Meatsack

What Inspired This Piece:  Oddly enough, I have Twitter to thank for this piece.  Someone was curious about my strange euphemism for the body.  I usually refer to the human body as a meatsack.  Meatsack--for the visceral imagery, and acknowledgement of human fragility.

Meatsack

Meatsack.  That is the appropriate and adequate term I prefer when talking about the human body.  Forget things like maintaining 34-26-36 measurements and consuming delicious slices of cake.  This thing that I'm in, that you're in, and that all human beings have is quite simply a meatsack.

It may be hard to think of it that way especially nowadays, and particularly in the first world.  Outside of surgery, we never really see our insides on the outside in the day-to-day.  However, imagine living in a place in which bombs rain from the sky more frequently than precipitation... The day to day just may then have many more insides on the outside. 

That sort of environment doesn't let its population forget the fragility of the human body.  Also, by extension the fragility of the human condition.

In this day and age we are sunk into a world obsessed with the outward appearance of the body.  Beautification, plastic surgery, make up, chic high-fashion--all facets of the same obsession with the aesthetic.  We are paying more attention to the aesthetics, meanwhile we forget the viscera, the fragility, and the strength of the human body.  We wrap ourselves up in kempt clothes, and perfectly coiffed hair to distance ourselves from the nudity of being an animal.  We are civilized.  We are dressed.  We are forgetting the capabilities our bodies have.

The vast majority of the population probably doesn't regularly exercise and maintain a proportionate height to body fat percent ratio.  The standards of aesthetics are high.  Few genetically lucky and hard working individuals ever achieve this, and so whoever remains may slip into obesity.  When pushed and trained and well maintained, the human body is capable of animal feats.  Surprising, when we belong to Kingdom Animalia.  

As awesome as the power the human body may have to harness, there still is the fact that human life is just too easily snuffed out.  A hairline fracture could eventually lead to a brain aneurysm.  A trip to the dentist could be the catalyst to a deathly infection.  A papercut may evolve into a CDC nightmare.  Our bodies and the mechanisms within them are susceptible to an endless list of diseases.  Single celled organisms can easily snuff out swathes of humanity. 

Although there is often great uproar from the concerned and squeamish about violence portrayed in media, there is an upside.  It reminds humanity of how delicate and easily stabable, shootable, burnable, assaultable the human body is.  We've seen it in grisley YouTube videos, documentaries on genocides, and perhaps unluckily in the real world.  We are but pieces of so much meat to carry us through are awesome lives.

Don't suddenly turn agoraphobic and shutter yourself into your 1 BD/1 BTH, but rather accept and acknowledge it.  Protect your body by honing it into a sinewy machine.  Nourish it--And by God, carry it with dignity and some awareness.