Material Angst: Popping Pimples

Incomparable levels of satisfaction come from popping blemishes. The body feels release; the mind experiences victory over the zit as the puss erupts past the bottlenecked pore and out onto the mirror. Boom! Left on the mirror is the detritus of victory, the remains of the pimple, a delicate smear of pink blood and dead white blood cells turned yellow from their explosive deaths.

As I have aged, my sebaceous glands have mellowed out; I do not have the opportunity to explode many whiteheads. Frankly, I do not miss this so much. Recently though, I had the opportunity. A cluster of raised red marks had appeared just to the right of the tip of my nose, which is a resplendent organ in its own right. I examined this outbreak. Popping pimples is really a dance, an exacting footwork where moves must be made at exactly the right moment. If the move is not made at the perfect time the dancer stumbles and brings on shame. This is how pimples are. Pimples must be popped at the opportune moment. Too early and nothing will happen. Maybe some dead cells will agonizingly leak down the face and a red mark will form where the white eruption was. If popped too late, the procedure could be a waste and only damage skin that is healing.

I fucked up. I was too hungover and groggy. I stumbled and collapsed on the parquet. I shouldn't have played with it at all, but after days of waiting for this blemish to abate and seeing no results, I went at it in the frustration of the morning-after. I could wait no more. O yeah, I got it all right. I put that sucker between two q-tips and squeezed. Surrounding black heads gave off plumes of white flares across my nose, and at the epicenter, the cluster gave way: blood and puss gushed out, and within the crater the clump of puss coyly revealed itself. "Wow," I thought. "That's disgusting." It was like a congealed up pebble of rotted cells.
In my hungover daze, I hadn't quite realized what I had done, but as the day dragged on and I had taken several ibuprofens, I saw that I had created a blood red disfigurement. The mark of shame was not just a mark. It had three dimensionality: emerging from the right side of nose and peaking all the way over to the left side, entirely visible from the other side of my face.

Yikes.

Humans face a strange predicament. Humans are arguably the only self-aware animals, and while I am (arguably) self-aware I cannot see myself. I cannot see my own face, the most important element I use to interface with other humans. Unless I stare into a mirror I cannot see what I look like when I cry, or the shape my nose deforms into as I sarcastically guffaw. I cannot see that piece of mucus hanging out of my nostril or the pieces of cake schmeared in the corner of my lips.

I’m blind to my interfacing to the rest of the world. As a result, it was not I who would have to endure the aesthetic nightmare of this botched procedure, but my friends, and strangers, and people who weren't quite friends but also weren't quite strangers. What would they think? What would they attribute this abomination to? I felt the need to explain myself. "Oh, yes, [friend], I was bitten. Yes it's true. An eagle swooped down and took my nose into his beak and ravaged me. Oh, no, I fended him off without harming an endangered species." On the other hand, I considered that saying something would have been too vain, too self-deprecating and also too obvious; no one has to be alerted to the presence of a trainwreck, a landmark.
With my disfigurement, I sat with my friends, made regular conversation, took normal swigs of my drinks, and when no one seemed to be looking, crossed my eyes to shoot a look down my snout.

The Terrors of Pissing in Public: Performance Anxiety

I don't particularly like bathrooms. Maybe this stems from my childhood. My mother says I once narrowly avoided a would-be molestation in the men's bathroom when I was eight. But I just thought that man standing behind me was waiting his turn when she busted into the bathroom and began screaming.

I'm also somewhat germaphobic an the men's bathroom may be the pinnacle of all that is unclean. Often I find myself standing in a puddle of urine while urinating at the urinal. After I see that my loose shoelace dangles in such misfires, (though not all are misfires-- I explained to my friend Matt Levin that I pissed on his shower curtain at a party he threw), I will go days without tying it, further perpetuating the problem by allowing it to be pulled through other piss pools.

However, possibly the worst bathroom predicament has to be Performance Anxiety. This failure to produce a free flowing stream when under the duress of prying eyes may come from: a byproduct sexual behaviors, an evolutionary adaptation, or a crippling neurosis.

Yesterday, during a class break a number of classmates and I went in to the bathroom of College of Arts and Sciences to respectively relieve ourselves.

At the second to last urinal stood a colleague from Trinidad, an extended education student. Likely his penis is larger than mine any maybe that's why he smiled as I stepped up to the pisser. Another classmate, of hazy ancestral origins who dresses too well followed us in. I surveyed the situation as I readied, thinking for a brief moment about aborting the pisser and using a stall to take my leak, as I saw the mulattu did, smart queer mulattu that he is.

I thought fuck it, Max, I'll be able to handle it and stood one urinal apart from the grinning Trinidadian and unzipped. Then in came another classmate, in his fifties, with a paunch and graying hair. He then began loudly conversing with the Islander as he stepped one urinal down from me and unzipped. The Trinidadian gave me another smilish look and I knew I was fucked.

I strained, I pushed my prostate. I clenched my ass cheeks. I set my teeth on edge. I glanced at that Wynton Marsalis enjoying the privacy of his stall. I tried to work, but nothing would come out! I visualized urination. I cursed my prostate. I could hear no streams from the other gentlemen, and considered the prostates plight of these extended ed. students. Maybe their woes came from anal play too.

I tried for one more second and realized the point was moot. Is it easily conceivable that a Bathroom Buddy could piss inaudibly? I hope for the sake of rectitude it is.

For I now had to take a fake piss.

I shook off my dry apparatus, making a real show of it, really thrashing the theremin, sending off every last nonexistent driblet. I cleared my throat, then went to wash my hands. Normally, I do not wash my hands, but whenever I fake piss I do, as though I am really going through the motions, as if I pissed a little on my fingers. I looked back in the mirror as I lathered and saw them enjoying unfettered pisses.

And they too must have thought of me: Max, the pervert. The creep who comes into the bathroom, takes his dick out, does not piss, looks around at all of them, and then shakes it around for a prolonged period, and follows it with washing his hands. A total nutcase. I bet they thought that I had an erection.

I'm not a nutcase, maybe a tad neurotic, but I'm no Ted Bundy or Buffalo Bill. I must have evolved this adaptive trait. When I could be any more vulnerable than when I am unloading? How could I run from a sabertooth tiger when I'm in the process of pissing? Or a lascivious chemistry teacher, hungry for any young flesh, regardless of gender? Or, have you ever pushed a man who is pissing? He'll nearly fall over, or if he's a cruel bastard, he'll flip it on you and try to piss on your leg like my alleged best friend tried to do to me a few years ago.

I left the bathroom, sighed, and sauntered down to the end wing of CAS. I found a single urinal pisser. A man in the stall next to me sounded as if he was battling Caprito Burrito or the three entree Panda Express platter, this was no two entree special. No matter. I took 'er out, pissed one, and then amid the sounds of gastrointestinal gurgling beat off.

What a picture.