| dewy decimal |
2003-03-07 - 7:15 p.m.
Youth was, for me, never all that simple. Could it be possible for a third grader to drag himself to church in hopes of redeeming his eternal soul while his parents lay merrily on the couch consuming vast streams of radio-active Sunday cartoons with his little sister? I say yes! For I, as a child, possessed the fanatical thoughts typically reserved for chain smoking poets and prostitues.
Since preschool days, my thoughts had formed their own personalities independent of myself. Picture a five year old Dustin. Big headed, not at all figuratively speaking but rather in a quite literal instance, BIG HEADED. On this BIG HEAD, there between my eyebrows, sat a blemish. Like nosemouthbrowseyes, it was a feature, dare I say land mark. Set in facial equilibrium where a unibrow would have perfectly concealed this muddy feature. This MOLE. I was also thin enough to make teachers and neighbors throw suspicious glances at my mother that silently questioned her ability to provide for her ittybitty (although big-headed) son. Young, fragile, emotionally albino Dustin.
Sensitivity in men or in my case as a boy, can be met with either accolades or admonishments. My medically astonishing case of this affliction was met by both reactions, introducing confusion and binary opposition into my self-conscious, not yet developed mind.
To further estrange me, I was seemingly a child prot�g� of sorts. For every hour that my parents spent working (collectively 16 hours), I spent as much time drawing. Both my grandmothers were seamstresses and had large rolls of newsprint for sewing purposes. I used this endless resource as my canvas where I would spread over wooden floor, my geographically sized, cheap-fibered canvas. I was obsessed with Chinese mythology and the porcelain figurines that I would see through the mottled windows of Chinatown. Fut Goong, Qwan Yin, and the gang. Gods with auspicious colorful flowing robes, secret powers, and all the enchantment of �the old ways� begged me to draw them with my arsenal of 64 crayons. Gold, Copper, and silver were usually the first to be eroded.
Till the sixth grade I drew. My fellow students envied this gift that allowed me to issue fore-shortened, perspective-conscious renditions of everything from Chinese Goddesses to an extensive account of various species of crayfish. And although I suffered through C�s in P.E., it was a given that I would be rewarded with an A in art. To get anything else would have been an obvious mistake on my teachers behalf. So I drew everything. I was appraised as being �highly creative.� The yards of newsprint became my obsession at an early age. All the old friends of my grandparents prophesized my career in art, as I, marinating in incense, drewdrewdrew. That is until the ending of the sixth grade. That was the period I refer to as the mutilation.
�That is a mighty large mole,� adults would whisper to each other, somehow equating youth with deafness.
�Ho, Dustin, brah, how come you get da kine between your eyes?� laughter ensuing from classmates. I, searching for explanation but finding none, would leak the tears of an emotionally albino child.
So on my behalf, my parents sought out a dermatologist who suggested that such moles were prone to malignant melanoma. Furthermore Dr. Dan, as I was told to address him, explained, �It is a rather large mole and removing it now will help him to feel less conscientious of his appearance.�
I cannot blame neither my parents, nor Dr. Dan for the event. Freeing my parents from any label of being shallow or professional regarding the decision (to remove the mole), I will say that simply, it was a concern.
So one day I went into the office where they administered a local anesthesia which made my mole rise atop an inflating lump of flesh that stood a ping pong ball�s height above skull level. I was awake as he took the knife to my head. There was no pain as he uprooted the raisin-like blemish. In fact it felt as if he were simply kneading putty on the space between my brows. I recovered after only reopening the stitches once in my sleep.
Upon returning to school, people greeted me with more fondness. The loss of the mole had insighted something different in me. This thing was different from anything I had experienced before in my former life of mole-bearing humility, when once I had worn the gaudy turquoise polo shirts and out of fashion high-cut shorts. This thing was called vanity. With this new vanity, I was subject to less estrangement and even met with subtle affections from girls. I learned to like this affirmative response and soon sought after it with the more stylish clothing of the time. In short I became a participating member of the eighties. Cavariccis, Oakleys, Billabong, etc. So yes, I lost my mole, but I was soon to discover I had also lost something else.
I found myself less frequently meeting my gargantuan newsprint rolls. The necessity to produce renditions of gods and crayfish had utterly vanished. Poof! So I departed from my estrangement into a new mole-less, newsprint-less world. My third eye had vanished forever, probably wasted away somewhere where all biodegradable excesses meet their maker. And like an ancient Indian wife, my obsession with art followed in a destructive flame. In short, I had lost my vision and in turn adopted the banal capabilities of everyone else.
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