Pillow Talk

​In honor of this week's featured artist, here is one of my own pointillist contributions to the world. This is what I imagine my skull looks like under the skin. Read on...
 
As I said in my last little update, I am more a gorilla than a gazelle. I don't think I realize the extent of my klutziness. 

I have run into walls, telephone poles, fence posts, and door jams. At times it even extends to tripping over steps, stones, and things that aren't there. You know, the type of trip where you look back to see what the hell happened. For me, I swear the earth reaches up and grabs me, and I go tumbling.

In the United States, where doors are more often than not several inches above my head, it doesn't pose too much of a problem. Most of the time, the worst that happens is light bruising and rattled bones from running into door jams.

Some part of my body is continually recovering from a cut, a bruise, or some form of petty injury. It often includes bleeding from some fresh wound or another. Sometimes I'm spontaneously leaking from a cut I had no idea I had. In the past, folks may have called it stigmata, tied me to a stake, and set a match. Now they make bandages for that.

However, England has ancient houses with positively Hobbit sized doors.

The house in which we live is 500 years old. Yes, it has ghosts and creaks and whispers, oh my. One of the doors here is only three and a half feet tall. That's being generous. People were shorter then.

Until the last couple of hundred years, human height had stayed relatively constant; somewhere around 5'7" (170 cm for those not in the United States.) So I don't know why that door is only 3 1/2 foot tall.

People have been shooting up like bean poles in the last one hundred and fifty years. We've added an average of 3.9" inches (10 cm) from the bottoms of our feet to the top of our heads. Those that study these things put it down to better nutrition or better medicine - we no longer consider The Four Humours, Phrenology, Systematic Bleeding, or prescribe cigarettes for stress as sound medical practices.

I guess I'm one of those who has benefited from modern medicine and nutrition being 6'1" (185 cm give or take).

Last year, when I was going into a closet, my head hit the jam so hard it peeled off a pelt of skin and fur on the door jam. It looked like it could have come from a squirrel caught in something from the Spanish Inquisition. I had to peel it off of the crossbeam. The gash in my head bled like a neverending bloodletting ceremony from the Middle Ages.

Unfortunately, household harmony suffers a bit when we discover my pillow looks like Hannibal Lecter used it for a drop cloth or a napkin. Beautiful white linen pillowcases stained with copious amounts of Scott's internal operating system can send the day into a quick tailspin.

We have resorted to using black pillowcases on my side of the bed. It's not like it solves the problem, but is undoubtedly a step I'm willing to take for peaceful coexistence.

In a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is I hit my head again today. Not too bad; it was a relatively light tap, but it did draw blood.

Tonight, we are going back to the: "Black Pillowcases Of Shame." I will hang my head and accept my lot, because, well, it's just who I am: Shrek.

Until next week, I wish you peace. 

T - 270 DAYS

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