Msg#: 10                            Date: 11 Oct 97 23:10:58
  From: Bill Kochman                  Read: Yes    Replied: No
    To: All                           Mark:
  Subj: My personal problem
.
During the last week I've been wrangling with the stubbornest
pimple ever to grace my skin.  Allow me to tell you about it.
.
It all began innocently enough: several days ago, I was harvesting
a crop of upper-arm-zits (am I the only one who gets these? I can'
t be...).  I punctured a little fellow located a few inches above
my elbow, and promptly forgot about it.  Imagine my surprise when
I inspected the area the next morning and found a HUGE lump, almost
an inch across!
.
Of course, I immediately got a hard-on and squeezed the lump, expecting
to be treated to an enormous geyser of pus.  When nothing happened
except that the damn thing hurt like hell, I began to experience a
few misgivings.
.
Since brute force had failed, I decided to be subtle and peeled off the
top of the monster.  It bled--profusely, at first--but no pus was to be
had.
.
When I had almost completely covered a tissue with dabs of the blood oozing
from the thing, and my fingernails were crusted over with the same liquid,
I was rewarded with a tiny white column which sprouted from somewhere in
the middle of the hole in my skin.  Gleefully, I wiped it up and redoubled
my efforts, but all I got for my trouble was that unsatisfying, clear,
watery pus.
.
While all of this had been going on, the hard skin around and under the
mutant zit hadn't changed one bit (I'd expected it to deflate under all
the pressure I was putting on it).
.
Reluctantly, I gave up and left the zit alone for a while.  It scabbed
over, but I have never, EVER been able to leave a scab alone for long,
so eventually I broke down and attacked the thing again.  Got nothing but
blood and water-pus for my trouble.  Let it scab over.  Attacked it again.
Let it scab over.  Attacked it again.  Do you see a pattern here?
.
Under all my constant haranguing, the superzit began to metamorphosize.
The ring of hard skin around the scabbed part became an angry red color;
the interior of the zit became dead white; and there was a strange brown
spot smack dab in the middle.  It was raised slightly: a perfect target
for the tweezers!  Unfortunately, I had lost the only pair of tweezers I
owned (the one on my Swiss Army knife) the previous month.  Strafing the
area with a fingernail did no good, for while the brown spot was raised,
the dead-white area in which it was situated was on a lower level than
the surrounding skin; I couldn't scrape it off, no matter how hard I
tried.
.
After a few treatments like this, the brown spot elongated, although it
still refused to yield up its treasure.  The zit began to remind me of
an eye, and I wondered if I had been invaded by some alien organism like
in Steven King's story "I Am The Doorway".
.
I became frantic with the desire to puncture this brown spot.  I
searched the knife that had formerly held my tweezers.  There was also
a plastic toothpick.  Sigh, not the most appropriate tool for the job,
but I tried it anyway.  Attempts to wedge the tip of the 'pick under
the spot and lever it open met with failure.  Eventually I tried placing
the toothpick's point direcly on the spot and pressing down firmly,
slowly increasing the pressure.  Finally, the pick broke through
something, and plunged down to another level of the zit.  I was alarmed,
but it seemed that I had made a hole of SOME kind, so I resumed
the usual squeezing.  What did I get out of it?  Nuttin', honey.
.
I looked at the knife again.  Hmmm, a corkscrew.  I tried using the
'screw and the 'pick in unison as a makeshift tweezer, but I wasn't
dextrous enough to do it one-handed.  I even tried using the tip of
the knife part of the knife, but stopped in short order, fearing a bloody
mis-slice.
.
A short time later, during one of my routine scab-pickings, a halfhearted
squeeze yielded a copious quantity of meaty white pus!  Awright!  I milked
the zit dry, left it alone, popped it again, and got another pus-puddle,
although not so voluminous as the first time.  After a few more of these
treatments, the well of white pus seemed to be exhausted.
.
With the pus went my enthusiasm to plumb the uttermost secrets of this
mighty pockmark on my skin: I covered the hole with a Band-Aid to which I
had applied some Neosporin.  The thing has been healing slowly ever since.
.
And THAT, boys and girls, is the story of the biggest zit I ever had.
.
Bill Kochman
.
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