Baseball and Dentistry Don't Mix

When I was a kid, twelve, I think, I went to the dentist once, and a checkup revealed that I had a cavity in one of my back teeth. My mother made an appointment for me to come back in to have it drilled, and a filling put in.

I already hated going to the dentist. There's nothing worse that having a guy who mistakenly thinks they are "good with kids," go to work on your teeth with a drill.

First off, most people don't really listen to children. Hell, if they're in the medical profession, they don't often listen to adults. I suppose that's understandable, but that's not the same as it being okay. I hated this guy anyway. He always acted like he was on television - it was like having William Shatner for a dentist. He'd wander out of the room for fifteen minutes while your mouth was loaded with cotton, right in the middle of drilling. He'd talk on the phone while doing stuff in your mouth. He'd ask you questions and then make fun of how you sounded because he had his hands in there.

But my favorite... my favorite part, was that he'd say "If it hurts to much to continue, just raise your left hand, and we'll stop for a second." And then he'd ignore you or come up with reasons not to stop.

Also... he kept calling me "Sport," and "Chief," and "Little Buddy." This is not a way to win points with me.

So... I go in, and the first warning sign that this will not be a good visit is that the televisions on in the office - this is a children's dentist, and they had TV's up that would show cartoons while they worked on you, to distract you from that silly root canal - are not showing cartoons today. No. They're showing a baseball game.

He asks me "Hey, how about a little baseball today while we work?"

"No thank you," I say, "I don't really like sports." This is an understatement. Frankly, at this point in my life... and up until today really, sports of all kinds make me think of something my Sicilian grandmother would say: "Se tutti esplodono en una mattina," which means "They should all explode in one morning."

"Don't be silly," he says, "All little boys like sports!"

"Actually, I have no interest in sports," I tell him, "I really don't like watching them or playing them at all."

"Well, chief," he says, "This isn't just any sport. This is baseball!"

Now... this whole time, he has not looked me in the face a single time - worrisome, since I think he needs to look at my face if he's going to stick a drill in my mouth. He's staring, unblinking at the TV, while trying to get me ready for the dental work. There are several dental assistants around, but all but one of them are also staring at the television, carrying on about the game. Loudly.

So... the guy shoots me up with some Novocaine. Before we even begin, I explain that I hope he's using one of the newer Novocaine-like anesthetics, because Novocaine stopped working on me years before. And this is true. I hate when I have to use stuff like that, because it works on me maybe once or twice, and then never works again. You could shoot me up with so much Novocaine that it squirts out my ears, and it doesn't do a goddamn thing to me.

He responds "Don't be silly. You can't be resistant to Novocaine."

I can see this is going to be a fun visit.

So, of course, he sticks this needle the size of a harpoon in my gums and starts wriggling it around. but he's still glancing over his shoulder at the game while he's doing it. Twice, the needle scrapes on something hard - under my gums - probably bone. With a needle in your gums, it's hard to say anything without risking further injury, so I'm raising my left hand, and when he finally notices (because I'm shaking it in front of his face, obstructing his view of the television), he stops and says "It can't be hurting yet, this shot is to make it not hurt!"

Idiot.

So, I'm telling him "Novocaine takes like fifteen minutes to start working, and that's when you're not immune to it! And you're digging all around in there. Can you stop watching the TV when you have a needle in my mouth at least?"

His response? "Now, now, sport. I'm the dentist. I think I know what I'm doing."

There is, and was, by the way, no quicker way to earn my utter hatred and loathing than to call me "Chief," "Sport," or "Little Buddy." I've long ago given up on trying to politely ask this guy to quit that. I think he even called my mom "Sport" once. It was like he had Tourette's - except that most people with Tourette's aren't retarded.

So... anyway... after a bit, my mouth is feeling very not-numb. Maybe a little tingly. So, I insist that the stuff's not working. I finally manage to flag over a dental assistant, who goes and gets my mom. My mother comes in and verifies that yes, indeed, I'm immune to Novocaine. She then announces that if it's going to be a while, she's just going to go do some shopping, and can she leave me here?

Great. As soon as he gets rid of the rest of the witnesses, then he can finish me off and dispose of my corpse in time for halftime, or whatever the fuck baseball has.

So... he has the assistant bring over some Xylocaine or something, which I've only used once at this point, and which he had the whole damn time, and he repeats the process of preventing me from having pain by scraping a giant needle around inside my gums and squirting burning fluid into them. At least this time, it makes my gums a little numb. Almost so numb that it's hard to feel where the needles went in.

So... anyway, he gets started on my tooth. And he's drilling, and drilling, and drilling. I'm beginning to wonder if he's hoping to find Uranium in there, or if he's forgotten I'm just in for a filling, and he's giving me a root canal instead. Needless to say, this shit hurts like crazy already, and he keeps glancing over his shoulder, while he's working, to see the goddamn baseball game.

Finally, at one point, when he glances at the game, I guess the guy has either hit the ball, or missed the ball, or something else of vital importance to this asshat's betting pool, because... and I am not making this up... he makes that "punching" motion that guys make when they are pumped up about something. Except that he does this with the hand that is in my mouth, drilling on my tooth, and this causes him to drill a hole into my cheek.

So, I grab his arm, and yank his hand out of my mouth, and begin spitting blood everywhere. The guy has the nerve to tell me to hold still, because "You don't want to be wiggling around while a dentist's got a drill in your mouth, sport! Ha ha!"

Motherfucker.

So... I explain to him that he has drilled a hole where no filling need go... my cheek, and he looks and discovers that, surprise! I seem to be correct! "Sorry about that, chief," he says... "We'll just be more careful, huh?"

At this point, I'm wishing that I had a baseball bat. So I tell him that if he watches the game while drilling on me, I'm going to tell my mother that he drilled a hole in my cheek while watching television. I also explain that I once watched my mother hit a man so hard that he flew into the air and landed on the top of his head, with his jaw broken in seven places. This is absolutely true, by the way. Also, this guy has met my mother, and is aware that she is... shall we say... somewhat unreasonable when aroused to anger - which can happen at any moment.

So... he starts in again, this time promising to be more careful, and with the television off. He still keeps calling to an assistant in the next area to tell him what the score is.

By this time, he's been drilling for quite a while, and gods know whether he's even doing it right, or what he's drilled besides my cheek. For all I know, he's not even working on the right tooth. The anesthetic was barely working to begin with, and now I have a hole in my cheek that hurts like fuck. Now... I just want this over with as soon as possible, so I'm trying to just let him finish. But finally, it just hurts too much, so I raise my left hand to let him know I want a break.

Needless to say, he doesn't stop. So I raise it higher, and wave it a little. Now... I'm trying to do this without moving anything but my arm, because there's a jackass with a drill stuck in my tooth. He does not stop. So I wave more frantically, and carefully make a "MMRRRGNNGH!" noise.

He says "Oh, it doesn't hurt that much."

So I wave my hand a lot more, and say, "ffRgh! MMMFLRggh! GGRRRNF!" which if translated would mean something like "The heck it doesn't, get that drill out of my mouth!" Unfortunately, it's hard to talk through a drill and a pound of cotton.

He says, "How about I just work on you a little longer? It can't possibly hurt, with all the anesthetic I gave you."

I repeat the waving, and frantic eye widening, and mrgle mrgle mrph noises. I am now approaching panic, because this hurts like civil war era medicine. And he says, and I am not making this up, "Aww... if it really hurt that much, you could do a better job of convincing me than that."

I lost it. I bunched up my right fist into a wad with the approximate density of a neutron star, carefully angled my body, and caught him under the chin with an uppercut so perfect that his jaws clicked together, he bashed his head on the worklight over the dental chair, and the drill went flying out of my mouth. Did you know that dentist's drills actually turn themselves off immediately if the dentist loses control of their fingers? It's good to know.

It actually dazed him enough that he fell over backwards. I started ripping that stupid dentist bib off, and hauled back my fist again, and shouted into his face, "Did that hurt? How about I stop when I'm good and ready! How about I work on you a little longer! Huh?!?" I'm spitting bloody cotton in all directions by this point.

Now... keep in mind... I'm a short, nerdy, quiet fat kid who cries easily. And I've just taught this six-foot tall grown man what "glass jaw" means. I'm wondering if he figured that if the twelve-year-old hits that hard, that he wouldn't want to get socked by his mom. Maybe he's worried about getting on the news at this point. he actually called his partner in, and had him finish doing the filling.

The other guy did a good job. He confided in me that he didn't even like baseball.

So... my mom finally returns. I'm still pissed off, and my face hurts. The first guy complains that I wasn't "a very good patient," and that I "won't be getting a lollipop," that time.

Really. I am not making this up. I muttered something about "Lollipops... good policy. You give those out so I'll get cavities and have to come back so you can finish me off, right?"

I explained the incident to my mother, and she did threaten to snatch the guy bald-headed. But then she smacked me for "Not behaving."

Man... I swear... to this day, if I see that so-called dentist, he's gonna need a dentist.

How to cure arachnophobia in one easy primal scream

When I was younger, I was afraid of, among other things, spiders. Actually, I was afraid of everything, but spiders were on the list.

Normally, when you have a deep-seated fear of something, traumatic exposure to the object of fear makes it worse. Perversely, I believe there are times when you are confronted with the object of your fear in such an over-the-top fashion that you actually explode the brain cells in charge of making you phobic, and they die screaming, so that you are no longer afraid of that particular thing.

Here is how I got over my fear of spiders.

Now... in my defense, I've been bitten by so many spiders that you can probably make antivenin out of my blood. Hell... I've been bitten by so many damn spiders that I can probably spit flesh-dissolving poison. I don't know why. I'm just lucky, I suppose. They fall down my shirt, crawl into my pants leg. I stick my feet under counters and into hidden webs. If I fall out of a tree, I'll land in a spider web. If I am walking down a forest path, behind ten other, taller people, I will walk face-first into some venomous little web-swinger. They say that spiders rarely bite, even when offended. All one has to do is touch me, and it instantly sinks it's teeny fangs in to the hilt, and if they can't break the skin (most spiders cannot), I swear they actually gnaw on me, while cursing angrily.

I grew up in South Florida, which I swear has more interesting spiders than anywhere else in North America. The only place you can go for more interesting and terrifying spiders is Australia, where all critters are apparently measured in how many hundreds of times more deadly they are than a King Cobra. Is that a unit of measurement? King Cobra toxicity? Is that like those animals, like Piranha, fire-ants, army ants and carrion beetles - who are measured according to how quickly they can skeletonize a cow?

So... one night, when I was maybe sixteen or so (I'd just hit puberty - my life sucks sometimes, but my late puberty is another tale of woe), I woke up at about three or four in the morning. I don't even know why I woke up. I just suddenly opened my eyes in the darkened room, facing the ceiling, for no particular reason. It was like I sensed something. I didn't have my glasses on, so everything was blurry, but there was a dot in the middle of my field of vision that seemed to be getting larger.

I thought, despite the fact that I usually came to full wakefulness instantly, that perhaps I was having some weird sleep-related visual artifact or something. So I just laid there for a moment, watching this dot swell to encompass most of my field of vision. Suddenly, the dot was shaped just like an enormous spider! Wasn't that intere....

PLOP!

The "dot" was a huge hairy wolf spider, almost the size of a tarantula, that had been precariously navigating upside-down across my ceiling. I didn't even know wolf spiders could do that!

The thing hit me right between the eyes, with an audible and stinging smack.

Needless to say, I did what any sixteen-year-old red-blooded American male would do. I screamed like a girl, and shot out of bed clawing at my face, dancing on my tippy-toes in terror.

You see, the best part was that the spider was a lady spider - covered with about fifty zillion baby spiders, which were now running all over my face, in my hair, and in my bed.

So, I hopped around like my ass was on fire for a moment, and then found myself looking for the enormous momma spider. That's the last thing I wanted to lose track of at that moment, I assure you - if I hadn't been able to find the damn thing I'd probably have slept on the kitchen table for a week - except that would have put me at the mercy of the palmetto bugs. In case you don't know what a palmetto bug is, it's a cockroach about the size of a Toyota station wagon.

Well, the mother spider was not hard to find. She was running around my bed, like she was crazy. I leaned in closer, amazed, as I realized that she was running around picking up baby spiders. When she'd get close, they actually seemed to run back up onto her, very quickly. It was hard to see what was going on, without my glasses, but it was almost as if, wherever she passed, the baby spiders just disappeared and reappeared on her back.

After a moment, both the mother spider and I were sitting still, staring at one another. The poor thing was just sitting there, covered with whatever little babies weren't lost or smooshed, and I swear she looked like she was panting like an athlete who'd just run the five hundred meter.

It was then that I noticed that a couple of her legs were broken off in the struggle.

Well... now I felt like a heel. Poor critter falls off a ceiling, lands on a screaming nutjob, loses a hefty percentage of offspring and legs, that's just gotta suck.

So... I carefully got a big piece of paper and coaxed her onto it. I was being ultra-careful, partly because I didn't want to hurt it any more than it already was, and partly because those kinds of big hairy spiders jump, and the last thing I wanted was a repeat performance of the face-full-of-spiders trick. I managed to get her outside into the yard, where she promptly disappeared into the grass.

I went upstairs and took a shower, to clean spider legs and goo and smooshed baby spider bits out of my hair (ahhh... the joys of long cascading hair that goes down to the middle of your back - ask me why I shave my head nowadays).

After that, I went back to sleep. I contemplated how that had to be possibly the worst experience an arachnophobe could have, and yet, by the end of it, I was so busy worrying about the mother spider that I forgot to hyperventilate and shiver in terror.

After that, spiders really just didn't freak me out any more. It's not that I'll pick them up, or give them hugs or anything. They still bite me on contact. But I kinda got over the phobia at that point.

In a way, humorous as this story is, I sort of feel like I grew as a person because of the incident. Again, at the expense of the creature involved, but, life's touch when you're a hairy, ceiling-crawling, urban mother of four thousand.

How to fit half a city block's worth of smoke into a bedroom

When I was a teenager, someone gave my mother a book by George Hayduke, called "Getting Even." For anyone who hasn't seen these books, they are incredibly funny... provided you have a penis, are fairly immature, and are the sort of person who laughs at the Three Stooges. They contain all sorts of juvenile pranks - most of which, if you have even a high-school understanding of physics, are exaggerated, embellished, or made up out of whole cloth.

Needless to say, my mother handled the thing like it was a dead cockroach. There's something about having two X chromosomes that automatically lets you know when something is puerile, dangerous, and stupid.

Naturally, at the time, I thought it was the greatest book in the entire universe. I was fifteen or so, nerdy, immature, and in possession of only one precious X chromosome. I theorize that the reason Y chromosomes are shorter is because they are missing the parts of human DNA that tell us how to find a gallon of milk in the refrigerator, and that tell us we should never try to set fire to anything without a damn good reason.

That missing part of genetic matter is clearly the one that contains the code that would otherwise prevent a normal, rational adult from ever doing anything that prompts them to say "Hey! Bubba! Watch this!" immediately before inspiring their own obituary.

Anyway, one of the entries in this glorious book, clearly written with the adolescent male in mind (which is basically about how to do mean things to people who have offended you, but whom you are afraid to just punch in the nose) was "How to make a smoke bomb."

The article claimed that a pound of the substance described could cover a city block in thick smoke.

My gods. I had to make this. Just think of the possibilities... why.. why... could... well... cover a city block in smoke! Mwa ha ha!

Basically, it said to mix two parts ammonium chloride (which you used to be able to get in children's chemistry sets, before they figured out that chemistry sets in the hands of anyone under the age of thirty, or who have a Y chromosome are dangerous when fully stocked), with three parts of sugar. Perhaps it was the other way around - I don't remember.

It said that you should carefully melt the sugar and ammonium chloride together over low heat, until it was a single gooey mass, and then leave it to cool. It then went further, and said that the resulting substance would be easier to light if you pushed match-heads into it while it was still warm and gooey.

So... I went to the local science hobby store, and convinced the proprietor to sell me a whole lot of ammonium chloride. He was a little suspicious, but not as suspicious as he was the time I bought a half pound of saltpeter to make black powder and fireworks with.

Anyone who would sell chemicals to a fifteen-year old boy is completely irresponsible. You'd be better off selling it to terrorists, who, presumably, at least know what they are doing, and who are, I presume, okay with setting themselves on fire or blowing themselves up, as long as their smoking bodies land somewhere near God, Allah, or whichever other deity will then say "Dammit, I thought I told you primates to be nice to each other!"

So... I get home, and smuggle my prize into my bedroom. At the time, I had a nice glass-topped desk to play with my various chemistry-set (for which read "make your own fireworks") projects.

Educational my ass. Those things are supposed to teach kids chemistry. My idea of chemistry came from Wile E. Coyote, not Mr. Wizard. I used to make little robots out of the molecular modeling kits - they were like tinkertoys!

Anyway, I carefully melted the sugar and ammonium chloride down. I'd decided that I didn't want to do anything too dangerous, especially since I hadn't performed this particular procedure before - and some of my smaller experiments had already resulted in some terrifying smells and strange burnt spots on my flesh from time to time.

Nope... I was going to be very responsible and proceed with caution. I decided to make only a half pound of this stuff.

All went well. The sugar melted down and partly caramelized, and the whole thing looked great. Didn't even catch fire or anything.

I let it cool for a couple of minutes, but remembered that before it cooled completely, I was supposed to embed match-heads in it, to help with lighting it later. So... I snipped the heads off some matches, and using forceps, began gingerly forcing them into the mass of smoke-bomb material.

Did you know that when sugar is hot enough to still be semi-liquid, that it is also hot enough to ignite a match head?

About a second after the first one went in, as I was preparing to insert the second, the first match head bust into flame, and the entire block of stuff instantly went "FFFOOOMF!" and in about a split-second, the entire block had converted it's mass into - you guessed it - enough smoke to cover half a city block.

Except this was in my bedroom, which was approximately ten feet by seventeen feet (it was a converted garage).

The entire room was immediately filled with thick, choking whitish smoke that reduced visibility to absolute zero. It didn't smell good, either. I inhaled a whole bunch, because it startled me. So I found myself staggering around, disoriented, trying to find the door.

So... I get to the far end of the room (tripping over more furniture than I even knew I had, and getting myself even more turned around), and fumble around until I feel a doorknob.

Now... my bedroom had two doors - one leading outside, into the back yard (the ultimate teenager's bedroom - concrete floors that didn't squeak, on the opposite side of the house from my mother's room, and with a door leading outside!).

The other door, of course, led into the rest of the house.

Now... I could not breathe, and didn't know for sure if I'd set fire to the house or not, although I didn't feel any heat. So I had to open a door before I passed out. Did I have the right door, in my blinded and disoriented state?

Just as I was about to turn the knob, from the other side of the door, I heard the voice of Nauni, my sainted grandmother, asking, "What are you doing in there?"

What was I doing?!?

"Nothing!!!" I croaked out, in perfect swallowed-a-burning frog tones of voice.

"Oh. Okay, sweetie!" she said. I love my grandmother. To this day, I'm sure she knew damn well when us kids were up to something, but that she liked to warn us that we were under supervision while also giving us a chance at plausible deniability, and to hide the evidence of whatever we were stopping doing that instant now that we were caught.

So... I lurched to the other door, flung it open, and staggered out into blessed fresh air. Well... not fresh really. I lived in Miami, and anyway, when I opened the door, the smoke billowed out along with me.

I caught my breath, and eyes watering, went back into the room to make sure there was no fire. My grandmother was in the house, after all, so I couldn't just leave, run away, change my name, and catch a bus to Alaska before my mother came home, which would otherwise have been the plan. My mother was never a reasonable woman at the best of times, and coming home to a house filled with smoke - or burnt to the ground - would have ended in my eulogy. My eulogy or an unmarked grave.

Fortunately, the stuff had peacefully converted to smoke and not fire. Or perhaps there just wasn't enough oxygen left. I'd done this little procedure on a glass surface, and for good measure, the block of good in it's metal dish was on a slab of concrete. So, no real damage.

Except for the smoke. Fortunately, since I know better than anyone what happens when coyotes play with matches or chemicals or tools, I'd had a towel stuffed under the door to the rest of the house before I even began.

So... I got my fan, positioned it in the door, and blew the rest of the smoke out of the house.

I staggered back inside, went to the kitchen, and got something to drink. My grandmother asked me if I was okay - she said I looked a little funny. I told her I was fine, and she gave me a suspicious look, but went back to whatever she'd been doing. I thank my lucky stars that my grandmother had no sense of smell whatsoever. She'd been smoking Pall Malls so long that you could have stuffed a dead skunk under the living room couch and she wouldn't have smelled anything. It's not that I was afraid she'd kill me. My mother would have killed me. No... my grandmother would have just given me that armor-piercing "I'm very disappointed," look for a second or two, and I'd need therapy to recover. I swear, she could inflict more guilt with a single twitch of an eyelash than a whole army of normal Jewish or Italian grandmothers could normally do with a whole day of nagging.

It was then that I glanced out the window and saw that the whole backyard - no... the whole neighborhood was covered in - as promised - thick smoke.

I ran back to my room, yanked in the fan, and went into the living room and pretended to read a book. A little while later, my grandmother came back down, wondering why the hell there were fire trucks circling the block. When the knock on the door came, she assured the confused and irritated-looking fireman that no, our house was on fire. She called out to me, "Are you doing anything with fire, sweetie?"

I croaked out, from behind my book, "No (gasp, choke) I'm not (gasp wheeze) burning anything, Nauni. Who's at the door?"

The fireman went away, still looking suspicious. By the time they'd gotten there, the smoke had dispersed all over the block. They pestered some of the people in the other houses, and then eventually left, presumably to rest and relax, or perhaps fight a real fire set by some other teenager who tried mixing George Hayduke with Mr. Wizard.

At least, on this occasion, I kept my eyebrows.

How to step on a nail

Once, when I was a kid, maybe ten or so, I went to visit my Dad, in Connecticut. He and I used to love hiking, and he had about five acres of heavily-wooded land. Somewhere on this piece of land, there was supposedly an old shed or outbuilding, or at least the foundation of it. We decided to go looking for it. He hadn't lived there terribly long at that point, I don't think (maybe I was even a little younger), and he was an airline pilot, so he was away from home a lot, and hadn't gotten to look at every inch of the property.

So... we went out traipsing around in the trees, looking for this thing.

Well... there was no sign of it until I stubbed my foot on something. A big old board popped up a little bit out of the pine needles and leaves and whatnot underfoot.

"Hey, look," I said, "there's boards and stuff under here. Maybe this is that shed?"

Dad took a closer look, and sure enough, there were lots of boards all around. Well, I took a step back, and felt something catch my shoe and poke my foot a little bit.

Darn it, I thought, I must have stepped on a nail. Sure enough, my shoe was caught, but it didn't really hurt, so I figured that it must not have gone too far... just poked through the sole of my shoe a little. There was no pain, for which I was happy. The last thing you want to do is ram a nail into your foot. You'd be amazed at how much feet hurt when you do things to them. Professional torturers love feet, because they hurt a lot.

So... I go to pull my shoe off the board, and it won't come off. Darn it, I'm thinking. My shoe is really stuck on this nail! So I tugged harder, but I just couldn't get the damn shoe to come loose. By this point, my dad's walked off a little bit, so I tell him to wait a minute, my shoe is stuck on something, and I have to take it off.

That's when I discover that I can't get my foot out of my shoe, either. Which is odd. Why would I not be able to get my foot out of the shoe?

Answer... because my foot was nailed to the shoe. And the board under it.

That's about when it started to hurt. Oops.

Now... I don't know that this is exactly true, because my mother, let us say... embellishes the truth, but she's told me that my father faints if he sees blood. I don't know about that, but when I told him my foot was nailed to the shoe and the board, and started crying, he did start looking a little pale. I now know that this is because he was worried about my well-being, but at the time, I had this terrified image in my head that he would faint, and I'd be nailed to a board, and I'd die of sepsis.

So, I yanked my foot off the board (don't do that by the way, it's bad for you). I felt like I had a moment of truth - in that split second, it was yank the foot off the nail or die while my father lay helpless and passed out, where he would be devoured by a passing bear, and it would be all my fault.

Fortunately, mom's tales of my father's wooziness were exaggerated (always take what divorced parents say about each other with a grain of salt), and he showed no signs of fainting. Thanks mom, you got me all worked up. He helped me get back to the house, and made appropriate comforting noises, peppered with a judicious amount of "now let's not act like this is the end of the world."

Now... the best part is that the puncture, which had gone deep enough through my foot to actually tent up the skin on top, closed up tight, so it looked like a little red dot with just a bit of blood. Of course, the damn thing had gone almost through my foot, and I felt it grate between the bones when I yanked it off (trust me, you do not want to experience that sensation - it squicks me just thinking about it, to this day). So, I now had this horrendously painful deep puncture, which looked like a spot on my foot. On top of everything else, I had callouses like a quarter of an inch thick at the time - I used to go barefoot everywhere. So this injury looked minor.

So... basically, my dad thought I was carrying on for nothing. In his defense, I was one of those kids who cried if a TV show got canceled, or someone looked at me funny, or if I noticed I was fat, or if I had to hang something up in a dark closet (dark meaning a closet with less than five 100-watt light bulbs). I was always crying and making a fuss over some damn thing when I was little, so I wouldn't have believed me either.

Let's just say that the incident was character-building. I hobbled around on a foot that felt like it had a railroad spike in it. And then, of course, being a kid, I discovered that being crippled by my terrible injury ate into time I could be playing "Lawn dart panic," with friends, so I basically just bit the bullet.

By the way... "Lawn Dart Panic," is where you throw a lawn dart (or three, or five, depending on how many kids you have, and how many hands they have left after playing cute childhood games) straight up into the air as hard as you can, and then try to run away before the lawn darts can skewer you in the brain, or some other vestigial organ. Keep in mind, I was a kid in the seventies, and lawn dart back then did not have safety in mind. They basically were a metal spike with a big weight on it, with vanes behind to help them fly better. If you through a 1970's lawn dart at someone, it would probably go through their whole body, possibly nailing them to a tree.

The moral of this story is that, speaking as a kid who cried and freaked out a lot, even though I didn't realize it at the time, most of it was just performance art. When there was no audience (or when having an audience was inconvenient) it's amazing how high one's pain threshold can go. Also... when I was in situations where I expected someone else to save me, I felt a lot more helpless and afraid than when I knew (or thought) I should be saving myself.

At the time, I honestly thought my dad would be unable to help me, so I pulled my own impaled foot off a nail. I didn't even make all that much fuss (by my standards at the time), and only made a fuss afterwards. If I hadn't known that he wasn't actually going to faint (Thanks Mom! Grrr!) I'd probably have carried on, and made him have to deal with it.

Marijuana, Roto-rooter, and you...

After my mom divorced my stepfather, I guess I was maybe fourteen, my mom's friend Michelle, and her son Curtis, who I'd been friends with for a while came to live with us. I was pretty ecstatic... Curtis was about one of the coolest people I'd ever know, and one of my best friends as a kid.

Well... we were both like the same age - I think I might have been a year older than Curtis, but he was way more mature. This is not saying much, as we were both teenage boys, and didn't hit puberty until I was sixteen. Curtis hit puberty at like eleven... in spades. He was over six feet tall by the time he was twelve, and was like 6'6" when he was thirteen. He looked like he was eighteen.

I think in a zillion ways, we were like night and day. He was tall and athletic, and easy-going, and funny, and had a million friends. I was short, fat, nerdy, and neurotic. I was anti-drug, anti-smoking, anti-alcohol, and didn't really do anything fun. Curtis liked the Beatles, and smoked marijuana. I don't know how the hell we got along so well, but it worked.

Anyway... despite my anti-drug position (as a kid, I thought Marijuana was a drug), and despite the fact that Florida weed all smelled like burning garbage when you lit it up, Curtis talked me into engaging in an illicit project - growing a pot plant. He appealed to my love of science and my dislike for authority. That was a surefire thing. I was in.

This would have to be completely covert, of course. I don't think his mom was particularly psycho about pot, but she didn't approve of him smoking it. My mother, and I assure you this is an understatement, would have gone through the stratosphere. No... she would have gone into space, grabbed a nickel-iron meteorite, and come back down to earth and beat us to death with it.

In other words, we had to grow this pot plant.

Of course, we didn't have any seeds. You'd think that the skunk-ass weed available in South Florida at the time would have been all seeds, but no... of course not. Probably the people he got it from (friends who grew and traded their own, never dealers), took all the seeds out.

So... we bought birdseed. And lots of it. At the time, you could sometimes find birdseed that had hemp seeds in it. It wasn't supposed to, and even when it did, the birdseed was supposed to be cooked before packaging in order to kill any hemp seeds present, but I figured that if we picked out enough of them, we might get a live one.

So... we spent hours one day, sifting through all this birdseed, until we had maybe forty or fifty hemp seeds. I'm surprised the back yard didn't look like it was paved with chia pet after we were done tossing all the excess normal seeds.

We planted all the seeds in various flowerpots, watching and watering carefully. Out of all those seeds, sure enough, two actually sprouted. They weren't terribly healthy, and one of the seedlings wilted and died almost immediately. We transferred the survivor carefully out of the pots into a miniature hydroponic culture set that I had... it had come with some "learn about science" kit that someone had given me for Christmas or my birthday. With careful care, proper space-age nutrients, and with a grow light I had lying around for some of the other non-illicit plants I used to grow (I was a nerd - I cultivated Peruvian violets for a couple of years), our little plant began to actually live.

Curtis named the plant "Herbie," and when he was big enough to recognize as a pot plant, we transferred him into some enriched sandy soil in a little pot ( a pot-pot?) We built a pile of fake boxes taped together, so that it looked like a pile of storage boxes, but the whole pile was hollow, and hid Herbie and the grow-light behind this contraption into Curtis's closet.

When Herbie was about a foot tall, he was covered with pretty purplish-red hairs. He was a gorgeous, if slightly spindly little plant. When Curtis saw the red hairs, he declared that Herbie was obviously a high-quality Sinsemilla plant, and was overjoyed. Truth-be-told, Herbie was probably industrial hemp, and we'd have had to make a joint the size of a pine tree in order to get high off of it.

It was at this point in Herbie's existence that Curtis's mom discovered our little project. I think she walked in to his partly-open bedroom to ask her son a question, and caught him fussing over the plant. The jig was up. Michelle was annoyed enough that we were growing a pot plant... but was extra, super upset because if my mother had been the one to discover this little endeavor, she'd have gone psycho-death-machine on all three of us. I remember Michelle saying "Marijuana is illegal!" maybe once, and "Do you know what would happen if Joanne found out?" about seventy times.

So, to make her point, Michelle ripped Herbie out of his dirt, stuffed him into the commode, and flushed him until he was gone.

I'm guessing she wasn't thinking too clearly. Herbie wasn't gone, of course. He was in the pipe, and he may have looked fragile, but let's face it folks, the main reason people cultivated hemp wasn't necessarily to get high - it's because hemp contains really tough and durable fibers. So... Herbie plugged up the plumbing, but good. He laughed at the plunger. He resisted all the advances made by our toilet snake. He laughed in the face of Drano.

So... now, we had a stopped-up toilet. A really, really stopped-up toilet. It was about 3PM, and my mother would be home around 5PM. She'd respond to the plumbing being stopped up (again - another story) with nearly as much delight as a pot plant. The thought of her discovering both problems at the same time was something we didn't think carried a high chance of survival for the three of us.

So... Michelle called Roto-rooter, and somehow convinced them it was a dire emergency. They had a guy out to our house in maybe a half hour. Of course, they probably had our address memorized, and possibly kept a truck on standby for us. During the course of a single year, our septic tank had exploded when yard chemicals leaked into it, the pipes had been clogged variously by a can of hair spray accidentally flushed down it, a motor-oil-soaked rag, a pair of children's underwear flushed by one of Michelle's friends, and some gravel from a fishtank.

So... we're anxiously watching the clock, while the Roto-rooter guy works, hoping and praying that we can have it all fixed and have him out of there before my mother gets home.

Tick... tick.... (gurgle sploosh) tock, tock.

So... just as my mother pulls into the driveway, the Roto-rooter guy announces "I think I've got it! It'll just be a minute!"

We're now really biting fingernails. My mom comes in the front door, and wants to know why Roto-rooter is there. I stop to distract her, while Michelle deals with the plumber. While I'm talking to her, I can see, behind my mother, that the Roto-rooter man is holding up the bedraggled, but still clearly-recognizable remains of Herbie, and is saying "Geez, lady, looks like some kind of weird plant. Did someone flush this, or do you think you have stuff growing through your pipes or something?"

My mother turns around, just then, and looks straight at Herbie. There is no sense of recognition in her eyes at all.

Michelle assured my mother that none of us knew what had happened, and that it looked like maybe we had damaged pipes, and that stuff was growing into them. She explained that she'd taken care of the Roto-rooter call, and would pay to have the pipes checked, so that my mother wouldn't have to deal with all that hassle, in light of the previous plumbing problems. The whole time, Mr. Roto Rooter is holding up this filthy pot plant and looking perplexed.

Amazingly, my mother went along with all this, and did not appear to be suspicious at all. We escaped alive.

That was the end of my foray into illegal drug cultivation as a kid. To my knowledge, Curtis left it up to the professionals after that as well.

Next time I need a scrotum tumor removed, I'm doing it myself

Warning: This story is about having a tumor removed by nitwits from a sensitive part of the anatomy. It contains words like scrotum, testicles, and "OUCH! GODDAMIT! FUCK! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?" If this bothers you, don't read any further.

Each time I get medical attention for something I don't think I can handle myself, after receiving the medical assistance, I decide that in future, if the same thing comes up again, I'll just do it myself. At this point, the only thing I think I'll go to the hospital for is to have a severed limb reattached. This story is an example of why.

Some of the people in my family, including myself, have a tendency toward getting small, (usually) benign fatty skin tumors. They're generally harmless, but ugly, and you don't want to keep anything with the word "tumor" in it, because sometimes they decide that peaceful co-existence is not as much fun as migrating to your lymph nodes and killing you.

When I get these somewhere that is easy for me to see or get to, I usually get out a scalpel or sharp exacto knife, and carefully remove it myself. Don't act all horrified - it's not brain surgery. Usually, when I get them, it's on my face, around my eyes, but I'm very careful, I assure you, and it's easy to see what I'm doing in the mirror. I've never had a problem with this. I'm always careful to get the whole thing.

Their favorite place to form seems to be in a damaged hair follicle. Well... with my incredible Coyote luck, one day, I was zipping up my fly, and ripped out a pubic hair out of my scrotum. This is not the end of the world, but it was an ouch. I was late for work. I then got stuck in traffic on a really hot day, in my latest vehicle-with-no-air-conditioning. I have never, once, in my life, owned a car that the air conditioning worked in for more than two weeks. When I buy a car, two things immediately happen - the air conditioning stops working, and the parking brake breaks or falls off. I am not making this up. I don't even bother to try and fix them, because they just die immediately. Anyway, in the hot car, in Georgia heat, this hair follicle got infected.

It got better, or so I thought, but a few months later, a big white lump suddenly formed in there. At the time, I didn't have all the stuff I needed to deal with it, and frankly, I was a little squeamish about cutting down there. Sure... I'll put an exacto knife next to my eye, but was cautious about my junk. I plead "Y Chromosomal Judgment Disorder." Besides, sometimes these things will go away on their own. I'll do this self-healing meditation thing my grandmother taught me (I think she saw it on Donahue), and they'll shrink and go away. Possibly they would do this without the intervention of Donahue.

I guess this one was holding out for Liberace though, and he was dead by then. It rapidly got bigger. After a while, it was the size of a large English pea. Now, as I've mentioned, these things are pretty harmless. But it was big, and ugly, and on my nuts. My partner at the time finally started nagging me about it, and not wanting to fool around with me any more. They told me that if I wasn't going to do something about it, or go to the doctor, that there would be no more heavy petting until this changed.

By this point, the thing had gotten out of hand. There was a great big artery leading to it - apparently, sometimes, tumors can shanghai nearby blood-vessels or something. So I'm figuring that maybe this requires the assistance of a professional. I have this image that I'll go to cut on it (and it's already much bigger than any of these I've ever had before), and I'll sever this little artery, and it'll be gore-city and I won't be able to see what I'm doing amid all the blood, and my nuts will fall off and everyone will make fun of me, and I'll end up on a "news of the stupid" website, with a headline like "Idiot tries to operate on own scrotum, now will never love again."

Now... keep in mind. At this point, I am working for the University of Georgia Printing Department. Not to put to fine a point on it, they paid crap. I didn't have a lot of money for this sort of thing. And taking time off work would mean getting further into the hole. So I attempt to make a Saturday appointment at my doctor's office. There were, I think, two doctor's offices I could go to, and the other one was unaffordable.

I explain that I have a small, benign, fatty skin tumor that needs to be removed. I explain that they run in my family, and are not particularly dangerous. I explain that it just needs to be taken out, it is very small, and that it is on a private portion of my anatomy. I am not shy about this sort of thing, but I am in the South, so I ask the receptionist if she needs to know specifics, or if she would prefer to have me explain to a male attendant. She assures me that nothing will bother her. So I tell her it is on my scrotum. She then acts disgusted and offended, and says "I didn't need to know that."

I can already tell, this will be fun.

Now... just so you will know, when you have something like that removed, you don't test it and then remove it. There would be no point. You take the whole thing off, and then you send it to be tested to see if it was malignant (which, if it is, you then seek further medical care, and if it wasn't, it's finished with.)

So... simple right? I explain what I have, and that I want it removed, and can I be scheduled for a biopsy/removal. They assure me this is no problem - I'll come in, they'll give me a local, and zip, I'm outta there, total fees will come to fifty for the visit, and they'll have to let me know how much the procedure will cost, but probably not much more.

So... I show up on Saturday with my roommate, partner, and then companion in life, G.. When I check in, the lady at the desk says "Yes, you do have an appointment. Now, what are you in here for?" I ask if this is not already there in my file, because I explained when I made the appointment, that I was in to have a small tumor removed. This is important, because this is the sort of thing you schedule in advance. She says "Oh, it's probably in there, but I can't see that. Where is this tumor?"

Now... not to be prejudicial about people in the Bible Belt... I'm actually trying to be sensitive and courteous to people of different upbringings here... but this woman has a big cross, giant beehive hair, and looks like she stepped out of the fifties. She appears to be a conservative member of the Ladies Church Muffin Club. So, I ask, "It's in a sensitive area. Are you okay with me telling you, or would you prefer I speak to a male attendant?" She snaps her gum and says "Don't be silly, this is a doctor's office, and I've seen and heard it all. You got no business being in this business if you can't handle this sort of thing!"

So, I explain that the growth is on my scrotum. She goes "I'm sorry? Could you speak up?" So, louder, I say, "It's on my scrotum." Again, she says, "I'm sorry, hon, I'm a little deaf... could you say again? It's where?" So finally, I say loudly, "IT'S ON MY SCROTUM!"

A lady standing next to me moved away, giving me a dirty look, and the receptionist looks shocked and says "Well, I didn't need to know that!" and leaves in a huff. G, bless her heart, growled "Grow the hell up, lady, what are, you, ninety?" at the patient who backed away.

So... We wait for like two hours past the time of my appointment.

Finally, a nice, polite, genial doctor comes out to get me, and ushers me into a waiting room. He asks, "So... what seems to be the trouble?"

This is not a good sign. I'm thinking that he should already know what seems to be the trouble. I made the appointment for a procedure, not a checkup, and I've also explained it to Miss "I didn't need to know that," in the reception area.

So, I explain the situation, and ask, "So, can we remove this, then?"

And the doctor says, "Well, let's have a look at it, and see if it really needs to come off."

No. It doesn't need to come off. I've really been hoping I can keep it. I'll be so relieved if I discover that it's benign! I already know the damn thing is 99.999% likely to be harmless.

I explain patiently and politely that I don't want it removed because I am afraid it is dangerous. I explain that I want it removed because it is unsightly, and in case my simple wish to have it removed isn't enough, here is my lady friend who will attest that she thinks it is unsightly as well. We do not want to know, to paraphrase Paula Poundstone, if it is the sort of tumor that has rights. I just want it removed. I tell him, "Since a biopsy will involve removing it anyway, this should be a no-brainer, and that's what I made the appointment for."

So... the doctor says, "I'll really need to see it first, before we can make a determination."

Now, before allowing myself to get annoyed, I remind myself that he is a doctor, and part of the ethical dictates of his profession is that he, not the patient, needs to determine whether a medical procedure is necessary. For all he knows, I've got a malignant carcinoma with an eyeball growing out of it, and it's not an outpatient thing. I realize that he is probably doing his job, and I'm just being "Type A."

So, I drop my pants, so he can see the thing. He kind of tries to look at it without really looking at my genitals. Which is hard, because it is on my scrotum. He then attempts to touch it, without touching my genitals, which is also hard. I have never had this problem before... although I did once have a doctor who touched me more than I wanted him to, when I was eight, and I brained him with an instrument tray.

But this guy is acting like he has a cultural taboo against looking at or touching genitalia (he was Muslim, but that's never made a difference with any other Muslim doctor I've ever had). That's fine for him, but I need a doctor who isn't, because I want this thing gone.

So... he tells me "Yes, we should remove that. It's probably harmless, but I can see why you'd want it gone. We'll have to do a biopsy, but the entire growth will be removed when we do. We'll take it off and send it to the laboratory to make sure everything's okay."

Wow. Ya think? It's amazing... I could have sworn I'd heard similar words, a few moments before. From me.

So, I say, "Great! Thanks. So... will we be getting started soon, because I've already been here a couple hours later than planned."

He says, "Oh no... not today. We'll schedule you an appointment. I don't do outpatient surgeries."

Now I'm annoyed, because that's what I came in for. But I figure, "Okay. He wanted to make an observation and diagnosis first."

So... I make an appointment to come back in. The receptionist has clearly not spoken to the doctor I've just seen, so I explain what I need. I ask her to speak to the doctor, to avoid any confusion. We play the "Where is this tumor?" game again. I then drag the doctor over, to make sure that he explains that I need to have an appointment to have it removed, not examined.

I'm then told that the doctor who does these procedures does not come in on Saturdays. So I'll have to take work off. So, I make an appointment for the following week, and arrange with my boss to take a day off. I couldn't just clear this with my supervisor, who was an angel. I had to deal with the manager of the department, who frankly, I thought was rather a rotten creature. I don't like people who have trouble controlling a smile when they make someone unhappy, or see someone in discomfort, and he was exactly this type of person. So, I had to explain that I needed time off for a doctor's appointment, and he gives me a huge hassle, and wants to know why I need to go to the doctor. I tell him I need to have a tumor removed. He wants to know if it is medically necessary. I tell him that yes, I feel it is necessary to remove cancerous growths when I discover that I have them in my body. He wants to know what makes me think I have a tumor, so I acted as if I were going to unzip my pants, and offered to show him where it was. That definitely flustered him, and I got the day off. He said he'd need documentation from the doctor's office to prove I'd had a procedure. I offered to bring him pictures. We did not have a good rapport.

So... the next week, I get to the doctor's office, and I wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, after about three hours, I'm getting annoyed. Three different people at the receptionists desk play the "What are you here for?" game with me, which, of course, includes the "And where is the growth you want removed?" game as well.

So... finally, I'm called in to the examining room, and the nice, professional-looking guy comes in, in a doctor's coat, looking like Doctor Kildare. "So... what seems to be the trouble?" So, I explain for the umpteenth time, including that the reason for the appointment is to have the thing removed. He says, "Well, let's take a look at it first, before we go cutting on anything, and make sure it's something that needs to be removed. I'm now getting pretty annoyed, but I choke it down. I explain that the other doctor already looked at it before, determined that we should remove it, and that I made this appointment and took time off of work.

He tells me, "Well, he may have seen it, but I haven't."

So... I drop trousers and let him see this thing.

Okay... all my gay friends and people out there on the internet. This is not remotely amusing. This may sound like a porn script, but good porns don't have fatty tumors in them.

He looks at it, nods, and says, "Yep. That will have to come off!"

No shit. It's a frigging skin tumor.

So, I say, "Yup. It sure does. That's why I'm here. So, let's get to it."

And he says, "Oh no. I don't perform those procedures. I'm not a doctor. I'm just Doctor So-and-so's Physician's Assistant. He'll have to schedule you to come in when he gets back."

"Oh...when will he be back? I've already been here for hours," I say.

"He won't be back until next Monday. He's on vacation - went to some gold tournament," he tells me.

Yes. A golf tournament. Really. This is, by the way, something that the office knew about before scheduling my appointment.

I explain that I've already taken work off, that I'm very upset, and that I can't afford to miss work. I also can't afford to keep paying for office visits so that they can make appointments for more office visits. I say that I didn't need to pay $110 dollars to have someone tell me that I should have this thing cut off... I wanted it actually cut off. I insist that I need to be given an appointment when the doctor is actually there, when he is not on a golf tournament, and that when I come in, I want this thing to be removed. I can't afford to take any more time off work.

Keep in mind... my choices for where to go for this procedure are limited. I'm about ready to drive to Atlanta, but I figure that will probably mean starting this whole chuckle-fest over again.

So... we make the appointment. They apologize for the inconvenience. They assure me that next time I come it, it will be snicker-snack, and the tumor-wocky will be slain.

Now... by this time, I can't really afford to take more time off work, so I arrange to come in before work in the morning. I have to do this in the morning, because the doctor only does surgeries in the morning. It's supposed to take only fifteen minutes or so, and I work five minutes away. I arrange to come in a little bit late to work, just in case.

So... I get into the office at 8AM. I'm the only patient there. I wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, it's 9AM, when I'm supposed to be at work, but I've already arranged to come in as late as 10AM if necessary. I pester the receptionist, and explain that I can't afford to take time off work, and ask when the doctor will see me. After a few minutes, I'm ushered into an examination room. By this point, patients have begun to trickle in.

The doctor walks in - he's maybe fifty-five or sixty. Perfect silvery-white hair and mustache. Looks like someone out of a Normal Rockwell painting of a doctor. I figure this is good - he's obviously been in practice a while. So... he asks me.

"So... what seems to be the trouble today? Got that cold that's going around?"

I blink twice, and explain, no, that I'm in to have a tumor removed. That I'm here for a biopsy. That this is what I was scheduled to come in for. That I'm already late, have already been in twice, and that I need to get back to work.

And he says, I am shitting you not, "Well, let's take a look at what you've got there, and if it needs to come off, we can schedule you to come in and..."

And that's about as far as he got before I went ballistic. I explained, very loudly, that I'd already had the runaround, that the thing needed to come off. That I couldn't take time off work. That I was in here to have it removed, not examined, not talked about, and not discussed. He spluttered that he really hadn't been planning on doing a biopsy today, and I retorted that he should take it up with his secretaries, and that I'd already been inconvenienced, and that I was not paying for any more office visits, because I could not afford it. I told him that if I got cancer and died, I'd be sure to tell the reporters that I'd tried to have a simple outpatient procedure that I'd come to this office, and that they'd bungled it.

So... there was a big hustle and bustle, and they arranged to do the thing. So... they usher me into their little mini-surgery room, which is right next to the receptionist's desk. Part of the room is actually used for the office's file storage. Another physician's assistant (really nice guy, though he had a deer-in-the-headlights look), comes in and asks me to get undressed and sit on this little bed/operating table thingy.

So... I get undressed, and the receptionist walks in without knocking to get into the file cabinet, while I'm standing there with my pants off, and leaves the door open. There's like twenty people out in the receptionist's area, including a couple of little old ladies... one who looked deeply offended, and another who winked and blew me a kiss.

I'm not body-shy, but this struck me as a discourtesy. So, I said something like "Umm... excuse me?" to the receptionist. And she says, and I am not making this up... "Oh honey, don't worry, I've seen it all before." This is the same stupid bitch who got offended when I said where the tumor was.

So I said, "Maybe that's so, but maybe all the people in the reception area haven't, and you didn't ask if I'd prefer a male attendant. Maybe I dion't want you in here, or maybe you should knock first."

It's the principle of the thing. So... she says "Gee... soooorry," and leaves in a huff.

So, I get on the table, and the PA paints my crotch up with betadine, and leaves. And he leaves the door open. The table is in plain view of all the people standing in the reception area, crotch-forward. So, I get up, hobble over, and shut the door. Two minutes later, the secretary comes in, without knocking, goes "Eeek! Oh, I'm sorry!" and runs out... not shutting the door properly, so it swings open. I get up again, and shut the door. The PA comes back in after about ten minutes, and says the doctor will be down soon. He leaves, and does not shut the door. Now, I'm getting pissed. I shut it again. A woman standing in the reception area looks at me as I do, and says "Boy! You shoudl shut that damn door, I don't wanna see that!"

That really helped my mood.

So... I wait, and wait, and wait. It's freezing cold and I'm sitting naked in an empty room. The clock is ticking. I'm late for work. I finally get pissed off and put my clothes back on. I go out to call my boss and say I'll need a half day off work after all. The manager is thankfully out of the office that day.... doctor's appointment (ironically, the thing he was going to the doctor for apparently killed him later). My supervisor says not to worry.

So... I get back into the little operating room, and the PA is in there. He wants to know why I've gotten dressed. I bitched him out, and told him I was missing work, that I'd been left naked in a cold room for long enough, that I wanted the goddamn thing off of me, that I'd get undressed when the goddamn doctor was ready to goddamn operate, and to SHUT THE GODDAMN DOOR!

Honestly, sometimes, it pays to stop being reasonable.

So, the doctor comes in, finally, and wants to know why I'm not ready, because he doesn't have all day.

Needless to say, I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and "explained" things to him. When I was done with my, his silvery white hair had whiter streaks in it. I hate to say it... but sometimes, when I want to be scary, I can be. Perhaps it is best not to invoke sensations of primal terror in a man that you are asking to cut on your nuts with a scalpel, but on the other hand, trust me... when someone is in primal fear of you, and they are holding a scalpel to your junk, they are rather afraid to make a mistake.

So... I get prepped, and he brings over some Novocaine. I explain that I'm impervious to Novocaine, and does he have anything stronger. So he brings out some Lidocaine, and uses a lot of it. I'm pretty resistant to all of those things, so I insisted that he be sure to use plenty.

He injects me with the needle, and immediately begins cutting. Now... keep in mind. That shit takes like fifteen minutes to start working. But at this point, I no longer give a crap. I just want this over with, and besides, I've already terrorized this guy and his staff, and told them I want out of here as quickly as possible.

The very first thing he does is cut that little artery I was worried about at the beginning of this article. Blood spurts out of it in a little spray, before coursing down and pooling under my ass-crack. Yes. Pooling. As in... lots of blood. I remarked on this, but didn't really want to interrupt. he cuts out the little tumor that is the cause of this whole mess, and carefully scrapes away some surrounding tissue. The whole incision is maybe a centimeter long. But there's blood everywhere.

So.. he and the assistant are trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding. Or rather, the doctor is. The PA has turned chalk-white, and is looking at the ceiling and swallowing a lot, and has been since the first stroke of the knife. Big help. Now... the doctor keeps calling for more stitches, more stitches. He's sewing and sewing, and sewing, and finally, after a while, I'm like "What the hell are you doing down there?"

He looks up, ashen, with sweat running down his face into his little surgical mask and say, in a desperate, ER drama voice "I'm trying to stop this bleeding, but I can't seem to get it under control."

Okay... now I'm really mad. I'm looking at like a zillion stitches down there, already, and there's blood everywhere. So I ask, "It's not that big an incision. Just get a styptic pencil or some styptic powder, if pressure won't work."

I'm telling him this. He's a doctor.

He looks up at me and asks, "What's a styptic pencil?"

I am now furious. I can forgive some of my gentle readers if they don't know what this is. It's a little pencil-shaped thing with chemicals on it that you use to stop bleeding from small injuries. There's also styptic powder, which is used for the same thing. It's something your doctor should know what it is, and certainly a guy who got his degree in the fifties should have heard of it.

He has no clue. In fact, he has no idea of any substance or practice that can be used to stop bleeding. I am now wondering if they got the garbageman to play doctor for the day, while the real doctor plays golf.

So... I ask him, "What exactly were you planning to do then?"

His plan? Lots of stitches. He put like fifteen or twenty stitches into a spot less than a centimeter long. This did sort of stop the bleeding, in that the blood could not ooze out any more.

So... after this, he looks up at me, smiling and says, "There! Now that wasn't so bad, was it? How do you feel?"

So... I responded "Much better, now that the anesthetic is beginning to take effect."

I did not pay for this visit, at least not in money. I paid in experience. I also paid them in the form of some character building. I think by the time I was done ranting at them, they'd have called the police, except that they were afraid I might bite off some fingers if they went for the phone.

I actually lost enough blood that I felt sick. It hurt a lot too. I ended up missing the whole day of work. The frankenstein stitches kept the wound from oozing, but I had a giant blood-bubble from where it filled up the cavity. It took weeks to heal, and I assure you, I did not go back to the office to have the stitches removed. I just did it at home. I figured with my luck, that they'd schedule me for an appointment, on a workday, to have the janitor look at the stitches and see if they needed to be removed.

Portuguese Man of War Jellyfish make terrible undergarments

When I was a kid, I was very insecure about a lot of things. I was fat, dorky-looking, socially inept, and dressed funny. I had a very hard time laughing at myself, because usually, laughter directed at me seemed to be at my expense.

They say that we can learn many valuable life lessons from observing and interacting with nature. Here is the story of how a Portuguese Man-of-war taught me to laugh at myself.

First off, allow me to describe the Portuguese Man-of-war, for those of you who have not seen, or do not know of these fascinating sea creatures. A man-of-war is a kind of jellyfish (or a relative of the jellyfish), which has a large blue-tinted bubble as the top part of its body. The bubble is filled with air (or some kind of gas), and has a ridge across the top. The bubble keeps the jellyfish on top of the water, and in a certain light, is rather pretty.

Underneath the bubble part are about fifty-kajillion tentacles, some as thin as hair or spiderwebs, and these tentacles are covered with organs called nematocysts. A nematocyst is basically a little thingy that discharges a teensy poisonous barb into things it touches, stinging the shit out of them. This is how the man-of-war catches its food. When they sting a human being, it is very painful - imagine having someone wrap a string around you that is covered with bee-stings. Some people have even gone into shock from numerous stings, and if you have an allergic reaction, it can even be dangerous. Mostly though, they just hurt like ten kinds of motherfucker.

Anyway, when I was fourteen, I went to the beach with family. At the time, I was so insecure about my appearance that I didn't take off my shirt to swim. I'd always liked the water, especially the ocean, because in the water, it doesn't matter if you are fat or funny-looking - it matters that you can swim without drowning.

I've always found it incredible relaxing and therapeutic just to sit at the edge of the ocean and let the waves smack into me. So, I was sitting in the water, letting the waves smash up against my back, when a particularly large wave washed up under my shirt.

But it wasn't just water. I felt something big shoot up under with the water... something like a balloon attached to a fright wig. I knew instantly with the dread that only comes in nightmares, what had just gone up my shirt. It was a man-of-war. I immediately leaped to my feet with a yelp, and when I did, the back of my shorts opened up as the water went down, and my new blue-bubbled and sting-y friend went right down the back of my trunks.

If the dread of knowing that a stinging jellyfish has gone into your shirt is unpleasant, I can assure you that the sudden realization that it has fallen down inside your pants is indescribable.

And then, of course, the stinging began.

I ran out of the water, and began to shout. I was not, to paraphrase comedian Buddy Hackett, shouting "Spring is here!"

Up until this point, I'd rarely cursed, and only twice had slipped and used curse words in front of parents or adults from the family. I had never, even a single time, used the dreaded "F-word."

I made up for that oversight in seconds. I ran around at high speed, in tight circles, screaming "FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!!!!!"

I remember seeing the faces of the other kids who had been swimming nearby, almost as if in slow motion. There was this black kid who, at first, looked like he was about to laugh, but his jaw dropped when he saw me trailing bits of jellyfish - the thing was huge - and he said something like "Awww... man... is that a jellyfish?"

By this point, the angry, surprised, terrified sounds of rampaging F-bomb had attracted puzzled glances from my family. I ran through the whole group of them, at high speed, screaming "GODDAMN MOTHERFUCK JELLIFISH FUCK AAAAHHG FUCK AAAAIIII!!!!"

Or something to that effect. Frankly, I was so preoccupied that I had only maybe two brain cells capable of stopping to consider whether I should be embarrassed or should be censoring my monologue.

I ran the quarter or half-mile to the beach bathrooms, with their showers, and flung open the door. There was a big hairy guy in their pulling on his pants after changing out of his bathing suit (or maybe taking them off to put his trunks on - I don't know). I screamed at him "Out! Get out! Get the fuck out now!" The poor sod went scrambling out in panic from the crazed, four-foot-tall, three-foot wide pasty white boy who was clawing at his body and clothing.

I immediately ripped off my trunks and shirt, and commenced trying to scrape the stinging tentacles and bits of goo off. This, of course, caused them to sting my hands, arms, armpits, and re-sting everywhere else they'd already stung. Coming slightly to my senses, I then grabbed like every paper towel out of the dispenser, and proceeded to scrape as much of the stuff off as I could.

In case you are wondering what it feels like to have man-of-war stings all over your body, including your armpits, your ass-crack, and your nuts, allow me to tell you that you DON'T EVER WANT TO KNOW!

I managed to stumble into the shower part, which helped a little, took a deep breath, and let out the longest, loudest, primal scream that anyone has ever made that could still be recognized as one long, loving rendition of the word "FFUUUUUUUCCCCCKKKK!!!"

When I finally managed to stop cursing, I sat in the shower, trying to gingerly pick bits of tentacle off my crotch. Keep in mind, many of them are so fine as to be invisible. It's like trying to remove stinging micro-boogers that you can't see.

About then, I hear a knock at the door. It was my Aunt Sherry. I screamed "WHHHATT!?!?" at the top of my lungs!

I heard her, trying very hard not to laugh - she could tell I was upset, and I know that the effort to withhold laughing had to be causing her (or anyone with a sense of humor) to risk a cerebral aneurysm. But she loved me, so she tried.

She asked me, "Umm... sweetie? You all right in there kid?"

All of a sudden, I could see what that whole incident looked like: A funny-looking, shy, fat kid running around with stinging jellyfish in his pants in high speed circles, screaming obscenities at a volume and broadcasting over an area large enough to come under FCC jurisdiction. It was, simply, hilarious. How could I possibly ask someone not to laugh at that? Hell... I realized that even I thought it was funny as hell.

And then I started laughing. I shouted "Sure! I'm great! Now that I've got most of the jellyfish out of my pants!"

And then we were both laughing. She asked me if I thought I'd be all right, or if I needed any help. I told her not at the moment, but if I passed out, I'd be sure to ask for assistance.

That's the first time in this lifetime that I can recall just unreservedly laughing at myself, at my situation, and it felt damn good. It really made me feel better, and I tried to take it as a lesson not to take myself too seriously. Sometime, shit just happens, and if you take the stick out of your ass, you might realize that it's funny... and that laughter helps.

Thanks jellyfish. Sorry I killed you with my ass-crack.

Just so people will know... this is the sort of stuff that happens to me. It was either learn to laugh, or be miserable a lot.

Stopping on skis is as easy as pie.. as in pizza pie... as in street pizza.

When I was a kid, maybe ten or elven, if that, my dad took me to Mohawk Mountain, where you can go skiing. Now, don't get me wrong, I had a really good time. But I don't think I was really cut out, as a kid, for anything even remotely athletic, except possibly for swimming - fat kids float better.

There were ski instructors there, and if anyone has ever seen that South Park episode where the kid has to learn to ski from the overly cheerful guy who uses cute catchphrases in lieu of intelligent adult conversation, that's the instructor I got.

At least he was nice... in a retarded sort of way.

So... anyway, I've already tried out the bunny hill, where you learn basic ski skills like "Don't fall off the skis while you are standing still," and "make sure you are paying attention and don't begin sliding down the hill backwards." I also learned "Do not attempt to use a tree to stop."

That's correct. When you are on skis, and you are traveling at thirty or forty miles an hour, and you are four feet tall and three feet wide, and the tree is moving at zero miles an hour, trees are dangerous. I'm lucky that I had all that kid-fat underneath so many warm clothes that I looked like the kid in "A Christmas Story" who couldn't lower his arms. I was only stunned for a minute, and didn't actually lose consciousness.

Here is another safety tip - don't bundle your kid up in so many "warm" clothes that he cannot move his arms and legs, and then put him on skis, or any other fast-moving mode of conveyance that requires physical dexterity to avoid painful death.

So... anyway... off the bunny slope, and on to something more challenging. The instructor and I go up onto a larger hill, that you use a ski lift to climb. At the top, he explains that the most important thing to learn right now is how to speed up, slow down, and stop.

Hell... I already knew that. The tree told me.

He explains that in order to slow down, you angle your skis together, with the edges of the skis tilted out - and yes, he made the "pizza" analogy here.

So... armed with this important information, we head off down the slope. We're going faster and faster, and he's alongside me, shouting "Slow down! Make Pizza!" And I'm shouting back "I am! It's not working!"

We're going faster and faster. At this point, we're going fast enough that I'm pretty sure that if I hit an acorn, I'd end up in orbit. He's still shouting at me to angle my skis inward. And I'm shouting at him, "I am! Look!"

So... he looks down, and sees what I see. Which is that both our skis are angled inwards, and that the snow around us is perfectly still... but we are both moving at high speed. How is this possible?

Easy. We were standing on a huge chunk of snow and ice that had broken off the side of the mountain in one piece, with us standing on it. Like a giant snow raft of death. Angling our skis is having no effect, because we're standing on a giant piece of frozen danger that's shooting down the hillside with us on it.

By this time, we are going way to fast to attempt to ditch. The instructor has now begun yelling "Hang on! Oh shit! Hang on! Don't Fall down!"

You'd think I'd find that more alarming, but at least, at this point, I felt he was being realistic, which was a nice change.

So... we shoot all the way down the hill, and are moving at quite a clip across now-horizontal ground. There is no way to steer, and I'm afraid to try to get off this piece of ice. The bit with the instructor on it finally broke off into a separate piece, but we were both still fairly close together. We finally slowed down and stopped... amid crumbling bits of our impromptu snow-sled... wait for it...

On a frozen pond. Next to a sign warning "Danger! Thin Ice! Danger!" (it said "Danger" twice.)

So... now the instructor is coaching me on how to be very, very careful, so that we won't fall through the ice. He tells me to make "X's" out of my skis to distribute the weight. All this did was make me unable to move, because my skis were now on top of one another, and we're surrounded by jumbled up bits of ice and snow from our now-defunct, snowy murder-toboggan. So, I hobble carefully towards the edge of the pond, and the whole time, the instructor is telling me to be careful, and telling me what we'll do if I fall through the ice.

And then, of course, the ice broke, huge jagged cracks proceeding almost all the way across the frozen pond. And I see that the ice is indeed thin. Very thin. Because the whole pond is maybe six inches deep, total. I didn't even get my feet wet. I've seen deeper birdbaths.

The instructor asked me if I was okay, little buddy. I treated him to a short, bitter monologue to the effect that I was not called "Little Buddy," "Sport," or "Chief," and that in future, he could make his own pizza and French fries.

Coyote

The Flaming Wok Incident (or: Let's Order Pizza until my eyebrows grow back)

A lot of people who know me have heard this story. But for those who haven't, here it is.

This is the story of the dreaded Wok incident. It is one of the stories that ends in me not having eyebrows, so I like it.

Years ago, in my foolish youth, I got married (to a woman - yes folks, I used to be bi). The marriage had its ups and downs, but I suppose it had more downs, because the marriage only lasted a little under five years. I hasten to assure people that this incident isn't specifically one that I'd cite as a reason for my eventual divorce, but it's possible that it was a contributing factor.

My ex and I had just gotten a house, which we really couldn't afford. We were pretty poor then. But it had two nice features - a decent kitchen, and a converted garage that I could use as an office for my freelance graphics and consulting business.

Well... one day, I'm in my office, when I hear blood-curdling screams coming from the kitchen. I had long ago learned that blood-curdling screams from my ex were not something to waste any time investigating, because often, things like fire, explosions, animal-related incidents, blood, or severe structural damage were involved. Keep in mind, that while my ex-wife did spend a lot of time apparently afraid of stuff, she was not a wilting flower. She didn't even scream the time that the guy tried to mug her in the alley behind our first apartment. She just beat him into a bloody mess, stomped his teeth out after dropping him to the ground, and then quietly came inside and told me that we were moving (that's a whole other story). So... screams were bad.

I run into the kitchen, to see that the little Revere-ware saucepan my grandmother gave me is on the stove, and is filled with flaming oil. There's an eight-inch wide column of flame coming out of it, and bits of burning grease are shooting everywhere.

We had a fire-extinguisher (my mother always had like eight or ten at any given time, and would give them as gifts - she worked in a burn ward for a while) but being such good housekeepers, we had no idea what we'd done with the thing. For all I know, my ex had hot-glued it into one of her arts and crafts projects. Her arts and crafts projects actually did contribute to our eventual divorce, but I digress.

So... we both ran around the kitchen, panicking and shouting obscenities, while we tried to find something big enough to smother the flames before they spread and burned down the house. None of our pots and pans had lids that matched, of course, but we finally found one just big enough for me to clamp over the lid of the saucepan and asphyxiate the fire. It burned all the hair off my hand when I did it, but mostly, no harm done.

She immediately began crying and saying that she was stupid, and that she'd almost burned down the house, and being really down on herself. So, I hugged her, and told her not to feel bad, and that it was all okay. I looked to see how this could have happened, and basically what had gone wrong was that we'd bought safflower oil - at the time, it was the cheapest cooking oil you could get. Unbeknownst to most people, safflower oil will get smoky and ignite at a relatively low temperature. If she'd been using pretty much any other oil at the same heat, there would have been no problem. So... I calmly explained it, and told here there was no way she could have known, and that it wasn't her fault.

Then, to lighten the mood, I laughed and said "Ha ha! It's a good thing you weren't cooking in the wok, huh?"

So... the next day, at around the same time, I'm working in my office, when I hear bloodcurdling screams coming from the kitchen. I go running into the kitchen to see, not just a little saucepan with a piddly amount of fire coming out of it, but... you guessed it.

The wok - with a column of flame two feet wide and six feet tall coming out of it. By the time I got in there, the cabinets and hood over the stove were already turning black, and there were little puddles of spattered, burning grease all over the counters and floor.

We still hadn't found the damn fire extinguisher (yes... I was really stupid in my youth. With the number of fire-related incidents involving my ex-wife, I should have kept one strapped to my belt in a quick-release holster.)

So, we again ran around the kitchen screaming even more obscenities, in more of a panic, trying to find the wok-lid - which was the only thing big enough to cover the huge wok we had with. I found it (buried in the back of one of the cabinets, under the spreading grease-fire). I quickly slammed it over the top of the wok.

And the cheap aluminum lid immediately buckled, so that now, instead of a column of vertical flame heading toward the ceiling, there were twin spouts of flaming oil shooting out to either side.

I was not about to let the goddamn house burn down - it had already been wrecked by a hurricane, and we were still in the process of suing the people we bought it from for the insurance money - which they'd kept, in breach of contract - but that's another story. I'd sooner have burned alive than walk out of that goddamn place, with all the trouble we'd had getting into it.

So... I ran out into the back yard, adrenaline practically shooting from my pores (fortunately, high-capacity adrenal glands run in my family), and grabbed a huge concrete planter we had on the porch. I flung the dirt out of it, and ran back into the house with the planter in both arms. I ran into the kitchen, and smacked the burning wok into the planter, and ran back towards the yard cradling a huge oil fire in my arms.

On my way out the back door, I couldn't really see well because of the heat and flames, and I tripped on the weatherstripping in the doorway. I stumbled and twirled and flung the concrete planter with it's flaming cargo away from my body, with the intent to avoid the whole third-degree-burns thing. The planter and wok went sailing into the swimming pool. The planter sank instantly to the bottom, and the hot wok exploded into thousands of tiny burning drops of oil when it hit the cold water.

I ran back into the house, and we put out the countertops and floor.

Then, in the moment of silence afterwards, I reached up, and discovered that my mustache, eyelashes, eyebrows, and all the hair on the front half of my head was gone.

I turned on my ex, glared at her through the swimming blurriness of eyes that had been a little too close to the roiling flames, and snarled "Well... shall we order dinner tonight?"

I threw out the rest of the oil even before going to take care of my burned hands, arms, and face. I figured it was that, or try to find out how to put out a fire in a metal trash can, with burn-mitts on my hands.

What happened to my hair

As some folks know, I used to have long hair, and lots of it. When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I decided not to cut my hair any more, except maybe for an occasional trim. I'd lived through the eighties, when people were constantly doing stupid things with their hair, and every six months, you were a dork for having short hair, then a dork for having long hair, then a dork for not having hair with enough chemicals in it to mummify a bactrian camel.

Enough was enough. I decided that I liked how my hair looked when it was long. Long hair also symbolized a certain self-expression and individuality to me. I decided that, if I had to dress in various foolish costumes to fit in with society (including different outfits for work, play, school, home use, etc. that I'd be damned if I let anyone tell me what to do with an aspect of my appearance that was actually growing out of my body.

I mean, you can change out of dorky corporate clothes when you come home from work, but if you cut your hair, it's not like you can just make it long again in the evening, unless you want to wear a wig, which I had no intention of doing.

So... I grew my hair long, and left it long for years. I think in ten years, I had maybe a couple of trims. The maximum length my hair would grow would be roughly down to the middle of my back, and it looked pretty good. I also had lots of hair - wavy, thick hair. For the most part, I did nothing to it but wash it, occasionally comb it, or tie it into a ponytail. People would constantly ask me what I did to my hair to get it to look that good, and I'd tell them "I leave it the fuck alone."

You see... for a while, in my youth, I worked for places that marketed cosmetic products, including all manner of hair goops. I know what's in them. I know what distortions and lies we would put on packaging and product lines to get people to buy goop. And at the time, the healthiest hair products were the ones you could get for ninety-nine cents.

But I digress. The point is, I used to swear I'd never cut my hair again. Unless it started to fall out or something, at which point I'd go bald gracefully. I've always thought that nothing screamed "insecure" quite like a bad toupee or a comb-over, or the other things guys do to conceal thinning or absent hair.

Well... a few years ago, I met the love of my life, Coryn. A few months after we met, he got a job working in a hair salon. This had two major effects. One is that he was constantly trying out products and demos from the store on my hair. One or two were actually nice, but most of them were various kinds of foul-smell goo or weird chemicals, or did nothing much that I could tell. My hair, for one thing, had the consistency of spring steel, so there is absolutely no styling product that will hold it in any position it doesn't want to be in. My hair will shrug off even butch wax. Hell... my hair won't stay in place if you put surfboard wax in it.

The other major effect was that, with him working at the store, all our friends were buying hair stuff there, and Coryn was buying stuff for himself with his employee discount. So, all around me, all my friends are doing all this cool shit with their hair. They've all got blue hair, pink hair, green hair, spikes, mohawks, sparkly stuff. It was a blast. I'm sure everyone used so many different hair colors and products that if they ever have children, they'll be born with three heads from all the chemicals.

Keep in mind, most of my friends are either women, gay guys, goths, metrosexuals, or various people in the lunatic fringe. Some of us look normal at a glance, but under the hood, we're a mass of tattoos, piercings, brandings, and counterculture tribal neo-tradition. So everyone's having a blast with all this cool hair stuff.

Well... I decided that I wanted to do something crazy - maybe color my hair some wacky color or something. Now, my natural hair color is a dark brown - almost black. When I put in those temporary hair colors - even the ones that were opaque pastes, my hair would suck that shit down, burp, and ask for more, without changing in appearance hardly at all. I put bright neon-blue paste in my hair, and three minutes later, it just looked like I'd gotten it a little damp.

That meant that the first step would be bleaching it. Well, that was cool anyway! I'd always wondered what I'd look like with blonde hair. I figured that, worst-case scenario, I'd dye it back to normal if I didn't like it, and anyway, my hair grew at a prodigiously fast rate. When I first grew it out, it went from two inches to eighteen inches long in about nine or ten months.

So... we buy this giant tub of hair bleaching stuff. Now... yes. I have heard that you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever under any circumstances, ever, ever, ever let your friends bleach your hair or give you a permanent. Anyone who doesn't know this has never even lived on the same planet with Oprah.

But Coryn worked in a salon, and he's very intelligent, and knowledgeable. He was, after all, made into the acting manager in only a couple of months.

One of the things that should have been a further warning sign was that his store did not carry bleach or permanent hair color. They were a salon-style store, and their policy was that they would not sell those products because they're bad for your hair, and amateurs should not apply them. The store's official line was that if you want a bleach job or permanent color, go to a real salon hairstyling professional and pay to have it done right.

So, we went to Sally's Beauty supply, and bought the hair bleach there. The ladies at Sally's asked over and over if we were sure we knew what we were doing. They told us amusing anecdotes about people who tried to do this at home and burnt their scalps off down to their shoes, or came out looking like Bride of Frankenstein on acid. We bought it anyway. Coryn assured them (and myself) very glibly that all was well-in-hand.

Supplies in hand, we head over to Coryn's apartment, and he begins to apply this foul, toxic-smelling horrible stuff to my hair, rubbing it carefully into my hair and scalp to make sure that we don't have any roots. As it's going on my head, and my scalp is beginnign to tingle, I note that the smell of the bleach is very similar in some ways to the smell of products that are used to remove hair. Or clean a drain. It is about at this point that I glance over, through the haze of toxic fumes, and begin reading the instructions. Specifically, I am reading the part under the giant red letters that say:

"Honey," I say to Coryn, "The packaging says never to allow this substance to come into contact with your scalp, under any circumstances."

"Don't be silly. You don't want black roots, do you?" Coryn replied, turning the tub of hair bleach around so that the warning part of the label was no longer visible to me.

"It says it can cause severe burns, and to never let it come into contact with skin or scalp," I said.

"I know what I'm doing," he replied, "I work in a salon."

"But the label says..."

My pleas fell on deaf ears. He was in the zone. Well... he was actually very convincing and confident in his actions. His every movement exuded confidence and knowledge and professionalism. Well... except perhaps for the part where he turned the warning label around so I couldn't read further along to the part about what to do in case of severe burns. But I was blinded by love. Also... fumes.

After applying the mixture, I was supposed to wait for a while - I forget how long, fifteen minutes? Forty-five?

But the stuff was just burning more, and more, and more. I've had chemical burns before (one of the suntan lotions a company I'd worked for in my youth could cause severe chemical burns if the coloring and fragrance used in it came into contact with sunlight, and I found that out the hard way.)

I said that the stuff was burning my head. Coryn told me to stop being a wuss. But it kept burning, more and more.

Now, just to let you know, that despite the fact that I have been known to scream like a girl when a spider falls on me, that I am not a wuss. I have a very high pain threshold. I've had to develop one, because I've had lots of pain (like the time my foot got nailed to a board, and my shoe. But that's another story). I eat hot peppers that make lesser men not only cry, but lose control of their bowels. Once, some guys hit me with a car, knocking me into a gravel pit, before attempting to mug me, and I got up and beat the hell out of them, even with a concussion, a sprained knee, and some broken fingers - after they kicked me in the head (also another story).

So... around the point that I realized that I was starting to cry from the pain, I decided enough was enough, and announced that I was washing the crap off my head before it burned through my skull and into my brain.

The warning label also said something about not letting water touch this shit, but what the fuck else was I going to wash it out with? Motor oil? How the hell do you even use this crap?

So... I washed the bleach out of my hair, and gingerly toweled my head dry - my whole scalp was livid red and burned under the hair.

Needless to say, some of my hair had bleached a lot, some had bleached a little, and some had not bleached at all. There were patches of toxic chemical yellow, patches of almost-black brown, and patches of gorgeous honey-red color. I looked like an African Hunting dog. It was horrible. And of course, my scalp was burned, so the last thing I ought to do is put more chemicals on it.

Now... I never go to the mall, and hate going out in public unless I have a good reason, but I'll tell you, I made sure to take that fright-wig out everywhere for the next several days. Now, normally, I am somehow invisible to normal people. I don't know why. Sometimes, I have to grab customer service people or cashiers in stores and shake them to get them to even tell I am there - even though I'm nearly six feet tall, and loud and boisterous and talkative. So... I'd be walking in the mall, and nobody noticed a thing... until somehow I guess some poor mundane would pierce the veil and notice that I had African-hunting-dog hair. It was great fun. Or I'd be talking to someone for a few minutes, and all of a sudden, they'd look up and just get this look on their face.

The novelty did fade quickly though. So... as soon as my scalp was mostly healed, we tried again. This time, I insisted on following the directions under the giant words that said "WARNING!!!" in big red letters. No burning goo on my scalp... just very, very close to it. It still burned.

This time, my hair came out a color which can only be described as "chemical yellow," except for big, pencil-thin rings near my scalp where it stayed brown. The rings looked like giant ringworm. There is a substance called "toner," which is supposed to turn the weird chemical yellow into a normal color. Apparently, my hair laughs at toner. The strongest stuff had no effect. Also... my hair was fried to utter brittleness.

I now looked like the second-in-command evil henchman from an action movie. You know, there's always one of the villain's henchmen who has weird hair and then gets killed ignominiously with a ball=point pen after failing to shoot the hero to death at close range with a fully-automatic machine pistol loaded with 10,000 rounds.

So... after a couple of days of enjoying the effect of that particular hair-disaster (about ten strangers asked me if I was in a band, and one asked if we were making a movie), we bought some dark brown hair dye and returned my hair to its normal color, if not its normal consistency and texture.

But this is not, of course, the end of the story. Fark.com has a Florida tag for a reason, and while I left Florida years ago, I did grow up there, and the curse lingers.

Shortly thereafter, I went on a trip that took me through Texas, where we stopped to visit some friends. While we were there, they were apparently having "Purple" pollution days in Dallas. Many people are familiar with the color codes in pollution alerts for big cities. They go from green, to yellow, to orange, to red, in increasing levels of pollution.

Did you know that there are levels higher than red? Purple comes after red. It means "Try not to go outside if you can avoid it, and wear a mask if you do." The only thing higher is black, which means "Do not go outside, and while you are at it, make sure your will is up to date."

On top of the smog-type pollution, there are these plants in that part of the country that apparently pollinate in a fascinating way. They have these little buds that swell up and pop open, releasing little bursts of sticky sap - with about the consistency of creosote - that allows the pollen to stick to things.

The pollution and gummy pollen stuff were so bad that when we left my friend's apartment to go eat, we had to wash the windshield in order to see through it. By the time we finished eating, half an hour or so later, the windshield was again so covered that you could not see through it.

This incredible freak of science airborne death-on-toast crap went into my already crunchy, burnt, chemicaled, and dyed hair. It was sticky and horrid. I had the beginnings of dreadlocks almost immediately. My hair was actually sticky to the touch.

No problem, I thought, I'd just wash that shit out.

Six shampooings later, there was no change, except that now my hair was so covered with goo that you could actually mold it into shapes with your fingers and it would stay that way - only slowly bending back to its original shape. It also smelled very much like burnt tires. I moved on to more and more drastic substances trying to get the sticky crap out. I tried castile soap (not that Dr. Bronner's stuff either - I used the kind that's made of lye and coconut fat, that doubles as laundry detergent). Dishwasher detergent (that will remove almost anything from hair) had no effect. I tried escalating to more powerful cleansers, until finally, I'd tried alcohol, nail polish remover, and even kerosene. Nothing worked.

Finally, I decided that enough was enough. My hair had been tortured and burnt, and finally rendered sticky. I didn't have dreadlocks, which would have been at least briefly amusing. I had one solid dreadlock, singular, sticking out of my head like a tumor inspired by eighties hair bands gone wrong.

Well... if there's a time to try and put a positive spin on something, here it was. I found myself saying "I wonder what I'll look like bald."

Keep in mind - the last time I'd had my head shaved, I was five. Under the hair, it turned out that my head was lumpy, and the other kids made fun of me until I chased one up a tree, and then pushed him out with a stick, causing him to to a belly-whumper on hard-packed sugar sand.

Now, I am not given to revenge, really I'm not. Coryn loved my long hair (and loved doing things to it with hair products), but I just felt like it was his job to help me shave the mess off. So... after careful consideration, I decided to go ahead and shave it off. I'd never shaved my own hair before, and wanted assistance, so I browbeat Coryn into doing it. I'd like to make some poetic statements about how my shorn locks drifted down to the floor of his basement like fallen cherry blossoms onto snow, but basically, they were so coated with chemicals that they just sort of went "thump," or "spluck," when they hit the floor.

Much to my surprise, I began to have a sense of deja vu here. I realized that, years before, I'd dreamed of shaving my head, and it really bothered me - especially because, in the dream, I wasn't upset by this complete departure from normal behavior. When I woke up, from that dream, I actually panicked and grabbed my head to make sure my hair was still there.

But, there in the basement, everyone who'd gathered around to watch the sad procedure (my friends are ghouls, but lovable ones, I assure you), kind of nodded, and looked surprised, and allowed that maybe it wasn't too bad. I think my friend Timber was the first to say that he didn't know what I was bitching about, and that it might be a good look for me.

I looked into a mirror, and was pleased to discover that my head was no longer, in fact, lumpy. Also, I did not look like Curly Joe - a concern that had entered my mind. Maybe it wasn't so bad, I thought. But then... perhaps it was merely shock. What I dreaded was not that moment, of first seeing myself with a shaved head. What I dreaded was waking up in the morning, and realizing that this time, it wasn't just a dream.

Sure enough, I woke up the next morning, bleery as hell, and staggered in to the shower. When I was younger, I used to wake up instantly, and come to full alertness. As I've aged, it takes me longer to become fully conscious. I got into the shower, and realized I had no hair. Oh yeah. I'd shaved it off. There was a surreal moment when I thought I had found a leftover stray hair, and it turned out not to be a loose hair, but an eighteen-inch long hair that had been growing out of the top of my ear. It was a head-hair, but growing out of my ear. It had obviously been there forever, but I hadn't noticed it, with all the other hair around it.

There was that sense of deja vu again. When I stepped out of the shower, I realized that everything was exactly like it was in the dream, down to the Usago Yojimbo comics scattered around the bathroom by a roomate.

And just like in the dream, when I looked in the mirror at my shaved head, after all those years of being a die-hard longhair, I decided I liked it.

No more shampoo. No more fucking around with taking care of long hair (even the minimal care mine required). No more hair in my eyes when driving, or hair ripping free of ponytail ties, or blowing into a giant puffball in wind. Yeah... that also meant no luxurious long latin hair, which would turn into shiny ringlets if I ran plain water over them and let them air-dry.

But also... no more pain in the ass long hair to deal with.

And nothing to put hair products in. Mwa ha ha! I'm free! Coryn's still disgruntled, years later, at losing his favorite hair-product guinea-pig, but still.

In closing, it's working out for me. Another nice thing about having no hair is that people love to rub my scalp, even people I don't know.

But then... on the downside... people I don't know keep trying to rub my scalp.