2/28/10: Spit

You've gotta love those days when you go through your busy routine, doing your thing all over town, only to discover, afterward, you've had an eyebooger playing stowaway, or that a zit the size of Asia had materialized over your forehead. Especially nice are when such occasions include a significant other, or, worse, a potential. Oddly, these days have a habit of supplanting those that are supposed to be the exact opposite -- birthdays, graduations, vacations.

My contretemps occupied the last category: vacation day. It was the same vacation, in fact, in which the Almighty decided to enlighten me on the intricacies of patchouli. The morning of the twenty-eighth, as I readied myself for my impromptu and aimless beach getaway, a phrase popped into my head, as phrases have a way of doing, in my case: "Is just spit I wipe off my chin." It's a song lyric, actually, Skid Row, "Riot Act". Classic album, if you're into early-nineties metal.

Anyway.

The phrase looped through my cranium all morning as I slaved to my grind, and I thought both nothing and everything of it, a kind of listless zen. At one point -- an early point -- I remember blowing my nose, a nonevent. I went places, I saw people, I had face-to-face social contact; and then, my obligations done, I went home, intent on loading up my truck and hieing off on my halfcocked trip. I bee-lined for the bathroom beforehand, however, and after doing my necessaries, I stole a glance in the mirror. And what did I find clinging for dear life from the forest of stubble over my chin? Not spit, no, better: a little arachnid glob of snot, an apparent misfire when I'd blown into the Kleenex hours earlier.

It wasn't a direct hit, but it was uncannily close. And who's to say Sebastian Bach's said spit wasn't, in fact, mucus? The two can look remarkably similar ...