’s office. Lots more people read the articles than have a subscription to Playboy, right? Easier said than done.

Larry introduced me to the concept of behavioral objectives where you don’t just outline your material but think about the discrete behaviors you want the person to display as a result of listening to the lecture. We broke the course down into 30 one-hour (50 minutes actually, a psychologist’s hour) lectures of ten-minute segments each, so 5 segments per lecture, each with its own individual behavioral objective. Each lecture had an overall behavioral objective and there was one behavioral objective for the course: I. Get students to talk about human sexuality. WOW! Thank you, Larry and Bob, for how you changed my mind about teaching.

We got a bunch of student assistants to produce the segments and we worked through Instructional Media to create the video. I worked with Gary McCuaig who acted as Producer-Director. That’s not it, though. What is the It is is that I got to sit and watch myself on a big TV screen. Have you ever listened to a recording of your voice and thought: That doesn’t sound like me? How about watching yourself on TV as a naïve observer and thinking: Is that me?? Holy Cow, it wasn’t me at least not the way I thought of me, didn’t sound like me, didn’t look like me, it was shocking. I had to get over it the shock and face the reality of being me.

Producing that course was all about me, right? It was about my sexuality right out there for everyone to see. And in doing the course, I came out, not as gay, silly, but as who or what I really am, maybe ambisexual, polymorphous perverse, whatever. And then we did an updated version in 1976 with tighter, shorter segments using the Sesame Street model pioneered by Children’s Television Workshop.³ The theme music we used was from the rock-opera, Tommy, by the Who. Do you remember: See me, hear me, feel me, touch me, as Tommy came out of himself; Pinball Wizard, the best version I think was by Elton John. An autistic Tommy becomes a cult leader and has all these followers who turn against him because of sexual abuse by Uncle Ernie while they are blindfolded. Seemed like a great theme for a sex course.

The first time we offered Human Sexuality, 2500 people signed up. We made headlines all over the world. In the nine years we offered the course, over 10,000 students were enrolled. What do you do after that? My colleague, G. Marian Kinget was retiring, she was a Humanistic psychologist who taught a course called The Psychology of Love and Maturity, and I asked her if I could take over teaching it. She agreed and helped me organize the material, she talked to me about Carl Rogers, one of her mentors, it was really a logical and emotional sequel to Human Sexuality for me. Thank you, Marian. But I still wasn’t Dr. Sex.

That happened when I was invited to appear on a TV show in Detroit, a morning show hosted by John Kelly and Marilyn Turner. I can’t remember what we talked about the first time I appeared, but Lori Weiss (a former student) produced the segment and she really made me look good. All I remember was being so excited about being on TV in front of all those people (maybe 100 in the studio but 1,000,000 in the Detroit area) I was bouncing up and down in my seat. I did another appearance and started coming in once a month. Then I got to do Good Afternoon, Detroit with John and Marilyn.

I can remember walking onto the set and John would turn to the audience and announce: Here he is, Dr. Sex. Sometimes he would refer to me as Dr. Dirty, but mostly as our Dr. Sex. They had me on with Dr. Ruth Westheimer a couple of times, she was a lovely little grandmother type with a German accent who could say anything on the air and get away with it. I loved Dr. Ruth, I looked brawny next to her because of how the camera distorted size, she was a little woman, so I looked huge.

I will never forget when she told a call-in viewer to do oral sex on her husband to get him hard. The caller said: Oh Dr. Ruth, I could never do that! Dr. Ruth said, So I see it isn’t your husband who has the problem, and the audience broke up. If I had said that, they would have thrown me off the air. In fact, they did suspend me for three weeks once when I showed Marilyn how to find the G-spot with my hands as I faced the camera.

So, as I said, all this is history. Fast-forward to the present. Some years ago, one of my students, Victor Frisk, took some tapes of Love and Maturity lectures I gave in the ‘90s at MSU, converted them into MP-5 files and we have been fighting with transcribing lectures ever since. I talk fast and the lecture sort of falls out of my mouth, so it gives transcribing software fits. You should see the garbage it comes up with or maybe the transcript is not much different from the lecture, you know what I mean? Anyway, we had been fighting this fight for some years and then the Covid-19 virus hit, we were locked down. Victor had found transcribing software which was doing a good job word-for-word but it was taking a lot of work to whip it into shape but I had time because we were locked down, quarantined and all that stuff, in a global pandemic. Who knew?

Then, as I was clearing out a desk drawer, I came across two 3½ inch floppy disks, remember them? We used to use them for coasters under our beer, these were marked Love and Mat lectures. I won’t go through what I had to go through to find a floppy disk reader (thanks to Harley Koepf, my neighbor, a retired IT guy from MSU) but I did manage to open them and they were trash, junk, I couldn’t get any of my word-processing software to make anything readable of them, nothing but alien, weird symbols as if my software had been taken over by Martians.

I did some research online and came across someone who said they could crack any old disk’s coding and send back meaningful files on a thumb drive. I sent my disks off to them and sure enough, back came the disks on a thumb drive which when opened, displayed my files in MS Word. Turns out they were rough-edited versions of lectures I had given in 1984 for my Love and Maturity class, they were in good shape but needed some editing because I am much more conscious now than I was in 1984.

But it was like an archaeological dig into my mind, the contents totally preserved just as they were in the spring of ’84 before President Reagan-George HW Bush ran for a second term against Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. Remember? Indira Gandhi was murdered, and the AIDS pandemic broke out in America. Funny about Covid-19 is that it is a lot like I remember AIDS only you had to fuck someone to get AIDS, so contact-tracing was easier, know what I mean? Ghostbusters and Terminator were popular movies and nuclear war was a major threat. It was also the year popularized by George Orwell in his book, 1984, but that wasn’t really in play at that time, not until more recently. It was the beginning of the Bush dynasty as well as trickle-down economics, still a very popular idea among Republicans.

So here you go. Enter the time machine to return to 1984 and experience full immersion in the Zeitgeist through the perceptions of Dr. Sex. He is being presented by Doc Barclay for his many students over the years who said: You ought to publish these lectures.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to Love-Energy

I may be difficult to follow at first, but I know from experience that my words and attitudes will become easier to understand. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to my writing style after a while.

The Delphic Oracle lived in a cave in Greece at Delphi which was adjacent to a volcanic fissure in the rock. When you wanted an answer to a profound question like: What is love? you went to the cave and asked her your question. After a suitable amount of money changed hands, she would retire to the rear of the cave, take a hit off the poisonous fumes, stagger to the front of the cave, and babble at you. Since you paid a lot of money, you couldn’t pass her response off as meaningless crap. You had to ask yourself what the answer meant and, after some time had passed, her response took on more meaning.

Non-linear thinking predicts what will happen in the future. If you read this book six months or a year from now, you will say, How did he know all this was going to happen? We never met; he knew nothing about me. Yet he was able to predict events that were about to happen! Most of you who are reading this for the first time will not believe a word I say. More likely you are thinking: What is this? Here is another psychologist saying he’s going to predict what will happen six months down the road -- no way.

Your experience shapes how you perceive my words. If you are as virginal as the Oracle, if you have never had a meaningful relationship of any depth, I can guarantee you will have a great deal of trouble following my reasoning. What is worse, when you tell people what I have written, you’re going to tell them the problem was mine; it was all my fault, not yours. Even though I am telling you in the first chapter what you are going to have trouble with and why.

If you tell people about the strange events reading this has created in your life, you’re likely to say:

That idiot cheated me!

He took my money,

Gave me nothing

But bullshit in return

Hey, I told right up front,

How it was going to be.

I warned you.

If you don’t want these weird events to happen to you, you’re going to have to lay this aside right now; give the book away to a friend so the strangeness will happen to them. If you are in a relationship with someone who is a little shaky, give it to them, see what happens before you read it. Take my word for it.

Please don’t think:

Ooh, I think I’ll read Barclay’s book about love.

It sounds like it should be fun. Right?

It doesn’t cost too much - I’ve got the money

And a little time on my hands,

I’m going to learn about love.

Sounds great.

You may think you’re ready because you spent the summer reading Kahlil Gibran:

If humanity were to

Lead love’s cavalcade to a bed of

Faithless motive, then love there

Would decline to abide. Love is a

Beautiful bird, begging capture,

But refusing injury.

Love,

When sought out, is an ailment

Between the flesh and the bone,

And only when youth has passed

Does the pain bring rich and

Sorrowful knowledge.⁴

Or how about:

As the first glance from the eyes of the beloved

is like a seed sown in the human heart, and the

first kiss of her lips like a flower upon the

branch of the Tree of Life, so the union of two

lovers in marriage is like the first fruit of the

flower of that seed.⁵

If everyone around us knew what love was really all about, there’d be no need to write this book, would there? Obviously, people reading these words don’t know a much about love but a lot of you are going to wind up thinking you are better off or smarter than I am. If that’s really true, why have you reached this point in the text? Why are you reading this instead of making love? I ‘m writing to make an impact on you, what are you doing?

Buying this book without knowing what it is about is a lot like going to a car dealership where the dealer says:

Have we got a great deal for you

If you give me $8,000, you can

Reach into this barrel, pull out a

Registration, and drive

That car off the lot

Today

Wow! Only $8,000? Let me look around.

As you look over the lot you see everything from a ‘48 Chevy with two fenders missing to a brand new Cadillac. The dealer says: Yup, only $8,000 and you can get anything you want.

Would you say. Great! I’ll take the deal?

I sure hope you wouldn’t; well, you might. Let me know when you’re going to do that will you? I have a car in my driveway I’ve been trying to get rid of for a while. You’ll love it. O. K. I’ll stop being funny. This is me being funny. Let me be serious for a few pages here:

The word currency (money, in my jargon) and shit come from the same Indo-European root. Our language forces us to link money and love with shit experiences in life. Didn’t they teach this to you in English classes? See? Your English teachers don’t teach you the right stuff about language. They left it up to me, but when I do it, you sit there thinking that I’m the asshole because your English teacher lied to you along the way.

Some readers may say, He’s on drugs. These are the very same people who got stoned before they opened the book. They think, I understand so much better when I’m stoned. No you don’t, you just think you do. That’s a problem. You say, I think I’m doing O.K. I don’t want you to think something, though, because I’m going to show you how to know your way, not think your way, through life.

Thinking is a process, knowing is something completely different. I will show you the difference between thoughts and knowledge. That difference can sound inconsequential, but when we are describing the difference between bullshit and truth, thinking and knowing take on a whole new meaning. We’re not talking Trivial Pursuit here, it is a critical issue. To me, if you can’t tell the difference between bullshit and Truth, especially in THIS culture, you are in trouble.

You are likely to lay out $8,000 for a car, a ‘48 Chevy with only two fenders and then try to sue General Motors when the damned thing won’t run. Americans have to be smarter because rich white people are out to get us by dispensing poison in attractive containers. Did you know that rats prefer drinking saccharine to sugar in their water? There’s no nutrient value in saccharine. It feels as good as sugar to the mouth so a rat likes the chemical better than the natural food. Stress the rat and he likes alcohol even better than saccharine. Alcohol is just a highly oxidizable sugar, isn’t it? Hmm.

White culture preys on human beings … sucks them dry and spits them out. That’s why coal miners die of black lung disease at the age of 45, they’ve been used up. Society doesn’t need them any more because we have a population surplus. When I discuss these issues or something similar, I am often seen as being critical of the Regan administration but I’m speaking only in general terms; it doesn’t matter which administration is in power, or any administration. This is more a matter of how society is structured, our values or beliefs, which have their precursors in our personality. They were formed right after you were born in the first six to twelve months in life. Your personality can tell you where the culture will be when you are older, because you will be the culture when you are 45.

Telling other people about your discoveries. I can make this guarantee: As you go through life, the one thing you will find is no matter how smart you are, no matter how well you know how to do something, people won’t listen to you. You are better off not telling them anything. When you learn something from this new way of thinking, you are going to have a tremendous Aha Effect. About a third of the way through this book, the people who understand what I’m doing will undergo a conversion of sorts. Like any other convert, you will try to tell other people about what you have realized and, of course, they will ignore you or make fun of you.

At first, you will feel like, God, this is it, I know what Reality is. Seeing Reality is easy, once you know the trick. Pulling teeth is easy too but you don’t walk into the dentists office like:

I got a loose tooth.

The doctor says, Where?

(Pointing) Right here i’h ‘hy ‘ower ‘aw.

DENTIST: YANK!

Ow ow ow!!!

That’s not the way it works is it? You sit down, the dentist puts the earphones on your head, mine puts a little gas-cone over my nose and goes away for about 10 minutes -- I drift off into rock and roll. Have you ever done Nitrous Oxide? It’s great. You don’t have to smoke it, it comes to you already in gaseous form. I can’t believe they actually let people do this drug legally.

SIDE NOTE: I’m going to tell you how to use the nitrous: Breathe in through your nose, and, if you get weird because you get too high (everything becomes hard like a piece of tin, I can’t describe it, sound gets tinny, your body gets hard, the ceiling gets hard, everything’s hard. Sounds are coming to you from far away. It’s like your whole head is made out of tin. I don’t like that weird place.) When you feel yourself getting a little tinny around the edges, you just blow it off through your mouth: Puff, puff, puff.

You can be just like Robert Anderson, the fellow who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a balloon: You can get your balloon up to ten thousand feet, floating along in sunshine above the clouds -- which is a great thing to be able to do in Michigan where I live because we have a lot of clouds due to Lake Effect -- and then you come down. You walk to the front desk where the receptionist says:

That’ll be $75 please.

Wow! O.K. Ha ha!

I’m still laughing from the gas, right? I always walk out of my dentist’s office laughing. It’s wonderful! No tooth, his receptionist took all my money, but I don’t care because I didn’t feel it. That’s the neat thing about laughing gas.

I know from past experience if I attempted to manipulate problem places in your personality right up front, if I said, Stand by and then did it to you, you would find it most uncomfortable. Have you ever gone to the chiropractor to have your neck adjusted? Go in with a stiff neck, it’s a lot like going to the dentist. She says:

What’s the problem?

Stiff neck, Doc.

Oh, that’s nothing. Come here.

She takes your head under her arm in a weird lock, stands up real quick and your neck says, CRACK!!

I hate that sound, because it sounds like my neck’s broken but it always feels better so I say, Wow! Hey Doc, thanks. It always comes as a shock, though, and I wouldn’t let just anybody do it to me. I had another doctor that used to say, Come here. Relax, as they grab your jaw and you know it’s coming and you’re like: Nothing moves. The world turns tinny again right? When you’re stressed, everything seizes up and gets solid.

Are you feeling frustrated because I’m just dancing around? I ‘ve talked about doing drugs and gas and a lot of other meaningless stuff. But remember, you were the person who paid your money in advance for a ‘48 Chevy. I expect you to get nothing from all of this -- nothing is very important. People will ask you what you learned from reading this and I hope you will say, Nothing. Now some readers will grin when they say that. ‘Yes, it’s really great. Every other book I’ve read purported to show me something, this is the first one showed me nothing. I’m so happy I learned nothing."

If love or experiencing love were simple, after reading a book like this people would say: Come here a minute, I learned, and this is where you run into trouble, I learned what love really is. The other person will say, What? For God’s sake, what?

You think for a minute, then you say:

Love is tongue kissing

Under the moon at midnight

On a rocky beach with waves

Breaking over you

In a rush of gurgling foam.

Then the other person will say, You’re sick! But maybe that is love. If it were really all that simple, just go lie on a rocky beach under a full moon and jam your tongue into someone’s mouth.

There is a sex difference in the way men and women French kiss, by the way. Have you noticed who closes their eyes and who keeps them open when you kiss them? Do a little survey, find out for yourself. If you don’t do these surveys, you will never find out whether what I am saying is true. If you actually carry out the surveys, I’m going to have you in bars all over town doing Love-research. Great stuff because it’s such a good excuse.

If you think bars are immoral places, you can always run an experiment at your next church-group meeting. Go to different places to try your love-experiments or you risk making judgments about ideas for which you have no data. Shoot, that’s what most people do anyway, you wouldn’t be much different from your average person-on-the-street, now would you?

It used to be that sociologists did all their survey-research in bars. Every time I picked somebody up, it always turned out to be a sociology graduate student doing a dissertation. It was always nothing doing about sex, though. I would be into: Hey, why are you here? What are you here for? They would be whining: I didn’t want any sex, I was just … but you answered my…

Hey, I picked you up.

You knew

What you were in there for.

No, No, my dissertation…

Got the picture? I don’t want to go into it any further, it gets to be a sorry scene because they really loved being tied up. They did. They loved being chained up and whipped or they wouldn’t have been in graduate school, would they? Grad students are masochists.

Right now, you’re like interns looking for the head of a tapeworm. That’s why I didn’t become a physician. Do you know about tapeworms? Before the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in the United States, you could go to the drug store and buy products which guaranteed you would lose weight because inside of every chocolate cordial were two tapeworm eggs. If you ate three or four of these chocolate cordials, at the end of six weeks you would notice you were starting to lose weight. People would say, Try it, it really works, and it did. This is the ultimate in American culture.

Luckily now there is a Pure Food and Drug Administration and it is more what we don’t know that is hurting us. At least we know not to allow Industry to give you tapeworm eggs deliberately. Inadvertently, maybe, but not deliberately. (Did you know there was a standard for rat shit in your flour that’s greater than zero?) The tapeworm cure is the reason why I didn’t become a physician.

First, you give the patient a powerful drug that makes their intestines contract; it breaks up the tapeworm. Pieces of the tapeworm come out along with everything else you’ve eaten for the last fifteen years. The tapeworm’s head is critical in all of this because the tapeworm can regenerate if the head does not come loose and pass along with everything else. The head has three little prongs on it that hook into the intestinal wall; it’s digesting your blood and you’re losing weight because you’re becoming anemic. You’ve got to find the head or the cure isn’t complete. I know in the depths of a hospital, some poor intern is going through twenty-six piles of moldy shit with a microscope looking for a tapeworm head.

No way I was going anywhere near studying medicine because I had a pronounced suspicion (call it paranoia, if you will)