It’s a phrase I’ve used a fair bit in my lifetime - “I need that like I need a hole in the head!”
Except this time, I actually do need a hole in the head.
For some years now, I’ve had a little bump on my head - dead centre and just above (what used to be) the hairline.
For a while, I hoped a beautiful spiral horn would grow there, as part of my gradual transformation into a magical unicorn.
Reality, however, turned out to be not quite so interesting - it’s a little cyst, with ambitions not to be so little - it’s completely benign and could just be ignored, if not for the fact that it interferes with my hat - so it has to go.
So I’m scheduled for minor surgery at the local clinic in a few weeks’ time - they’re actually going to make a hole in my head - well, scalp and pop it out under local anaesthetic.
Apparently it will leave a small scar, for which I’m intending to invent an interesting fictional explanation - maybe I’ll say I had a horn removed - any better suggestions?
“Once I took a bullet wound to the head. No, the scar isn’t from the bullet, it’s from the torrent of telekinetic energy I unleashed upon the man who fired it.”
You were born a Siamese twin, joined at the forehead. After the operation to separate you, your parents divorced and your father moved to Australia with your brother. You know you’ll never see him again, but you can’t stop yourself from checking the forehead of every man your age you meet, hoping against hope that one day you and Toutsuite will be reunited…
You spend your whole life hiding the truth, then *one time *you get drunk, spill it all to some blonde in an Edinburgh bar, and then it’s “Boy Who Lived” this and “Hufflepuff that” every goddam place you go. *And *she took it upon herself to add in a lot of unnecessary crap. Hermione will never speak to you again, that’s for damn sure. Plus, you’ve never seen any bloody royalties.
Before you take a job as a knife-thrower’s assistant, always, always, ask why the position’s become vacant…
“Alright, after I cannibalized on this pregnant chick once I got a splitting headache, so this really good blacksmith I knew split my head open with an axe, that’s how I birthed my first daughter.”
Bonus points if you have a daughter named or nicknamed Athena.
Yes - usually just a baseball cap to keep the sun off. Or if I’m out walking or foraging, I have a wide-brimmed grass hat which protects my neck from sunburn too.
I tan fairly easily, but I don’t like being exposed to direct sunlight in the heat of the day.
I was a clumsy little kid (and my brother had a tendency to get out of the double stroller, thus unbalancing it and catapulting me out) and as a result have a knot of tissue under my forehead, right in the middle. It’s always been there so I don’t think it’s a cyst.
I double-tapped a friend in the side of the head with a paintball gun during a game once. Aside from an education in team identification and humiliating defeat he also got two cysts under each impact.
He said the surgery was bloody but painless - the scar is noticeable but nothing drastic.
My suggestion for responding to the inevitable questions: “brain zit.”
Simple: you were once abducted by aliens and they, ever-so clumsy on human bodies that actually bleed and bruise (gasp!), they dropped you while attempting to laser you up into their spaceship to transplant a live alien fetus, nonetheless your gender.
OR if that seems to cliche just stare at the nosy person who asked and reply, “the goverment… they want to control us with their mind-reading, even if I was the lucky one who managed to escape their deadly radiation waves to tap into my conscience.” -creepy music-
