I'm back from a long run of fourteen hour work days, just in time to leave again: I'm going to Texas for a week. If we still lived in America I could make a joke about my trip. Say that I'm going down there on a secret mission, to a certain ranch in Crawford, to see to it that it's owner and his right hand man will have a horrible accident. But since you can get 'detained' for wearing a Kerry button in Terromerica, you certainly can't make jokes like that anymore. So I won't.
In the meanwhile, enjoy the eighty or so comment spams I get a day. On a site I pay money to keep advertisement free. And know that while I'm in the land of the dirty rotten scoundrels, I'll be keeping it real for my peeps. That, and drinking.
Every skin-care professional I've sought for my acne, either at a facial spa or dermatologists office, spent hours picking away at my face while sternly lecturing me why one should never do so. You'll tear the skin, they'd say. You'll make things worse --all the while digging holes in my head with metal implements or fingernails and alcohol-dipped cotton balls. "You know *squeeze* you should never pick at your *squeeze* pimples, you could cause permanent *squeeze* scarring and *squeeze*..." Seriously, every single one. What a scam. I refuse to believe washing one's face and picking one's zits is a complicated medical procedure too dangerous for lay-people, or that one should pay a hundred dollars an hour to have someone else do it for them (and hopefully buy the lot of whatever skin care line they're hawking). I'll pop my pimples at home for free, thankyouverymuch.
But no matter how you feel about skin-care specialists, or where you fall on the 'to pick or not to pick' argument, I want to address the when you must pick issue. Yes, there is a time when you absolutely must squeeze your zits. Why? Because you're really freaking the rest of us out.
A guideline:
When you have such a ripe honker that the hard, yellow pustule is already hanging halfway out of the pore, and worse, is threatening to fall into the sandwich you are making for me at my local deli--you must zap that mo'fo. It's turning me, and everyone in line, off our lunch.
When the blackhead in the middle of your forehead has grown so huge it looks like someone forced a wine cork into your skin with a jackhammer...take a sec and squeeze it out, okay? If you are unsure how, ask one of the many people who are staring at it. Heck, you might even get some brave soul to do it for you.
If you have a jawline full of angry, red spots that will turn into angrier cysts if you so much as touch them, leave them alone. However when one of those angry red dots turns into an inch-high, inch-wide whitehead? That's what we acne-prone call ready. Get a pin, poke, and drain.
And for God's sakes fellas, get a decent razor. Even the most dermally blessed look like they have genital warts on their neck after using one of those orange Bic nightmares. While I'm at it, buy a pair of tweezers and pluck those nasty ingrowns too. It won't make you gay.
Yeah. I haven’t posted anything in awhile. I’m too busy being terrorized by the terror alerts and the anti-terror police and the terror awareness programs and the in-the-event-of-terror emergency drills and freaking cops and firemen everywhere showing us they are on the case, in the know, ready for action, ready to kick some butt when all the terror starts raining down on our asses. I know they are doing the best they can. I know it’s supposed to make me feel safer to see homeless people get wrangled and their bags emptied out onto the subway platform, but you know what? It doesn’t.
So I focus on other things when I commute. Like how, on the train this morning, if you looked down the length of the car at all the up-stretched arms with fists wrapped over poles, it looked like everybody was giving up the black power sign. You know, in honor of Louis Armstrong's birthday.
Or how some things are kept sacred. The tunnel I walk through to exit the station is flanked with advertisements --for movies, TV shows, social programs, Jennifer Convertibles couch sets-- and they’re each defaced in some way: devil horns on our local news celebrity, or “Fuck YOU Bush you fucking motherfucker!” scrawled on a Dodge truck ad. So many additions are made to the graffiti everyday, you can’t even tell what half of the posters are advertising anymore. But one ad is as pristine as the day it was stuck there with the rest of them. It’s nothing much to describe. A montage of really cute babies, words that say something about a healthcare program for newborns. The posters on either side of it are indecipherable. But no one will tag the babies.