We skipped out of my Elementary School Graduation Celebrationsbecause my best friend Josh was in the hospital.
I say it was because he was having his chin fixed
but he thinks it was for something a little more life-and-death.
Maybe he knows better.

My parents took me to where Josh recuperated
and I saw him unconscious, knocked out on anesthesia,
helpless, thinned out from surgery,
obviously beaten down by the process,
and I thought, "What have they done to him?
How could this cosmetic surgery possibly be worth all of this?"

My friend seemed so weak, and for what?

Now to hear him tell it, there was some serious illness going on,
but that’s not what I remember, and I thought it was a darn shame
that he would go so far just to have a nicer chin.

"Plastic surgery," I thought, "is fucking dumb."

And that is an opinion I hold to this day
despite how irrelevant it may be
to the truth of my best friend’s life.