On the surface

On the surface I look pretty respectable today. I've got on my Too Faced Boudoir Eyes shadow in the color called Classic today, although sometimes I wear Sugar Walls.

After Fiona open the liquid eyeliner last night and picassoed it all around the edges and inside of my sink daintily, I found it, open, on the floor and noticed that there was still a little bit of edgy black goo left. So I smeared/lined a bit of that on each of my eyes for good measure and then brushed on the obligatory mascara. I mean come on you've got to at least wear mascara. 

I can kind of fix up this whole thing at least with the skin on my face by patching it up and spackling it and painting it a bit. Fake you out. I wish Matisse or Gauguin were here to help me.

Them there's all this other skin that's all over the place. I mean it's kind of like a weird drapery that's been shrink-wrapped and sucked on to my skeleton and squishy parts. They say that the skin is the largest organ in your body. That the average person's skin weighs about 20 pounds or so, depending on your size. Sort of like around 16-ish percent of your bodyweight. 

So 20 pounds - that's kind of like five of those 3 pound packages of hamburger when you're gonna make a bunch of hamburgers, it's kind of gross. Or a big bag of mulch or dog food. Apparently when you think of skin in the world of medicine it include your nails and your hair. We are all carting around a bunch of keratin stuff. We're a bunch of hooves and antlers and horns. You are horny.

And get this, your body has about 5 million hair follicles on it, and the average head of hair has between 250,000 to 500,000 hairs on it, and the average loss of hair is about 100 pairs per day. I have always had very thick hair, and I have never lost hair in the drain or in a brush. Never had to clear my hair out of the drain. I think lost 17 hairs a moon cycle. I know that's strange. There are other things that I never do that make me unique. Another one is I never have any allergies. Or lock my car. Or drink any water. 

Lately I've been trying to pull out my hair just to see if it's starting to loosen. Today I yanked on a bit of it and make it all came out in my hands. So I then said to Fiona, who I was driving to the doctor, hey this is a neat trick you want to try it?! She grabbed a big hunk of my hair with her grubby left hand and yanked. It all came out, like a swatch. I took it from her and rolled down my window and let it blow out on 183 North. Maybe a hummingbird will use a strand of it to make her nest. I hope it doesn't poison her babies.

I guess I now have to face the reality that my hair is going away. What I don't like is that it hurts. Yes my hair hurts. What that means is the end (the beginning?) of my hair where it starts life in a follicle hurts. I've heard people liken this to a hangnail. I really don't get that metaphor. Except maybe inside that follicular cave, the roots of this tree are pulling up and the scrabble mesquite ends of the roots are scratchy and they are cat scratching the inside of that little pink soft cave. Maybe that's it. 

The beginning of my hair is beginning to hurt and I'm beginning to not like this. Each hair starts as a little tiny egg that hatches inside a little tiny sack call a follicle. I made up that part about the egg.

On planet Amy on the surface on the continent called Scalp something weird is happening happening in the dens where the little follicles live. It's an apartment complex on my head and each little den has one follicle in it and they communicate with each other follicularly. I think they have Wi-Fi, and last week or so there was this terrible flood that came in, the red river Styx that got into some of the follicles and burned and drowned them at the same time, they said it was extremely unpleasant. And they would have no more part of it. So they started emailing and twittering to each other and saying we have got to abandon this apartment complex and go find somewhere else to live. Maybe we will turn into dandelions and fly on the breeze but this place ain't no place we want to have or no domicile and no more. Don't you try to condition us, we don't care about that anymore. So I think they're leaving soon. I no longer have to shave my legs or under my arms anymore - nothing's happening. That's kind of nice actually.

I think I'm going to get my supershort haircut pretty soon. I have a nice of a collection of hats and scarves, but I don't want to wear them. But I will.

People say I seem down and depressed. Yes I am down and depressed. Isn't that appropriate?I'm just trying to maintain a moderate level of intelligence here. One of the things that's weird about having cancer is that it puts you in a very strange etiquette position, where you suddenly feel that you have to take care of other people's feelings, even while they're saying to you for you only to take care of yourself. It's a cognitive dissonance of the third degree. It's a different planet, it's an Emily Post head trip with goat cheese. 

Even down to the simplest things, when someone says how are you doing? Or hi how's it going? I hope you're feeling okay? I find myself automatically saying fine! I'm a harmonious polite robot. I hate harmoniously polite robots. I hate myself kind of right now. And I kinda hate everybody right now. I'm not apologizing for that. But I love you all too. Maybe I'm bipolar in addition to being screwed up. If you want pink joyful happiness with iced cookies and trinkets you are shopping at the wrong store.

Anyway back to my automatic response of the word "fine." What a big fat stupid lie that is. However, we are all under the social contract, this unwritten contract whereby we follow the unwritten rules that are not written but they're extremely freakishly important and if anyone of them is broken the matrix will unplug. I guess it's good for society.

Example: if you go to Thundercloud Subs and you accidentally get the Austin club with avocado and bacon instead of the traditional club sandwich with salami and ham and provolone cheese you're not going to lay on the floor and scream and toss a table through the window and cry. That's written in the social contract. Everyone already knows this. Except for troglodytes and people under the age of three. Society is always challenging the social contract in many ways, like breast-feeding in public, or when gay people hold hands in public, stuff like that. The social contract is dynamic of course, but generally if someone has cancer nobody wants to hear about it. They are afraid of cancer, and to hide this they tell themselves that they just don't know what to say. This is kind of silly because you just say the same things that you always say like hey or would you like a beer or what you think about how stupid is it some people don't like Obamacare when they don't even know what it is? I wrote about this in my first blog I think. When someone is avoiding me I know that and I feel it and it feels bad. However I'm lucky to have lots and lots of wonderful friends that do want to know how I'm doing and they make me feel better. I'm not really complaining, maybe just a little bit, I'm sort of disappointed in some people, but I'm also observing this experience with and anthropologist's eye. It is amazingly complex and fascinating to observe how people react. We are all creatures in a social network, always jockeying for position and status and signifying to each other all kinds of complicated communications. Maybe I should go back and get my PhD in anthropology? What do you think? We are all just a bunch of bags of DNA maneuvering around for 70 or 80 years.

My lunch I think. You never know.