Pop Goes the Damsel

So I've popped a few zits in my day. It comes with the territory. In addition to feeding me fat-back (a substance only really poor white trash eat and then only as a "garnish") as a main-dish with the nightly meat-n-three as a child, the parents also passed on to me a digestive system marked by the ability to shoot lava-hot acidic bile out of either my ass OR mouth, and the sort of skin that Ukrainian orphans who work in sulphur mines would describe as "rough."

My brother had it first, which, in addition to priming my taste for popping zits and excavating pimples, served as a sort of warning shot for the perils of continuing life into adolescence. My brother, "Leslie," had cystic acne starting from his hairline and continuing all the way down to his ass. Back, chest and various crevices were not spared. I spent some of the happiest hours of my life as a child, (there was a decade age gap) huddled next to him on a floor, with a bobby-pin, upholstery needle and nail clippers in rotation as I gouged at his cratered carcass like a turkey vulture with a swiss-army-knife for a beak. Leslie's moans of anguish as I tapped the upholstery needle into assorted infected pores with a heavy book were soothing, sort of like Enya for hill-billies.
Which brings us to the point, which is that I LIKE to pop zits. It's not just the popping itself with its heady mixture of pain and pleasure, anticipation and release. Sort of like masturbating with a penis instead of the usual equipment, if you're a girl. It's also the endless possibilities after the thing has shot it's load, and you're standing there in the bathroom, holding this slightly damp, elegantly curled albino fairy-turd on your finger and wonder what life will be like from now on. Now the REAL magic happens. You wipe it on the mirror.

I call this "frosting the frame" and it's a must-do for any arts and crafts fan, or just the recreational face picker. You start low, usually the bottom of the frame, as it's convenient to the finger and face, post-pop. With careful planning and a little imagination, you can create miniature macrame works of art using only facial effluvium and creativity. My roommate, for instance, only recently discovered that our bathroom mirror frame did not in fact have a paisley pattern worked upon it in low relief. Or rather, that it DID, but simply had not been that way at the moment of purchase. He still gags when he thinks about the gently curdled and yellowed pile of minute maggots nestled in the tissue after I made a wipe across the frame with it. Sure, it upset 6 months of work, but there will be more.

There are always more.

Ha'pint brought up the "pock-marked" reference from an earlier post, and felt like I must be describing her. To be fair, she cultivates an admirable crop of diminuitive and deep pimples with every cycle of panty-plague and school, work and home related stress. But it was not her I referred to, but myself. The craters on my face will become, like my mother's, more pronounced with age and misjudgement, but for now, both Ha'pint and myself are more or less "passing" in the world of lesser-blighted people. It is entirely due to inspired application of cosmetics and advantageous light.

Plus, she's got this thing going on with her bangs... If her forehead was the Titanic, which it almost is, then imagine the hair she has combed over one side of it at a jaunty angle to be the deluge of passengers jockeying for position to get the hell off the ship before it sinks. These are the sort of bangs which provide very particular and effective pimple cover all on their own. I've never seen a zit under them (who could?) but I imagine it would be like stumbling upon a small but fiercely independent group of refugees hiding in a tent from immigration officials.

The Money Shot:
Women and men in 17th and 18th century France used little black pieces of felt cut into whimsical shapes to cover their facial imperfections. They would paste them onto whatever they didn't feel like was up to the sexy standard the rest of their "look" set, which usually included a shit-ton of powder, wigs, hideous lip-paint, mouthwash made from human piss (Portugese was best!) and cosmetics made from arsenic.
This is what you looked like if you had money to really fix yourself up.