The other night I picked my nose until it bled.
Really, I did! And I wasn’t even doing any deep, satisfying excavation. I was absently scratching the tip (yes, the outside tip!) of my nose with my index finger and inadvertently scraped open what I can only assume was the terminal point of a major artery that most people don’t have in their faces. I pulled my finger away, saw the blood, got a square of toilet tissue, and went back to what I was doing. And the bleeding wouldn’t stop. It was a small, yet constant, stream of bright red blood. The TP started looking like a teeny-tiny Shroud of Turin, and by the time N came home, it was soaked. “What the hell happened?” he asked, with a look that unsubtly suggested he was calling shenanigans on the whole thing. I finally stanched it with a giant glob of bacitracin. I spent the following day casually touching the end of my nose to make sure it hadn’t begun bleeding again (and it had, more than once). I thought about that gesture, the index finger tapping on nose-tip, which a friend of mine and I have used for many years in social situations to indicate displeasure. Whatever scenarios I was unhappily ensconced in up until now, they kind of paled in comparison to having an ever-present bead of bright red blood on my nose.
Song: Jail Weddings, I Am Fucking Crazy
Stroke me.
