[Ed. note: Last couple posts have unintentionally run a theme of…lingering leftovers, we’ll call ‘em, and the subject seems to merit another go. Thus, we keep the streak alive.]

Just stood in front of the mirror and dabbed a pearl of Mederma (”Skin care for scars”™) into the corner of my mouth. I have a scar that runs right out of the crease there from my assault in South Carolina crack ‘hood. I still have have a line drawn in my face to remind me of what I still can’t remember: what happened to me that night. I remain amnesiac about it. And every time I put on my medicine, I get a Sybilant feeling. Part of me doesn’t want that crack crack to fill-in. I’m not sure exactly what it is. When the stiches were still in, giving me a perma-sneer with black-threaded X’s, it looked badass. The fissure that’s left is far subtler and doesn’t come anywhere near to giving me a Scarface look, but the fact of its existence might be a touch badass. Is that its appeal? Or, is it a more honorable, spiritual desire to be reminded of what I don’t want and don’t want to be? I feel silly wanting a trophy. A real reformation would have me see it not as a mark of how tough and cool I was or am, but as a memorial to my own idiocy. That’s why my other, more noble Dudley Do Right personality wants to salve that scar away. My Cyrano De Bergerac personality is for smoothing things over, too; for kissing, and for not making frowny first impressions with the females. But with us schizophrenics, where there’s two personalities, there’s three, and where there’s three, four…and at least one of those mourns a twinge or two everytime I poke on more Mederma. It’s not big in honesty, it’s there. So, I’d feel better if I could convince myself that the thing I value in the scar—the heart of my urge to protect its ugliness—is the service that it renders me as tribute to the invaluable life lessons I’ve learned (am learning) and the price that’s been paid for them. Like a Vietnam memorial. That’s an overloaded metaphor, but the idea, I suspect, is gotten by you. And that’s passive voice, which should be excised like the coal in my soul that is my immature clinging to what little street cred I’ve garn-earned and my imaginary crazybrave addict identity. Bad rhymes… industrial mis-spellings… stupid things our society can’t let go of. Yes, I am aware that one cannot speak of The Faults of capital-S Society without sounding fifteen. Okay, I’m getting goofy, now. Let’s flip the subject. Here’s something I would like to go away…

When I pulled into the garage coming home from my Sunday workout this afternoon, NPR was just getting into a story on border violence. It’s a subject I’m very interested in, so I put the pink truck in park, clicked the roll-door closed behind me, and let the engine idle while I heard the segment out. That is, until I remembered that that’s how people kill themselves. I figured I’d done enough inhalation of deadly fumes, so I turned the car off and continued listening. Then the timered light overhead turned off leaving me in the dark. Then the program segued into a piece on political pressures environmental scientists face—not on my hot-topic plate right now like border issues are but, if you’ll forgive the pun, an evergreen concern of mine. So I stayed on. And then my mom, who had heard the garage door open way back when, came out and stood in the doorway. She just kind of stared at me and I just kind of stared back. She said, “Are you alright?” I, sensing some kind-hearted suspicion regarding my sitting in a dark garage (can’t blame Mom, how ever much it might annoy me), only gruntily affirmed that I was, in fact, alright. She mumbled something about the dog pacing by the door in anticipation, the same door which she closed again as she receded back into her bedroom.

The radio was still interesting me, but when it did no longer, I pulled the keys out of the ignition and felt my way to the door and into the light, toward the dog and Mom in her blue, buttoned-down Lay-Z-Boy. “Were you listening to something?” she asked.

“Yeah, they were discussing recent border events.” I avoided the word ‘violence’ because one of my…uh, pipedream is to wade into that fray and write a book about it, and my poor mother will worry enough without me fanning the flames like that. “And then the talked about political pressure on forestry scientists,” I said.

She was leaned over, scratching the dog fairly vigorously and hadn’t any reply. So after a pause, I shrugged to myself and walked off in my own silence.

Just as I was about to hit the hall she called out, “You worked out!” It was an odd declaration—certainly not news to me—as if she were reassuring herself that I did indeed exercise and not smoke drugs, or wanted confirmation from me to reassure her. I hesitated, unsure of the appropriate response, “Yeah…?”

“Your back’s sweaty.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, and headed down the stairs.

I’ll readily own up to some measure of self-consciousness—okay, defensiveness, but it’s hard not to read the sequence of events through dark lenses, and I’m not sure whether it would be more appropriate to hope that my suspicious viewpoint, or hers, fades away.