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The Nail Biter ... March 06, 2005
today i was standing there in the CVS parking lot smoking my millionth cigarette of the day, fingering the bottle of nail growth syrum in my pocket (snake oil!) and thinking about what a nervous little nelly i've made myself into here recently. the evidence is right there, literally at my fingertips, showing itself as 5 pairs of fingernails knawed down to the bloody, ragged quicks, with even the cuticles roughly torn off. they look so disgusting that, if i can, i hide my hands in my pockets in public. in my despirate embarassment over how revolting my hands look, i even do things i always said i would never do, like buying that nail growth shit. is it vanity? but who wouldn't be ashamed about such a sometimes obvious characteristic? something that tells others who happen to notice that this person they are looking at may well have some serious mental defects. normal, sane people don't bite their nails until they bleed. normal, sane people don't have tooth scarred hands, heck, they don't even have dirty nails unless they're an automechanic. but just look at those nails, all chewed down to little stubs. nothing like the french manicures you see on TV. i care but i don't. sometimes i rip little pieces of flimsy, ill-grown nail off until those scarred fingertips of mine ooze blood and pain, till i can feel every single inch of the little lightening bolts that shoot in a straight line directly from that little strip of raw flesh where my nails should be all the way to my brain. then i keep chewing, ignoring the distinct taste of my own blood i can't even remember ever being without. i have never been without those hideous, bleeding, tooth marked fingertips. sometimes i speculate that i was born with them, that i popped out of my mother, having already knawed my fingernails to a blood-froth pulp, worrying my little warm, red, placenta encapuslated self over some now unthinkable embryonic thought. that aside, i know i even did this to myself in my crib, before i should have had anything to think about. but that's just it, i remember those days pretty clearly. i remember having dreams of things i had yet to learn words for, like RAPE and DEATH and VENGANCE. once, in a dream that i had while i was still sleeping in my crib, i was a cowboy whose woman was raped and killed. so i found the criminal, beat him unconscious, drug him through town from the back of my horse, and then shot him dead in the same ditch where he killed my woman. i wonder where, at that age, i even got the idea that a man would want to do that to a woman. i remember my poor little nails were bloody for weeks after that dream. but despite the fact that i remember the dream waking me up, i know i didn't call for my mother. i just clung to the bars of my little crib and cried silently for a long time. it obviously disturbed me, but it was as if i wasn't surprised by the existance of such things. it was as if i had known it all before, but had briefly forgetten.
well,mysticism aside, i am a nail biter, and i am not proud. i hide my hands, and while i'm at it, why not my arms? why not my face? it's the face of a nutcase so let's put it away where i won't remind the rest of you of what might happen to you someday. what normal face would be connected with such terrible, bloody, infected excuses for hands anyways?
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