Last night, in my boredom I watched three hour-long British medical documentaries, back-to-back, on a show called "Bodyshock." This proved to be a mistake. I was first tantalized by an incredible videoclip (not on "Bodyshock") of these bicephalic conjoined twins from Minnesota, Abby and Brittany, who share a body but have two heads. Twin A can only feel sensation on one side of her body and same for Twin B, yet they can clap. I had to think about that for a moment before it's incredibleness hit me. How could they co-ordinate it? I don't know. They can also drive and -- get this -- type. AIIII! You know what's really weird is how normal, in a sense, they look. Part of that has to do with their remarkably well-adjusted attitude. But aesthetically -- I mean it's like if you or I designed a two-headed person -- it's that straightforward. There is something so conceivable about it. Yet at the same time so totally odd, you can't stop looking. I think it's what they call boggling. My mind doesn't boggle easily, but staring at them, my mind boggled.

So somehow I got from this to a video about a kid in Egypt who was born with a parastic semi-head attached to her own head (craniopagus parasiticus is the evocative medical term). This is when I should have turned off the computer -- look away! Look away! But noooo, I only wanted to look more. So, get this, there is this head sprouting a head, and the secondary head has a face. It has a face! And the secondary face is soooo almost normal, so slightly distorted in a Photoshoppy kind of way, and it's attached to a kind of neck that is its whole body, you can see in the X-ray that this neck/body has a tiny little spine. It reminds me of when my rubber plant, maybe through lack of water, or being pressed too close to the wall, grows a slightly curly and misshapen leaf. As the baby ages, the secondary head learns to suck and blink, but basically looks spaced out and froths at the mouth a lot. Because the saliva clearly has nowhere to go -- there are no organs in its tiny body/neck/stump thing. OK. This is very deeply disturbing, but I keep watching. It doesn't help that the Egyptian press is all over this operation and even has a camera installed in the operating theatre when they finally decide to seperate the heads, and they show the footage on "Bodyshock," of course, 'cause how else could it earn the "shock" part of its name? Oh and you get to see the dead, detached secondary head lying on some green piece of felt before its burial.

Well, on from this to "The Half Ton Man," which I think might not be so bad -- it's just very fat people, right? And Richard Simmons, as it turns out. He featured prominently in this documentary, giving Brits the wrong idea about how much influence he wields over here. But ohhhhh, "just fat people," eh? Just people who are naked, soiled by their own feces and literally ripping at their own seams, stretching the skin so much that it begins to give and weep liquids. This is not fat. This is something else, something horrible having to do with brain chemistry and compulsion and an insanely enabling wife who, even after his stomach is stapled up to "the size of a thumb" (his doctor's words) feeds him KFC and peanut M&Ms. It's fascinating, I won't deny it, to see so much flesh unbroken by definable features. His head was like some small outgrowth, a knobby mole, on the vast expanse of his body. When they rolled him over, he had been on his stomach so long that his fat retained a semi-rigid shape, like a candle that had melted flat and then hardened. Wow! Time to turn off the TV, right? No, but gosh, there's only one more "Bodyshock" and even though it's 10:30 pm I guess I'll just...

"The 80 Year Old Children"! Well! I'm sure that won't be harrowing! It was about these Indian kids who have "progeria," which inflicts them with geriatric ailments and also distorts their features so they end up with very protruberant eyes and recessed chins and look like claymation characters. If I watched more cartoons/animations I would probably be able to name exactly which characters. Draw a long, thin rectangle. Now add great big, circular eyes that blink from the bottom and top simultaneously, and a mouth jampacked with dozens of teeth, layered three deep. That's it. They are also bald. I am dissatisfied with this description but their features are so distorted that there is no template in my brain to hang their features on, so I can almost not really picture them. And hospital tests reveal that not only are these kids fated to be ostrasized for their looks, but they don't live long, because their glass-brittle bones are being reabsorbed by their bodies, are literally dissolving, so that their collarbones are nearly non-existant and their ribs are no longer attached to their spines.

And then, OK, lights out! Time for bed!

I suspect that I am sounding frat-boyishly callous and normative, but I can't deny that there was something so different, for want of a better word, about these kids' physicality that it was hard at first to see them as human. It feels weird writing that because you're not supposed to say it about anyone. But it's true! And it turns out that there is something just proundly unsettling about looking at deformities: I imagine it's a combination of being constantly inundated with media images of preternaturally beautiful people and some evolutionarily adaptive mechanism. Watching them right before bed, when the unconscious is glimmering just below the surface, is purely hazardous. My mind was literally aflood with images of the cringing, hollow head, the strange, frog-like faces of the progeria family, the strainingly fat limbs of the morbidly obese. I had to read about half of my stunningly boring book by Vikram Seth before I could feel anything like normal.

Never again. Never after dark, anyway. Too much material for my overvisual, overstimulated dream-factory brain.