Starting with me head:
The Hair Situ: Dark brown hair, with the wee initimations of a tonsure on the crown of my head. I have maybe a dozen gray hairs pretty evenly distributed. My hairline has always tended toward the Klingon side of things, but since my late-twenties, I’ve seen the power strips just above my temples make deeper inroads, like a rain forest being deforested.
Eyebrows: Curiously, my eyebrows are both waxing and waning. On the ear-side limit, they are barely there, yet the hairs from the inside limit to the middle are getting coarser and more Rooneyesque with each passing season. In ten years, all I’ll have two or three six inch hair the width of a wire hanger shooting out in graceful arcs from my brow like some ghastly mud fish.
Eyes: Large, blue, with heavy lids and bluish rings below. I have never had enough sleep. Ever. Wrinkle under the eyes and crows feet around ‘em.
Forehead: A little bit creased with two perma-zits. There like these little flesh volcanoes, each built up around a cyclopean pore. Bizarre.
A quarter-inch lighting bolt scar, slightly raised, bung between my eyebrows. My mom through an old Bell Labs phone at my head. Had to get a butterfly suture. Long story.
Pitted little scar right above my outer right eyelid. Got hit by and 5 lbs ice block at the Orinda Hills Country Club on a midnight ice-blocking raid. Probably could have used a stitch.
Nose: Largish. Big fucking pores. And due to a bizarre mondo zit problem that flares up every two years or so on the upper exterior slop of my honker (right below my eye), I have a patch of subtly lighter colored flesh, a gentle scar from an epic battle between a wicked fierce carbuncle and my heroic lymphatic system.
These zits are vexing. They exist deep in the fleshy part of my nose and never come to a head. My nose merely blows up like Morley Safer’s and hurts like a motherfucker. During the worst outbreaks I can actually FEEL MY HEART BEAT IN MY NOSE.
I also have a few rogue hairs on the tip. Very tiny. But they look huge to me in the mirror, like the burnt hulk of a fir tree after a forest fire.
Cheeks: roundish, with an occasional cheery flush to the them, especially when drinking. I have a faint blemish on the left one from an ingrown beard hair that managed to grow half-an-inch before popping out of my cheek like a debutante at her ball. TOINK!
Ears: Slightly sticky outy, with the right one noticeably larger and less sticky outty then the left one. The right one is also notch from getting a rock through at it a summer camp when I was 13. I was peeing behind a bush. A beautiful older girl took me to the nurse, cupping her hand to catch the dripping blood. (Why?) Two weeks later, on the last night of camp, we lightly made out in the meadow. My first make-out session. Hot!
Also, at the bottom of the right ear lobe, I have a single, strange whiskery hair that grows in. I pluck it. I am not a freak.
Beard: Good coverage on the upper lip, chin, jaw line. Have blond little soul patch. Should I go for the ‘stache, I wonder? Lousy blond sideburns, patchiest where the facial hair joins the head hair-proper. Thus pointless.
Yet, I can grow a neck beard like the Star Trek fan of a thousand nightmares. Go figure.
Neck: Thickish, with a little brown pencil eraser mole on the left side in back. My daughter calls in my “nipple”.
Shoulders: Left one has twin scars, about a quarter inch long, scraped out by an industrial staple. I was making a Halloween costume.
My upper back is freckled like a bastard, and covered with DOWNY SOFT hair. And check out the middling freckle mole thing!
Chest: There’s hair. The standout is the strange single wispy, extremely thin white hair that can grow to tape-worm lengths if left unattended.
Arms: Permenent farmer’s tan, mottled with wee pink half moons and ovals and freckles and shit. The right arm has a juicy mole, replete with two wild hair. You gotta pluck that shit, Smallish hands with big thumbs. (Not weirdly so.)
Right wrist has a faint spray of freckle on the outside, and two raised freckle/mole things right on top. Thankfully, these are bald.
Every four years or so, I get an outbreak of psoriasis (or is it eczema? Something heartbreaking, anyway.) on the tip of the ring finger on my right hand.
Pointer finger on the left hand has a scar from a tragic bread slicing accident.
Innerarms: Smooth and fish belly white. Right one has a mole on the forearm. Left one has a faint pink and purple mottled scar from rug burn.
Ass: Leave it alone
Groinal: Ditto. Although, I am willing to admit to two moles in the region.
Thighs: Big fuckers. Always have been. Seriously, my legs look soccer player-ish, which is odd, because I’m a fat bastard.
Sundry scars on my knees. Nothing cool.
Feet: Size 11, with Shrek toes. Big toes have a few juicy hairs. Little toes are little winky slugs.
The arch of the right foot has a grizzly pearl pink scar from the Stupid Vacuuming Accident.
Read: Our house has forced air heating, the intake of which is a 2’x3’ grated gaping maw in the entry between our living room and little dweezily diningroom.
Early in our homeownership career, we were doing some weekend clean-up. Wife had removed the grate and washed the filter, leaving it do dry in the sun.
I was vacuuming in the dining hidey-hole, Being INSANELY COOL, I had merely slipped on my running shoes and was wearing them like flip-flops, heels nude as the day I was born. Vacuuming. Backing up. Backing up. OH HOLY FUCK.
I had fallen in the hole, the duct plummeting into the crawl space below the house. My left leg was still in the living room, while with the right I could feel the dirt below the house with my now unshod naked foot. But I was okay.
Wife calls out: “You okay.”
Me: “Yeah, yeah…
But as I pull my foot out, the arch catches on the gleaming razor thin newly serrated blade of sheet metal, which cut a wound about an inch deep into my exposed virgin arch.
I pulled up my foot, the top of which was a lavash sandwich of muscle, fat and sinew, with bloody blood sauce on top. “OooooOOOOooooooaOaOaoaoooooAAAAAAAAAACH!!! CALL MOTHERFUCKING 911!!!”
Because I had cut the sinew attaching my big toe to the foot, I had to wear a cast holding it at a ninety degree angle for 8 some odd weeks. My big toe, formerly a source of much personal satisfaction due to its worldclass suppleness, is now stiff and wretched. I mean, I can walk, run and do everything else. But since that day, I feel all the spirit and zest left that toe. Such is life.
Labels: Greg's Life As Nincompoop, Thinking about crap
