y.g. has been one of my best friends since college, where we studied music composition together. he is now an experimental performance artist, director, and choreographer. we would often eat meals together, we formed and experimental music ensemble together, and i was deeply influenced by his approach to art and life. he also liked to play tiny pranks. one of them involved him telling everyone that men could develop babies in their knees. he claimed that the fluid in the knee cap was similar to embryonic fluid, which may well be true. but it rapidly became a thing--knee babies. y.g. also loves the male body. somehow those two things about him kept pushing an image of a pregnant man in my head. it feels a bit "earth mother" of me to push some "men-can-have-babies-too" thing. but i figure that if that image kept taking hold of my imagination, i should go ahead and create it. i spent a long time looking at images of nude men and sketching them. it was hard to make him look pregnant rather than just plain paunchy.