In and Out

I took the day off today.

I haven't taken a day off since September and I needed it.

What you don't realize about me is that I'm not really human. Sure I sit and stare at myself in the mirror like every other bloke, but I don't think I see the same things. I see the scar tissue from the cherry of a cig I mishandled a couple of years ago - its healing process stunted by my continuous picking and scratching. It's there again today because hairs attempt to go through it and get twisted and bent, macheteing back into the lower dermal layers.

Sounds sick dunnit?

Well, its just my vessel giving me something to think about. How nothing ever really heals. Scar tissue is scar tissue. A reminder of some fuck-up, a bunged job, a rat's hope at kingdom.

Thrice this week I've been gently reminded that scar tissue will come back to haunt you. My eye doctor tells me today that I have astigmatism in my left eye more than my right because of scar tissue from surgery I had when I was younger.

- Your eyes are going to change shape as you get older, he says. And when that happens the scar tissue isn't going to stretch. It's going to hold your eye back from changing the way it should, making your left eye always permanently worse than your right.

How

fucking

profound.

As for the third ... its more of an open wound.

Scar tissue always comes back to haunt you.

And that's what I am.

Not human.

Just a sentient scar on the face of the world. Always coming back to remind Mother Nature that she bunged up creation once again. And I'll never go away.

On the lighter side:

I finished Bran Mak Morn and was surprised at how Howard wraps it up. He puts it to the reader that all the dark fairy tales surrounding dwarves and elves and wendigos and leprecauns and fae kidnapping the young and weak on the fog-shrouded moors have a truth to them. The Picts, a stout, misshapen, dark, flint-working people that inhabited the British Isles long before the Celts or the Grey-eyed Norsemen or the Saxons - there's your mystical beings, he says.

Scars of a past rewritten. Like plastic surgery to turn a hook nose into a perky princess's prized possession.

I also have two new books to add to the queue:

The Eye of the World - Book One of the Wheel of Time Series - Robert Jordan

I find myself continuously thrown into a collective mix with Hipsters and Neo-Beatnik Beardies ... not by choice but by geography. I inhabit dark but aesthetically "coo" bars and pubs, and there they flock as well. Birds of a feather? Fuck shite. I keep hearing them talk about this series of books like I'm some kind of leper for not having been intimately bedded down with these monstrous volumes of high fantasy. I'll give it a chance.

Finnegan's Wake - James Joyce

Again I've managed to decrypt my doctor uncle's henscratching to unearth one of his literary suggestions. He wrote down Ulysses but I now distinctly remember him telling me that Finnegan's Wake by Joyce and Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon are the two most difficult books he's ever read in his life. I'll give it a chance.

My random choice by die roll, by the way, was Porno by Irvine Welsh.

Maybe that's why I feel like spouting scots and reminiscing the dance I danced with light drugs so long ago. I'm what you call a skinny bloke, whereas a Fat Fuck is one whose taste for scag, coke, the pipe, turns the body to a big mushy mountain of useless flesh.

I was always the skinny ... never going past the barbed wire and big signs saying "Past this point, yer fucked"

That's a scar I don't have.

That's a scar I'll never have.

But alcohol ...

... fuck's sake, man.