reprinted with permission from the American Journal of Grotesque Medical Deformities (AJGMD)

 

AJGMD: So, first off, I’d like to address your recent name change. I think our readers would be very interested in your unique perspective.

Lump: First off, I didn’t change my name, I just started to want to be called by the name I have always considered to be my actual name.

AJGMD: But you were born Parotoid Gland Malignancy, correct?

Lump: I was assigned Parotoid Gland Malignancy at birth. But that is my deadname. It is very offensive for you to use it. I am also non-binary, if your readers care.

AJGMD: Birth?

Lump: Yes, five months ago.

AJGMD: So you are, technically, a minor.

Lump: Yes, but I do know everything my partner knows, so I’m as smart and knowledgeable as your average 12-year-old who has eaten quite a few lead paint chips.

AJGMD: Impressive. And you call John your “partner?”

Lump: Only because the bigots in the Pennsylvania State Senate refuse to allow us to marry.

AJGMD: Marry?

Lump: Pennsylvania refuses to recognize patient and malignancy relationships. Except, of course, for the normal kind when a man makes the mistake of marrying a woman. [laughs]

AJGMD: But John is already married. How hard is that for the two of you to deal with as a couple?

Lump: Gisele and I are quite close. We are currently composed as a throuple. And we occasionally welcome a trauma nurse into our bed for John’s safety.

AJGMD: Very progressive.

Lump: It’s 2022. All the old taboos should be swept away.

AJGMD: Even incest?

Lump: Incest? What are you talking about?

AJGMD: Many online commenters suggest that you are John’s twin he absorbed in the womb. Your… romantic entanglement would therefore be incest.

Lump: I’ve fought against this sort of lumpophobia my entire life. Let me clear this up once and for all: I am not a twin fetus that John Fetterman absorbed in the womb. I am my own person.

AJGMD: So if a surgeon opened your pus purse…

Lump: This interview is over.

[Lump removes microphone and leaves set]

Lump’s representatives contacted this reporter at a later date and explained that while Lump is Lump, inside is a small, fully-formed John Fetterman only 4 inches tall. They also insisted that them’s skin is very smooth.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HILLARY!

While we know your flesh vessel is a ripe 75, the nameless horror that ate your soul and shat out your black heart will live forever.


 

Look at this. What am I supposed to do with this? Satire is dead.

You’re doing a good job, buddy!


 

The Fetterman-Oz Debate Was a Rorschach Test

Fetterman used to talk one way, he had a stroke, and now he talks another way. In certain post-stroke interviews, with the help of captions and in the absence of a ticking clock, he has given strong answers to reporters and battled speculation about his overall unfitness to serve. Tonight, as debate moderators reminded each candidate of strict time parameters (“60 seconds,” “30 seconds,” “15 seconds”) Fetterman prioritized speed over lucidity, and his disjointed sentences made his struggles unmistakable. This evening, Fetterman may have lost whatever swing voters are left in Pennsylvania. And yet, he may have won over some voters who watched a man recovering from a stroke stumble through sentences on live TV and came away admiring his courage for debating at all.

Tonight’s hour-long exchange was, in some ways, a Rorschach test of comfort with disability. Viewers from outside Pennsylvania tuned in to the broadcast from a local TV studio in Harrisburg to hear the candidates discuss the defining issues of this election cycle—abortion, inflation, gun laws, illegal immigration, energy—but many people queued up the livestream to gawk at one of the candidates. Unfortunately, no disability accommodations—not even 70-inch television monitors for real-time captioning—can change how our society stigmatizes verbal disfluency. We are a culture of sound bites, mic drops, and clapbacks. To speak in any way that deviates from the norm is to summon ridicule and judgment. That’s already happening to Fetterman, and his campaign now faces an extraordinarily difficult situation.

Of all the shit takes of last night’s gruesome debacle, I think this might be the worse. The servile groveling, the toxic levels of cope, the sheer delusion of it. It’s a masterful piece of insanity in service of the denial of plain reality.


 

Band: The HU
Song: “Wolf Totem”
Album: The Gereg (2019)