Leprous Surfaces

Not long ago I was looking at a friend's refrigerator. It was literally covered with magnets, but what caught my eye were those tiny word magnets that allow you to write sentences, poems, hell, even a novel on one of those double-wide Sub Zero models. And then I started to feel nauseous, and had to turn away. That sensation caused a revelation, which I'd like to share with you.

Recently our consumer culture has been encouraging the creation of leprous surfaces. Such surfaces can be a refrigerator door, the back of a car, a pizza crust, the edges of a computer monitor, cubicle walls. Just about anything. We all seem obsessed with affixing as many bits and pieces of stuff on these surfaces as we possible can, and I don't get it. At times it seems as if too many people are subconsciously remembering past lives lived in lepor colonies, and they're trying to recreate the effects of the disease.

Even food is effected. Pizza, for example. While the "combo" pizza is always a favorite, too many pizza palaces are putting so many toppings on so little crust the result looks like a lepor's back. It's off-putting; really, I mean, who wants to bite into a steaming-hot wedge of fissured skin?? I sure don't.

Which brings me to piercings and tattoos….