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face guy
Tuesday, September 18 2007
This afternoon, across hundreds of feet of parking lot at the Kingston Plaza, I saw "face guy" for the first time in several years. Face guy is the gentleman who wears a baseball cap atop the most asymmetrical human head that can possibly be imagined. On one side his face is stretched out to occupy an entire hemisphere, with an eye slit at the top of his head and lips dangling near the chin line. Meanwhile the other half of his face is relatively normal. I can't imagine an accident: genetic, pre-natal, automotive, or military, that would result in such a grotesque injury. Mind you, it doesn't look like the sort of disfigurement that would be impossible to improve with plastic surgery, but evidently this gentleman cannot afford such luxury. I feel bad for the guy, but nevertheless I always try to keep my distance whenever I see him. It seems I have a deep-seated aversion to proximity to such gross human misfortune. Sure, he can walk around and carry on commerce in his hometown (favorite haunts include Hannaford's and Catskill Art & Office Supplies), but he looks like he walked off the set of a science fiction movie. So when I saw him walking into Hannaford's, I decided to cancel my plan to buy a couple boxes of generic rasin bran cereal. I'm not proud to admit that I did this, and I wish I wasn't this way, but I am. The fact that I am only makes me more sympathetic to this unfortunate man's plight.
I have to imagine, what with all the people coming home from Iraq with missing faces, that there will be many more small towns throughout America (particularly in the South and Midwest) with their own grotesquely disfigured citizens making their way to the grocery store for provisions.
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