Tag Archives: skin

The Machine

Enya returns from the rural warehouse disappointed, and joins me in the car.

“They’ve discontinued my model, and the new one looks terrible! And the women are so offhand and rude in there!”

I’ll go in and see for myself.

A young couple from New Zealand, crossing the mown grass fronting the building, break into a run. Laughing, I join them, awkward on my wounded leg. We throw ourselves prone on the gentle brow of the hill, soldiers or scouts alert to dangers all around. Neither seems to question the sudden presence of this disarming stranger.

I can feel grassy stubble tickling my chin. Rash-inducing. Such sensitive skin, stinging in response to a tiny bead of essential oil in an ocean of bathwater. I’m like the Princess and the Pea.

Inside, the brusque attendants admire a much-contoured, Segway-like machine. Over-contoured, like some doomed car model forever to be reviewed as “Good value second-hand due to its weird looks”. Or “Cons: Looks weird”.

Sticky-backed plastic still coats the shiny machine’s skin, slightly dog-eared at awkward corners, yet ready to be peeled off like great sheets of sunburn on arrival in its new mistress’s home. For now, it stands dumbly there against the wall.

Nose

It itches, wants to sniff, and makes my eyes squint and water. There’s been no pepper involvement, but that’s the feeling. There’s a sneeze coming.

Feeling the dryness of skin, knowing it’s reddened and flaky there – some genetic predisposition in the male line. My throat and forehead and inner ear all quietly mutter “Something’s amiss!” and I guess the placebo fizzy C pills will have to be administered.

I squeeze my nostrils and snort like a coke-head, but nothing clears.

Remember that old remedy – Friar’s Balsam? Sat the varnished kitchen table with my face above a steaming mixing bowl, towel rough and damp tenting my head, steam infusing all and condensing on reddened ears. A bitter, brown smell.

Or the taste of eucalyptus chapstick, and the cold-yet-hot sensation of Vick’s Vaporub evaporating from my chest.

That opaque pink medicine I’ve not seen in decades.

The sensation, for weeks after my ear drum burst, that the whole side of my head was dead, absent. Like half of a painted face – one side black, one white.

Kilt

I was a flasher, at the age of what – five, maybe? On the chunky, ash wood, varnished stairs. My kilt must have been the coolest, funniest thing, clothing item, ever, and B. a student guest of Dad’s, was going to know about it. Laughter, childish giggles, that kind of heady, somewhat forced hilarity a child can happily sustain way beyond what adults can enjoy. B. did pretty well, though – to his credit.

There’s something unique about “going commando” in a skirt. Just the freeness of feeling air and no constriction, and the sensuality of cloth brushing against skin.

In Poona, too, there was a habit of wearing no underwear under the mandated orange/maroon robes. Not everyone, but a valid choice. Of course, incredibly sexy, and a strong provocation both within and without the ashram.

The Poona ashram, hearing the night-time monsoon storms. The tree-sized bamboos creak in the wind, leaves whispering. As rain suddenly falls, the dry dust smell leaping away into damp aliveness and fertility.The “sniffers” at the meditation hall entrance have no control over this scent – only illicit perfume or hair products that might trigger Osho’s allergies.