Most people get numerous white spots all over their bodies. Its always mirrored, if one hand develops spots so will the other. If you get a spot on your right knee you’ll have a mirror image on the left. Weird eh?
I, however, have managed to do something different. Along with large white spots mirrored all over my body I have managed to lose all pigmentation in both hands and feet. I don’t have the normal spots. There is simply no pigment whatsoever in my hands from wrists to fingertips or from my ankles to toes. Nothing. In keeping with this pattern, I have no skin pigment from my Adams apple to the top of my head. Well that’s not entirely true. I have a one inch wide strip of normal skin that extends from my left ear to my nose and an inch wide band that runs from my left cheekbone to mid-throat. It looks like a Gothic cross. More Goth stuff, charming. To make things more interesting, the hair that grows on the pigment free zones is translucent, not white – but clear, invisible. The hair that grows where there is pigment is my normal jet black. This is especially true for my beard, if I forget to shave I get a one inch wide strip of jack black beard cutting down the left side of my face. It doesn’t make me look tough, just dirty.
Today I took Matthew, my eight year old son, to the “Battle of Brittan” air show. Before we left the house I applied 45 SPF sunscreen. We drove the thirty minutes to the airport and I re-applied the sunscreen before we left the car. I then re-applied sunscreen every hour while we watched the planes. To be safe, I also put on my old golfing hat. A wide brim straw number endorsed by Greg Norman himself, The Great White Shark, so you know its quality!. Anyhow, we stayed at the show from 11:00am to 3:00pm then went home. We saw the fake dogfight between the BF 109 and Hawker Hurricane. The BF 109 eventually puffing smoke and ducking behind the trees after the announcer yelled “tacka-tacka- tacka-tacka- tacka-tacka I think the Hurricane’s got him!” He wasn't a great announcer, he went on to mispronounce “Tuskegee, Harvard, Gatineau and name of each and every pilot except for a guy named "Cooper" who couldn’t make it to the show.
There were some pretty cool planes to watch; P51 Mustang, P40 Kittyhawk, MIG 15, L 29 Delfin, PBY 5 Canso (and every propeller driven trainer plane ever painted yellow) …etc. We watched a wing walker perform on a 1940 Boeing Stearman (she didn’t so much walk as stand unmoving while strapped to the top wing, seems some common sense has infiltrated the wing walking gild).
The promised Spitfire failed to show. Damn.
So the show ends and I take Matthew back to my store for ice cream. I notice people are staring at me but hey – I’m a sexy guy and they can’t help it, right? No, apparently my face and head are so red some people think I’ve put on makeup as a gag. That’s when my eyes start to swell shut and the headaches, dizziness … etc. begin. I never removed my hat during the entire time I was outside but the top of my head, the part completely covered by hat is red and blistering. Thank you Greg Norman! I have a white stripe where the hatband contacted the skin but other then that I’m red from neck to crown. Dang I hate Vitilago!
Last time this happened (I took Matthew to a birthday party in late October -in late October we often get snow – It was a nice day so the host decided to move the event outside) – I stayed outside for less then 40 minutes, the skin pealed so deeply that my face bled from little spots for over a week and these little blisters formed that oozed an amber liquid that hardened into little stones, a la Jurassic Park. The stones cut me when I brushed them off. Jurassic Goth! Fun.
Grrrrrrrrrr, no need to reply to this, I just wanted to vent and save my family from my bitching before my eyes swell completely shut. It’s going to be a long- long week.
