Tropic of Face Cancer

I haven’t done much writing in the last little while, I’ve been drained by the thought of a piece of my arse being sliced off and sewn onto my classic Italian profile. Yes, I was concerned about skin cancer, most worryingly on my nose. Yesterday my doctor’s appointment came up and they found nothing wrong with me. As I suspected, but was afraid to believe, I am perfect. A surgeon’s scalpel will not slice through my butt cheek to remove a flap of skin that will be sewn onto the centre of my face. I will not be known as Arse Face.

In school, some kids called me Wombat based on the perceived flatness of my nose. Accusing someone of Italian heritage of falling down on their nose game. What dogs. Though I didn’t really give much thought to my Italianity until my father called me a fucking little wog bastard. Was I technically a bastard? My juvenile delinquent parents were not married when I was conceived.

My father would be locked in a cupboard under a sink by his mother, an experience so traumatizing that I suffer from claustrophobia. However the claustrophobia has become increasingly intense, probably related to the police arrests that come with the life of the heroic firebrand activist. Who often finds himself face down with a pile of cops on top of him, or locked in small police spaces, concerned about immediate matters like air circulation and breathing.

The claustrophobia is bad enough that even the thought of a doctor leaning over me and closely examining my face was one that I had to push away. In the two years of pandemic a mask has never bothered me, but in the waiting room my cloth mask nearly set me off on a panic spiral.

It was only after the doctor gave me a clean bill of health that I felt a massive weight lift off my shoulders and I realized I had been carrying around a fear of disfigurement and/or a long and painful cancer death. And thanks to the transmission of psychosis from my raised as Catholic parents, what came along with this sense of horror was the feeling that I would deserve it. How anusingly complicated! Haha! I am laughing! Yes, it’s spelled anusingly.

For the last several months I have been cutting down my drinking. I believe that being drunk is a blessed state, I also have a strongly held view that my midriff could use some work. But the flip side of Catholic guilt is a rage against all forms of effort, trying or persistence. The world sucks, life is terrible, why should it be on me to do anything? Ever? So I decided I was gonna “work” on the difficult middle section of my dad bod by not doing something, that something being mindlessly drinking on school nights. I have to report that it’s been easy. So much for writing a book about my cancer journey or my struggle with the devil’s fruit juice.

For several months now I’ve been exploring a rekindled love of reading. I’m back where I was as a boy, with several books on the go. When I was a kid I would sit in the backyard leaning against a tree, a chill wind blowing, for it was winter. I would read and read in the cold until I became ill. I had become addicted to reading as a way to escape everything I could see around me. I was an annoying, unhealthy, bookworm and it’s good to be back, reading and feeling my enormous brain throbbing like a V8 motor everyone wants to have sex with. That’s a very strange thing to say but I refuse to delete it because it makes me laugh. I can still laugh despite being super intelligent and immortal.

Fuck I feel good. The doctor also told me my knees are fine, so I can get back into skating and kneeling to shoulder fire anti-tank missiles.

For a few weeks I’ve had the horrible idea that maybe I have face cancer, now I have the amazing feeling you get when you don’t have cancer, but what’s this? The Government has just sent me a bowel cancer test. I am truly blessed.