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Friday 12 May 2017

Superficialities concluded

OK, it was a trick (to attract your attention) but not a cheap one. If tricks can be priced in nervous energy and literary delicacy, this one’s pretty darn expensive. For one thing it demands supreme good taste and I’m not famed for that.

An erotic experience in Hereford County Hospital’s dermatology department. It happened. And, as with Brexit means Brexit (ref. Theresa May), erotic means erotic: tending to arouse sexually. But then many phenomena may do the arousing – from Botticelli’s Venus to an innocent ewe grazing on the Brecon Beacons. (And yes, I live near these hills but it’s not that).

I am particularly sensitive to the act of shriving, otherwise being made pure again. I gain pleasure from taking trash to the dump and returning with an empty car: intense pleasure. I anticipate pleasure when faced with rectifying (ie, purifying) the defects in a first draft. On Tuesday I entered the hair salon shaggy and came out smooth; it wasn’t my reflection that thrilled me but the discards I’d left behind on the salon floor. And pleasure, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is a wide spectrum.

Incidental to my dermatology appointment was the removal of a Giant Comedone, a blackhead with world domination ambitions. For US readers: a zit that’s read The Art Of The Deal. Google offers pictures but they’re more disgusting than the anaesthesia-free procedure itself, performed with finger pressure and tweezers. An analogy will serve: think toothpaste tube.

The resultant exudate is not revolting; it emerges like chips of granite. I was invited to check with my fingers.

Nevertheless those chips represented bodily imperfections and I was rid of them. I was – in my sense of the word – shriven. Pleasured, you might say.

Do you expect me to draw a picture?

Tasteful enough?

7 comments:

  1. Next up: stretch marks.
    Forthcoming: sebaceous filaments!

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  2. Well, I'm glad it was erotic for you anyway. I can't help myself asking, where was it, and will it return?

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  3. Hang on, you're saying you had to go to a clinic to have a black head squeezed? I once heard about a scuzzy biker type, the acquaintance of an acquaintance of a sort-of friend, as these subjects of urban myths always are, who lived usch an unwashed life that he finally had to go to hospital to have his klingons removed. I didn't question this at the time, but then wondered why on earth this necessitated such a course, what was wrong with a bath or a carefully wielded pair of small scissors, except I suppose they'd have to be wielded by a very close friend, which rather brings us back to the positioning of your GC...

    I hear the siren call of Google images, I know I'm going to regret this.

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  4. I trust you are still picking your own nose.

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  5. Marly: Stretch mark treatment a possibility. Once I was fat and my skin was stretched (but not by a baby); now I am thinner and my skin is de-stretched. Properly handled there might be enough for a pair of Turkish slippers.

    Lucy: I was there for other reasons. The GC was, as I said in the post, incidental. I think they removed it just to keep their hand in.

    Re. Google Images - colour makes all the difference.

    MikeM: Avidly.

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