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.