Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,51

parents, but one of the times I feel them the most is when faced with a tub the size of a Carmex container full of fancy wrinkle cream that costs upwards of five hundred dollars. I’m not cheap, and I love flushing money down the toilet, but nothing brings the “child, that’s just overpriced Vaseline” out of me quicker than the skincare counter at Saks. I mean, there are multiple times during the day when I can actively feel my body dying (sitting on the side of the bed after I first wake up in the morning, checking my text messages at literally any point during the day, when I accidentally catch the evening news), and if there is a cream strong enough to counteract the existential dread woven through every cell in my body, I’d buy it. If it exists, I bet it’s at NASA or some shit. They’re using it to power rockets.

Your neck is supposed to be firm and long, but I thought that was only asked of penises. Why does my neck have to do anything other than hold up my head? I do not, and will never, use any specific treatments for my neck. I cannot be bothered to care about my neck. Of all the things I have to check off this endless list, “neck maintenance” is not going to be one of them. Between whatever slides down it when I’m scrubbing my face and hair and whatever is slathered across it when I’m trying to moisturize all the other parts I can reach before the bathroom gets cold, that is all I can fucking be bothered to do.

What’s happening on your back right now? Do you even know? How much hair is on it? Is the skin soft? Has years of spending every day in a straitjacket-tight bra left weird marks on it? How are your moles doing? What’s up with that weird scaly patch? Are you already so tired from all the other shit you have to keep track of that you can’t be bothered to worry about the part of your body you can’t even fucking see? I FEEL THAT.

I think the last time I actually thought to myself, “Hey, I wonder what’s going on on my back?” was in 2002 when I was sleeping with this dude who lived in the apartment downstairs from mine. He would moan weird shit during sex like, “You are so warm inside,” and “I love looking at your back” while making love to my rear end. I laughed the first time he said the warm thing because, I’m sorry, what? Have you been fucking corpses? Do I have undiagnosed measles?? Anyway, I’m not such an asshole that I wouldn’t try to make my back nicer for someone who enjoyed looking at it, so I bought a back-scrubbing loofah stick and almost dislocated my fucking arm trying to scrape the dead layers of skin off my back with so much force that it bled. Then I would squirt lotion on the wand end after my shower and try to slather it on, because I hadn’t anticipated how dry and raw the trickiest part of my body to reach was going to feel after having twenty years’ worth of dead cells scrubbed off it. I ended up having to back up to the towel rack and gingerly rub myself up and down like a dog against a dry towel to try to get the lotion to absorb into my wounded skin. My freshly unearthed baby back ribs didn’t feel right for weeks, but the next time homeboy tapped on my door inappropriately late at night bearing nothing but lidded eyes and a throbbing erection, he did stop accidentally slipping into my anus long enough to ask, “Ouch, babe, did you fall on your back? You want me to put some liquid bandage on this?” Good ol’ thermometer dick reminding me that no good deed goes unpunished and you should never do anything nice, ever, for anyone.

Let’s flip your bodies over and examine all the shit that you could do but won’t, because who could possibly keep track of all this, to have a nice chest. I don’t mean your boobs, because they should be addressed on their own. I’m talking about that piece of real estate between your neck and where your boobs begin. Here’s how