Brown Bag Lunch

Yesterday, one of the guys at lunch started coughing. A bit of food had made its way down the wrong pipe. “Do you need the Heimlich maneuver?” (Insert a bit of sexually charged irony.) A brown bag lunch with gay male office workers at a university. What isn’t charged with sexual irony? The Heimlich is, of course, a non-insertive act of penetration. In redder-than-mauve surgical scrubs, a man with big brown eyes handed the coughing man an imaginary sheet of paper and said, in double time, “Organ donation form, sign here please!” If you had been there, you would have known the surgical scrubs were for surgeries done on corpses and you would have remembered that all good jokes are true at some level. It was a work lunch after all. Is it called surgery if you’re already dead?