After a Deliberate Pause

 

It isn’t a pretty song.  It captured my imagination for a short while as a thirteen-year-old.  I had run for some middle school office.  It may have been class-president.  But all I can remember running for the right to do, and then actually doing, was playing music in the lunchroom.  I fervently liked music that no one else liked.  I hated everyone else’s music.  But I won.  And ended up playing things like the Sex Pistols in the middle school cafeteria.

I can remember playing “EMI.”  I don’t think I ever played “Bodies” but I’m sure I thought of it.  Miraculously for my thirteen-year-old mind, the way one might consider a gymnast who could leap in the air and spin five times before landing, the song used the word “fuck” five times, rather overtly.  “Who Are You” was a Who song on the radio which managed so squeeze in a muffled “Who the fuck are you?”  But there was nothing discrete or tricky about what Johnny Rotten was saying.  The barrage of profanity was unmistakable confrontation after a deliberate pause.  And that’s all that mattered as I hadn’t any meaningful way to consider what an abortion was, yet.

 

The song was on my mind today, as there is another part of the song where Mssr. Lydon suggests the unfortunate topic is a “gurgling, bloody mess.”  Staring repeatedly at my left forearm today, mopping up an unerring stream of puss this description seemed most apt.  I have a rather epic case of poison ivy.  I guess I’d forgotten that it could get this bad.  There is a six-inch by two-inch strip of tender pale skin that is aflame with pustules.  I keep daubing it with calamine lotion.  Calamine lotion should work to dry it up and speed the end of it all, but I don’t think I’m even halfway through this yet.  Rivulets of puss make a mockery of the pretty pink covering. 

A long-sleeved shirt at least protects the rest of my family from having to consider this living road kill.  I snapped at my younger daughter during dinner when she asked me to show it to her sister.  Back at my desk there is a roll of paper towels.  I keep peeling off individual sheets, patting myself and tossing them.  But there is no end to this process.  There is too much carnage for anything to properly coagulate yet.  I have, of course, thought back over my activity.  What happened a few days ago to invite such a dramatic reaction?  Was it the quality of my encounter or the potency of that particular combination of three leaves and a petiole that set me aflame?

 

 

 

Tuesday 7/20/21