It’s been a while since I noticed a new development starting up on my person. Not a big thing, at all, but not authorized either, and so a object of curiosity and some disapproval. Like when you see the trees come down and the tiny house vanishes and a new foundation is poured, and you think: what monstrosity is this planning to be?

What it seemed to be was some sort of small pimple, except with a little more structure to it. More of a tiny tower than a cone. Possibly involving an otherwise innocent follicle. It didn’t bother me, but I did fool around with it in the shower. Seemed like if I could just pop it and squeeze out some goo, it would go away. It was hard to get any traction on it, though, because the surrounding area in question was too squishy. Also, it was in an area where I used to have a lot more follicles than I do now. A highly personal area, if you must know.

I’m not real bright about these things. Faithful readers might recall that I had marveled about getting bites in exactly the same location every so often for years, two little side-by-side butt bites, until I looked it up and discovered that some minor herpes strain was a far more likely culprit than site-specific repeat spiders.

The other night I somehow managed to get some gription on the new development and squoze for all I was worth, and nothing came out. Instead, the structure collapsed and the debris remained underground like the glowing residue of a nuclear meltdown and now I have a nice inflamed dome. It’s gone from a petite Tower of Pisa to the Great Pyramid. Not at all the desired outcome. And some time later that same night, a phrase floated out of my brain fog like the fortune in a Magic Eight-Ball: sebaceous cyst.

I have only a hazy idea of what either of those words means, exactly. It might just as well have been invidious ampule or heironymus bosch. But I looked it up the next day and there it was, my pimple, dead to rights: a.k.a. “epidermal inclusion cyst,” a round bump with a dark dot in the middle called a punctum, because why shouldn’t a bull’s-eye on a cyst have its own name?

And what is to be done about it? Well now! Glad you asked! The answer is Nothing!

Which would have been good to know before I squoze it, because that is the number one thing you are not supposed to do. The cyst is caused by a blockage in the follicular infundibulum, which is just what it feels like. Basically, it’s a place where your skin cells have died their natural deaths but not made it out to the air. So it’s just a nice bag of dead skin cells, and nobody plans to do anything about it.

And even if you do manage to drain the thing, it comes back. It’s not all goo. It makes its own suitcase. So the suitcase just fills up again. According to the medical experts, if you should find a new bosch on yourself that looks at all heironymus, and there’s a punctum in your junction, you should leave it the hell alone. Treat it like a small homeless encampment on your personal underpass.

Unless it is surgically removed, I will have the cyst for the rest of my life. Good! That’s not so long.

Okay, I just live with it, then, so it’s like those other squatters, the skin tags. I have one of those. I looked that up, too. Small growths, it says here, that occur where the skin rubs against itself. Bullshit! Mine is right out front on my lower ribcage, just under my…oh.