I don't know why, but I scar very easily. I was also once a little boy and as a man, I enjoy drinking. Thus, I have many scars, particularly on my hands and arms.
The one on my right wrist is from a really nasty burn I got while making gravy one time. At 3 a.m. It took over a month to heal and wept the most disgusting interdermal fluid ever. Plus, when I had the gauze on, it looked like I had tried to slit my wrist. I got so many looks at work (I was a cashier at the time) that I finally started showing people, because the pitying stares were eating away at the rational part of my brain.
I also have a scar on the back of my left hand, from backhanding my buddy. He's not real picky when it comes to women and over the years, he's really run the gamut. Once, he started shacking up with one of the ugliest people I have ever met, both physically and personality-wise. He would bring her to parties where she would talk shit about him for hours.
My friend and I have come to blows before, never out of malice, but simply because it can be good fun. Anyway, we started talking about who had won our previous fight. My friend's girl started screeching that she would break up with him if he got in a fight in front of her. To me, my duty as a friend was clear. I called him by a few choice names and got in his face, whereupon he asked me to step outside. I remember it began to rain really hard just as we started. During the scuffle, I backhanded him across the teeth. I think he ended up winning that one though, but in the end, the girl he was with was as good as her word and she broke up with him, much to the relief of myself and our mutual friends.
So, what are your scar stories?
Great question. The oldest scar I vividly remember getting is from my brother. (Yes, this guy.) It was at my birthday party. Now, fun fact, I'm born on Halloween, so I always had a Halloween-themed party. At this particular one, when I was probably about 8, my parents had set up a "spiderweb" with strands of yarn criss-crossing through our living room. The fun part about this was that every strand of yarn had, on one end, a clear plastic glove that had been stuffed with popcorn and candy corn fingernails so that they looked like hands. The other end of each strand was taped to the counter on one end of the living room. At my party, the time had come for all of the attendees to grab an end of yarn and unwind the web, to be rewarded with the literal hand full of sweets. My brother and I were going through the room unwinding our strings, and we got to a point where ours twined around each other. I had been wrapping my yarn around my hand at that point because it was so long. My brother and I were confused over which strand was whose because of the way it was wrapped. We both were insistent that one of the strands was ours. (Why not just unwind it and find out? I don't know. We were children.) My brother angrily pulled on the yarn. It was mine, and him pulling on it caused the yarn in my hand to run taught and now I have an inch-long scar on my pinky finger, right on the inside. I took a picture but am having trouble embedding it. Anyway, that is one of my many scars. I could also tell you about the time I got 11 stitches for falling up the stairs - graceful I am not - but I fear I'm getting long :) Great question humanodon!
OK, well, here's another one, briefly mentioned in the previous post. I did a summer college program in between my junior and senior year of high school, where I got to go to the local college (later my alma mater) and take two classes over the course of five weeks while living there. This was the first time in my life I made the mistake of taking an 8 AM class, but (for the only time in my history of taking 8 AMs) I actually did attend the class about 95% of the time. One morning I was walking up the stairs in the building, holding a glass bottle of juice in my hands, and kind of slowly running up the stairs. You know, the accelerated clip many people take when they are going up the stairs - not quite running, but not walking either. Anyway, as it happened, my shoe caught on the lip of the stair and I fell forward. This would not have been a big deal except for the glass in my hand. It hit the ground before I did, broke, and I lacerated myself pretty badly on the pieces. Immediately I grabbed my sweatshirt and applied it to the bleeding. I don't like blood or gore so I didn't even look at the wound, just knew it was bad. I proceeded to the classroom - I was early - and got a classmate and the teacher's attention. They called an ambulance! At one point there was even concern I had cut open my wrist on the glass. There is a longer story about how I was a (to-be) music major at the time and had to wait 8 hours to get stitches done by a cosmetic surgeon because we were worried about the cut potentially affecting my music. And there were the priceless moments where I told my mother "I didn't need stitches, we could just let this heal on its own" (it would have been a VERY ugly, twisted scar if that was the case) because I was pertified of needles and didn't want the painkiller injections or the stitches. The whole story culminates in me finding out that the shots of anesthetic that they give you for stitches sucks WAY MORE than the original cut probably did, and then us going out for steak. Because mmm, steak. The scar itself is on the meaty side of my right palm, about three inches long, and is like a Y shape with a very long extended tail. You can still see the marks of some of the stitches, in fact. So there's that! Also I'm covered in chicken pox scars because I liked to pick them off and tell my mother "I got another one!" Those are just all over. My chest, my forehead, my arms, etc.
When I was 18 I took a year off between high school and college to play in my band. For work I became an electric meter reader. One day while reading meters, I drove up a long driveway to find a man gardening outside with his two dogs. One dog was on a chain and the other was running free. I rolled down my window and asked him, "are the dogs safe?" He replied that the dog running free was friendly but the one on the leash was not. I got out of the car and immediately the dog running free ran over to me and bit my leg. I was bleeding quite a bit and the guy took me in and cleaned my wound. I went to the ER, per company policy and while there they gave me a few stitches and they gave me a drug test. -Also company policy. Back then I smoked a fair amount of pot. Two days later I was fired for drug use. The scar has faded over the years, but I can still see it and when I do I'm reminded of the only job I was ever fired from. Stupid dog!
That sucks. One thing I don't like about "dog culture" in America is that people tend to have huge dogs and when the dogs are running free, the owners tend to be super slow about coming over and grabbing them. Those owners tend to be really unapologetic about it too. After years of living in a place with feral street dogs, I have no qualms about throwing rocks at strange dogs or hitting one with a stick if it's moving toward me aggressively. I do however, understand that in America all dogs are "babies" and striking a dog is slightly worse than mugging someone. Did the dog owner know you lost your job because of it?
I was in high school, year 12 specifically, when a notorious problem decided to stomp on these disposable razors the school gave people who had to shave (All boys school, so looking neat was pretty strictly regulated). He then grabbed the blades from the razor and walked over to me, I was oblivious and talking to other people. He then cuts through my left sleeve of my white button-up shirt into my skin, giving a pretty nasty deep cut. I still have the scar surprisingly enough. Ended up going home on the bus with a heavily bloodstained white shirt.
This is actually the earliest memory I have. I was two years old, and my grandparents were visiting. They had a glass jar of coffee beans for reasons I can't recall. When they left, they let me carry it to their car. I tripped on the sidewalk and shattered the jar, and the glass cut my skin in several places. To this day I have a small lightning-shaped scar on my right index finger. At one point I got a mirroring one on my left finger, but I don't know how that got there.
Great topic humanodon. In Paul Auster's recent memoir Winter Journal, he begins a section like this: Wonderful writing, no? - and then he does take an inventory of scars. This particular memoir begins with his attempt to This book may not speak to everyone, but I took idea after idea from it and turned them into writing activities. I've written about Auster in previous Hubski discussions.The inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face, which are visible to you each morning . . . You seldom think about them, but whenever you do, you understand that they are marks of life, that the assorted jagged lines etched into the skin of your face are letters from the secret alphabet that tells the story of who you are, for each scar is the trace of a healed wound, and each would was caused by an unexpected collision with the world
try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenoenology of breathing.
I took this idea from Paul Auster and turned it into an activity for the writing workshops I teach -- beginning with, make an inventory of your scars BOTH INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL. -- then pick one and turn it into a poem or short story.
That really is some beautiful writing. The part about facial scars rings true for me. Every morning I look at my forehead, where my helmet prevented some serious damage after a serious nightcap, and the faint line left under my lip when I did a swan dive into the shallow end of a pool. I like the idea of internal (non-physical scarring) because it makes me wonder what kinds of shapes they'd take. For example, we all know what kind of scar a cut, a burn or a broken bone leaves, but what is the shape of the scar left by getting jilted? Your writing exercise reminds me of one I used to conduct with my own classes. It's a fairly well-known exercise, though for the life of me, I can't recall whose it is. It begins by looking at one's own hands in detail and imagining them as they were when one was a child, then when one is very, very old. The next part of the exercise is to do this for someone one knows very well, filling in all the details of the changes and their backstories. The final part is doing the same again for a character of one's own creation. It's a bit involved, but doable over three class periods with homework assignments.
I get scars periodically when I'm riding my bike and miscalculate a sharp turn and crash. In the cycling wold it's called bacon, I believe. Takes off just the top two, sometimes three layers of the epidermis.
I have an aloe plant in my front yard. I find that taking a piece off and rubbing it on the injury, letting it air out, will usually result in lesser scarring.
I have quite a sizeable and obvious scar running along the right side of my nose. I managed to find myself at school camp sailing a Laser dingy. I was calling out to one of my friends, looking back away from the front of the boat - I started to hear the boat start to gybe so I instinctively ducked. However, I'd normally sailed Pacers - their booms are at a much different height. I managed to duck into the swinging boom. It caught my nose, broke it, and left a pretty deep gash. Blood everwhere.
I got knocked out of the boat, but the water was shallow enough for me to just stand up, so I just climbed back down and lay down until I was sure I wasn't going to pass out. As for it getting reset, I went to the hospital, in the hope that they'd knock it straight back into place. Instead, they tell me to come back in 2 weeks time for surgery (which I did). Get knocked out, a "5 minute procedure takes place", wake up, cast taped to my face. Leave. Return, cast gets taken off. What do you know. My nose was still crooked. It's straight, just on the wrong place on my face. It's off by about 30 degrees.
The most interesting scar story I can think of happened when I was about 8 years old. I had finished my meal at McDonald's, so my sister and I went to the play area for a good round of hide and go seek with who ever would join. The style of hide and go seek we grew up playing involved running back to base once the hider thought the coast was clear. It was that time, and so I ran over to base. I thought I wasn't going to quite make it in time before the seeker would tag me, so I tried sliding in (similar to a baseball player sliding to a base). Little did I know, there was a broken tile right in front of base. It caught my left knee and left a large amount of skin barely hanging on. Surprisingly, there wasn't very much blood. A man carried me out to my family's car and we headed to the ER. I ended up getting stitches that look like the state of Oklahoma when a line was drawn across the bottom. McDonald's asked us how much money we wanted, and my mom only asked enough to cover the hospital bill.