When I showed up at college last fall, I was on top of the world. I had a healthy checking account put away in the bank after a hard summer of work with the high school energy that I had once upon a time. I drove my graduation present off to college and was ready to conquer the universe. But one semester, an accident, and other miscellaneous tickets and citations later, I found myself carless and licenseless, sporting a rusted out huffy bicycle, and owing the great state of Iowa a hefty sum of cash. I knew I had to get a job, but that high school energy I once possessed was somehow absorbed by the same mystical black hole that swallowed up my summer savings, driver’s license, common sense, and self respect. And just when I thought there was no hope for me whatsoever, I found the answer to my all problems on the back page of my college coupon book. The Plasma center!

Little did I know what I was getting into. It sounds like a great idea. You can make $110 for your first four donations and they pay you in cash. So on one wickedly cold January afternoon, I swallowed my pride and entered the clinic.

Now, let me tell you how things work down at the plasma center. First of all they have this foolproof screening process for getting rid of any unwanted donors. They ask you a series of questions about whether you’ve had any of several genital ailments involving sores, rashes, or liquid magma chronically erupting from your urethra, or if you’ve been to certain African nations in the past 18 months, or had sex with anyone from those African nations who had been diagnosed with any of the aforementioned genital ailments. And then, if you exit the clinic at any time between the screening and the drawing of blood, you have to go through the whole screening process again just in case you were subjected to some health altering condition during the time you’re outside. And let me tell you, after strolling back out to have unprotected sex with the Zairian tribal monkey I keep chained to my bike with that bizarre strain of volcanic syphilis, it was damn tough keeping a straight face while I told that nurse that I had done no such thing in the past 18 months.

So after the screening, they sent me downstairs to give the blood and everything’s going just fine. The process takes about an hour but it’s ok because they’ve always got some Disney movie showing for all the donors to watch, and also it gives you time to think. It’s really quite the environment to have some deep thoughts in. I mean, you get such a sense of your own mortality seeing your own life force drained out of you, then feeling the cool rush as that saline solution comes flowing through the tubes and back into your body. I was lying there watching and feeling all this happen to me and I began to think…

Now, a lot of people won’t donate sperm because of their own personal scruples of possibly bringing another life form into this world that will never meet its father. And I agree, it’s eerie to think that you could be helping produce another human being that you’ll never even meet. But then I asked myself, What makes the sperm a more vital ingredient in the recipe of life than the plasma? What’s so different? They’re both bodily fluids extracted from one person and deposited into another to help further along the wonderful process of life. So I’m lying there in my chair watching The Little Mermaid and contemplating all this and it hits me that what I was doing was really no different than donating sperm, or insulin, or any other bodily fluid for that matter. I realized that after I left that day, I would be leaving a part of me behind. A part of me that would eventually be injected into another human being. I could be walking down the street one day and there he’d be. Some complete stranger living and functioning on my plasma! The Plasma Center was manufacturing ME! Possibly a whole civilization of ME’s! Person by person they were creating a dominant race composed of the plasma of donors that they hand selected.

Now, by this point in my demented reasoning I was getting pretty light headed from the loss of blood, which may account for some or all of the paranoia I was experiencing. Anyway, I continued to let my imagination run away with me as I got dizzier and dizzier until I got up out of my chair and ran out of the clinic with the needle still in my arm, tubes hanging out and blood squirting everywhere, dragging the plasma machine behind me, all the while screaming "I won’t let you clone me you Nazi bastards!"

I guess I must have passed out in a snow bank after that, it’s all a little foggy. I woke up sometime the next day in a hospital room and had a shooting pain in my left forearm. I looked down and sure enough some quack doctor had hooked me up to an I.V. machine filled with god knows what. And I was actually feeling a little better until I looked up at the guy lying in the bed across from me who was hooked up to the same machine. There was something about his mannerisms, his face, his eyes…it was me.

"I’d give my left nut to be in my right mind" debuted September 3, 1999, performed by Aaron Galbraith

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