Spots

I have spots. It’s the weirdest thing, they inhabit pretty much the entirety of me – the outside part anyway. They are everywhere save for the bits that don’t usually see the light of day, the bits of me that are pearly white. Arms, legs, face, loaded for bear – ass, hips crotchal region, unloaded and bare. As they don’t appear where the sun doesn’t shine, I would then imagine them as sun spots.

It’s like a random rash of melanin or Jackson Pollock in his splattering stage blasting me with all kinds of splotchy oddness, skin, hair, spots. Spots on spots. They are of multiple shapes and hues, some have little lumps. Mounds. Like little dermal gophers popped through the surface and left a pile of dark meat. But they’re not gophers, they’re moles. Right there on my me.

I’ve been a spotty fellow all of my life, though never entirely pleased about it. As other freckle face freaks can attest, they do accompany their own peculiar brand of derision. And I can see why: it’s an outbreak of tan on whitey McWhite white skin in strange random patches, a birth mark that covers your whole body. Sometimes, I’ll find myself mesmerized by the splotches on others faces, I imagine people get lost in my spots and don’t hear a word I’m saying. Hypnotic.

Though my dad had the odd spot here and there, I like as not got mine from my mom. She had red hair and is covered with spots. A little bleached out Dalmatian of a woman who mixed it up with a black haired spotless guy and popped out a spotty brownish haired boything.

I suppose I expected them to fade with age, but I’m over half way to a hundred and the little fuckers are going strong. I’ve tried to tan them away but it invariably just makes them darker than the surrounding me meat, cooking out there all lubed up under God the sky broiler. Spots. My fleshy antagonists, we all know what they represent: puerility. Freckles are something little kids have – they make them cute. They are associated with Howdy Doody and Carrottop, goofy, childish, nonsensical, not to be taken seriously.

In adults they are to be avoided assiduously. Think of great humans noted for not only their noble deeds but their freckles. I can’t think of one. A genius with freckles is just a person of spots with some harebrained ideas. The same ideas in the mouth of a non-spotter are often highly regarded.

Actors and other public types with spots do all they can to minimize and conceal them, whereas most guys anyway, don’t walk around on the job site with make-up on – it just comes off weird. So we the spotty must accept our plight as blotched and display our shame for all to see. Some will try to mask under tan in a can or other emollients but then they just turn all leather colored and get derided for that. Most just accept it and find jobs that require as little contact with the public as possible.

But just because our spots make us easily dismissed, do not for an instant imagine our influence as negligible. For the spotty among us work behind the scenes, writing and directing and shaking and moving things where we aren’t seen or readily ridiculed for our impish dermatological clutching at childhood.

Spotters are aware of our position in the social hierarchy, we know that just as we deride others with ostentatious spottitude, that our own is the source of the derision of others. A strange reverence can be found in some spotty types for the really spotty, or worse, the tragically spotty, who may have only a couple of spots, but they take up half the face or something equally grotesque. There but for the grace of genetics…

For yes, I forget my spottiness during social interaction. I can’t see me or how preposterous I appear, all blotched and spotted like some hairless neofelis nebulosa, blathering away about this or that. It is only upon reflection, or a glimpse of these spotty, spotty arms, do I remember that credibility does not come from that which is blemished.

It’s as if the skin can’t commit: am I black, am I white, am I brown, am I yellow, am I red? I most assuredly possess all the assorted hues. Yet this doesn’t make me Everyman. Perhaps my flesh’s lack of commitment makes me appear uncertain (which I am) but lends a visual confirmation, regardless of content that credibility may be lacking. How can such a spotty thing have anything to offer? Everyman as no man.

Underneath, that’s all I am, just a man. Better judged by my action than my appearance.

A man.

A spotty, spotty man.



© 2012 simmbiosis 6/27/12