Skin Deep

So you say "you're fat, balding, covered with scars and incipient skin cancer", blind in one eye - and I know you're telling the truth.

All I can say is it's still a peptide thing. No matter what.

I'm not beautiful. I have my moments, but they're facets that flash and, like everything temporal, they wink out.

There's no such thing as fat. There's fit, and there's not fit. Sumo wrestlers can be fit. Rail-thin mountain climbers can be fit. I'm sort of fit. I used to be more fit - pretty strong, pretty energetic - but I'm slowing down a bit, now.

I'm so small that some fellows feel terrible around me - as though I were a little girl, some of them say.

I got my head kicked in by a racehorse while breaking babies one year on the Southern California arroyo ranches - my eye (the left one, so we'd be a pair if we tried to see eye-to-eye) gets a bit more silly every year, to say nothing of the brain underneath. Thank god it was my left brain.

My arm was crushed in that same accident, and sometimes it flings things without warning. That can be fun. Carrying morning coffee across a white carpet is always an adventure.

I told you about the tumor.

I have allergies, and asthma, and big feet for my size (but at least I don't fall over easily).

Underneath the skin I can be even more terrifying. I'm so sensitive that the slightest edge scores my surface. You never know when you're going to brush up against some piece of festering historicity. I have these broken pieces inside that cut like glass, and if you don't have the stomach for the blood - because my heart bleeds like there's no end, and you can't believe so many tears can live inside one little woman - and the pain, then you won't want to be around me when it starts to rain.

I'm not mean. But sometimes I'm so to-the-point it seems that way. I don't have a lot of patience for shilly-shallying around peoples' feelings when business is on the table. I'm trying to improve at that one, but even after all these years I still need a lot of work.

I'm pretty independent, and I do my best to stay uninvolved with things that are group efforts, where folk are working out karmas together that only surface in emotional dances that they are uninterested in talking through and finishing and getting beyond - and I'm RARELY interested in that sort of thing anymore so when I stumble across it, I usually morph along.

I have a personal thin-red-line that appears like it can be crossed and re-crossed. There's no little ticker running that says how many times are left and then *bing*, one day a person just goes too far (though never without a lot of perhaps too subtle warning) and it's all over - well, it's very different than it was, and there's rarely any going back.

I do keep my loves as friendships, even when they grow into loves and then out again, but they're always different, for I don't have time for lots of little moments of friendly upkeep, so I keep that to a minimum. I usually have one deep, intense relationship - as long term as I can make it - and then my Big Work in the world, some family, some politics, and that's about it.

People tell me I'm intimidating. And I bet I'm wyrrder than you.

Really.

So, there....

: : : : :

-- Anonymous, June 16, 2002

Answers

If we, like, had like a weirdness CONTEST?

I bet THAT would be a fucking trip.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2002