Sit On My Face

As far as I know, the face mite is the only living animal that doesn't poop.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't trust an animal that never pinched off a loaf. It's just not healthy to keep too much to yourself. I'm willing to give the face mite a pass, though, because there's no arguing with them at this point. They're set in their ways. Also in your pores.

Face mites are very small spider relatives that sit on your face. They look like a worm that changed its mind at one end, jamming in eight legs in a bunch. The other end is where the anus orter be but ain't. This is what happens when you rush a project without proper planning.

So what the face mite does is store up an entire lifetime's worth of crap and then, predictably, drops dead. Fortunately, it only lives about two weeks, but still. That's backed-up. It does all of this--growing up, having sex, dying, rotting, and dropping off its old shit, on your face. Mostly in your hair follicles or pores, but it moves around at night, and at a pretty good clip, considering. The female lays a heart-shaped egg half her own size in one of your sebaceous glands, and that hatches into a six-legged larva, later tacks on an extra pair of legs when it remembers it's in the spider family, and then it continues to eat your face until it dies.

Under the circumstances I don't get too worked up about having face mite poop disintegrate on my face, since its food came from my face to begin with. I think about it as being more of a compost situation.

sealed nethers

This is the kind of thing that makes people itchy, though. There's a whole industry in cosmetic exfoliation because people can't even stand having their own personal dead skin cells on them, and they will polish their faces to a high gloss with scrubs and little Dremel tools so as to get down to the young juicy layers. They're faithless, though. They'll give that beautiful young skin no more than a day or two and grind it off again. And this is without even knowing about the mites.

Scientists knew about the mites relatively early. The face mite was first described in 1841 and called Acarus folliculorum. Nobody paid much attention. The next year someone called it Demodex folliculorum and everybody went Oh, sure, Demodex. We know all about that. They discovered there was a long form and a short form, just like taxes, and it was 1972 before it was finally confirmed, in a real groundbreaker, that they were two different species, in a report that also did not receive much attention.

Both of them sit on your face, to the degree they can sit, without a butt. They stick their heads into your sebaceous glands with their sealed nethers sticking out. Except when they're motoring around at night.

They don't bother me. When you've got enough years in your back pocket, you have a much better grasp of what isn't going to harm you (face mites and refugees) and what is (falling down and global warming).

So they're all welcome here. Tolerance and compassion are my goals. A face mite wants to drop an anchor larva on my eyelid, I say go ahead on. I'm a Democrat.

Pre-Planning For The Future

Dave got a solicitation in the mail the other day from Neptune Cremation Service, which thought he might want to plan for the future. The only plan we've had so far is to have him go first, so that part was appropriate. And since cremators don't charge by the foot, he's already getting a better deal than I would. In the advertisement, Neptune Cremation Service points out that we can lock in today's prices, and that is a legitimate selling point in these days of rising energy costs. It's not easy to burn people thoroughly--we're seventy percent water, and it takes a lot of energy. That water weight is a big deal. If a woman succumbed during her period, she could end up smoldering for days. Fortunately, this doesn't happen often. Most deaths occur to people who happen to be nearby a woman having her period.

We also get mail from funeral homes. Most of them also remind us of the need to plan for the future, even though that is so much more challenging than planning for stuff that's already happened. Some of them up the ante by recommending pre-planning. But pre-plannig is what I'm already doing. I'm perpetually at the stage before planning, and that is why I'm unlikely to respond to this sort of advertisement. I am also not reassured by these outfits' tendency to use the word "pre-need." It should go without saying. People tend to lose a lot of their former charm almost immediately upon death, and something should be done, but you don't want to jump the gun on cremation. Some folks could use a little exfoliation, but that's about as far as it goes.

Neptune Cremation Service brought up some valid points. People move around so much these days that it makes less sense to place one's loved ones in a "local" cemetery. Which means "rest in peace" has turned into "buckle up, because your shiftless son is going to be toting you in a can from sofa to sofa for the next forty years." It's true that embalming and burial are a waste of resources, but cremation is not without its environmental impact. It would make more sense to get dug into the garden; it's not legal everywhere, although you could probably get away with it if you topped it with a little plywood headstone labeled "Fluffy." Better yet is to get staked out for the vultures, but people are excitable, and oddly begrudging of vultures, especially in your urban areas.

But wait! There's more! If we send in the enclosed card--you have to use your own Forever stamp--we can be put in the hopper to WIN A PRE-PAID CREMATION! which is no iPad, but I'd still probably mention it on Facebook if I won. The card insists it is a Confidential Data Card. No information will be released. So it's a little odd that they reveal last month's cremation winner. It's Charmaine Reed, y'all. If you know Charmaine, you might want to check on her to see if she's looking a little, uh, dehydrated.

Dave has cleaned out crematoria before. He used to be in the business of repairing and relining kilns and boilers. His mom sort of expected him to be an engineer, but instead he wore coveralls and scooped out cremation burners. Anyway, he's said many times that he wants to be cremated and have his ashes sent through a lime kiln one last time. I've got a plan too.

I want to have any functioning innards donated to whoever needs them (tip: go for my liver, it's a frickin' miracle worker), but then I would like to be taxidermed. I want my arms up and a fierce expression with big googly glass eyes, and then I want to be interred inside the wallboards of a new and totally useless partition in my house. One that the new owners will be anxious to demolish. They should probably have a pre-plan in place, too.