There I was...floating in the amniotic fluid in 1987, a year that can boast a few good movies - few of them truly great - and I wasn't actually floating...I was gesturing profusely - my movements were either caused by external forces within the amniotic sac/mother's larger body or a disturbance stemming from my physical form, which could have been triggered by emotional distress or any number of maladies...whatever the cause, my movements danced hazardously with my umbilical cord, which began to entwine and eventually entrap my body. i couldn't move and stopped kicking. my mother's obstetrician became alarmed and upon investigation, feared that the cord would continue wrapping itself around me and strangle me to death. in essence, i was a suicidal fetus:- and my instrument of death - my weapon in fact - was also my vein - the pipeline to all nutrients and life itself. was it my fault that i kept wrapping around the cord around my body? why did i do that? i literally had the brain the size of a pine nut at that point; no spatial awareness. completely ignorant. and this farce had an audience of giants ten times my size- they watched my sickening little form that looked like a parasitic monster out of a Cronenberg film on a tiny gray super-80's-out monitor. The female OBGYN oozed jelly on my mom's belly and my mom probably felt a great kinship with her doctor, on account of them being more or less the same age; and also, on account of my mom having an affinity for forming attachments to people outside of the realm of healthy (or she would argue, merely typical) circumstances -- her attachments usually being to those in the upper-upper-middle class and the upper class. a doctor would fit the bill, certainly. not that my mom did not need the support and sense of connection to another human being during this emotionally taxing journey filled with so much hardship, miscarriages, loss. my dad undeniably failed to provide emotional support to her; he felt insecure, slightly horrified, but deep=down deeply amazed by having another child; he couldn't grapple with the contradictory emotions because his psychological energy was spent coping with a host of turbulent, despairing emotions he repressed by rule of personality and concealed with a muted, mild temperament.