It’s true. I have no neck.

My teeth were being X-rayed at the dentist’s office yesterday by the panorama device that rotates 360 degrees around your head. As the dental hygienist was preparing me for the x-ray, she asked that I stand up straighter.

“I am,” I told her.

Then she asked if I could crane my neck higher. “There’s not a lot of room between your head and your shoulders, so I’m not sure if the machine will be able to rotate around your body unless you stretch your neck higher.”

“Are you saying I have no neck?” I asked.

There was a distinct pause before her actual answer, a pause which said, “Actually, yes.  Now that you mention it, you barely have a neck at all.  It’s as if your head is just sitting atop your shoulders.  Damn.  How the hell do you even look behind you without turning your entire body?”

Then she attempted to mitigate the pause. “Don’t be silly.  You just have… very muscular shoulders. That’s all.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve seen my shadow on a sunny day. Add two bolts sticking out of my neck and I could be Frankenstein.  I have no neck.”

Just last week, my friend asked me to look into the back of the car to confirm that he had remembered the propane for the tailgate. Then he began laughing when he realized that in order to look behind me, I had to disable my seat belt rotate at the hips rather than at the neck.

When I buy shirts, I have to find the exceedingly combination of an average sleeve length combined with a 19 inch neckline. A salesman once told me that the problem with my neckline is that it’s really just the median between my head (which is also large) and my shoulders. “You’re sort of missing the actual neck,” he said.

I appreciated his honesty.

The hygienist manipulated the machine until she was satisfied with it’s position and them stepped behind the wall to activate it.

On her first attempt, the machine came to a stop after jamming against my shoulders.

Eventually we managed to get a suitable X-ray, but only after I did my best imitation of a giraffe.