My face seems too square and my eyes too big, like I'm perpetually surprised, but there's nothing wrong with me that I can fix.
I'm pretty fortunate that my beard - if I shave it off, I look like a completely different person. My face, it transforms. I mean, I have a weird face! My eyes are really deep and sunken. My son tells me, 'You don't have any eyebrows.'
The pace at which science has progressed has been too fast for human behaviour to adapt to it. As I said we are still apes. A part of our brain is still a paleo-brain and many of the reactions come from our fight or flight instinct. As long as this part of the brain can take over control the rational part of the brain (we will face these problems).
My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.
My eyes are too big, my nose is too flat, my ears stick out, my mouth is too big and my face is too small... my body is thin as a clarinet and my ankles are so skinny that I wear two pairs of bobby socks because I don't want people to see how thin they are.
I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. I move my hands over my body - my shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through. I could be a lot younger than seventeen. I could be a child still, untouched.
Sweet baby Jesus, Blue Eyes was... He was gorgeous in all the ways that made girls do stupid things. He was tall, a good head or two taller than me and broad at the shoulders, but tapered at the waist. An athlete's body - like a swimmer's. Wavy black hair toppled over his forehead, brushing matching eyebrows. Broad cheekbones and wide, expressive lips completed the package created for girls to drool over. And with those sapphire-colored eyes, holy moley...
The physical part was one thing. Whatever - I broke my face; that'll heal. The mental aspect was the biggest shock to the system. You just don't know how to experience stuff like that. You don't have any control over it, either. It's just how your body and brain reacts to something like that happening.
I don't mind my eyebrows. They add... something to me. I wouldn't say they were my best feature, though. People tell me they like my eyes. They distract from the eyebrows.
I was blessed to have my son, ZZ, doing it; he managed to pull nothing but the truth out of me. Put all that aside, and you think how strange it is to watch a movie about some small, but important, part of your life.
I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.
My favorite part of my body is my brain. I think no matter what my body looks like I wont be satisfied unless I know how to use it.
I have often caught sight of myself, my spine humped over, defining my hollowness, my head too heavy for my body, swinging like the oversized blossom of some cruelly bred plant; admiration for the world spread for the world to see on my gullible face-unlike my other face with the sour look of a starved peasant.
I think of the brain as a computational device: It has a bunch of little components that perform calculations on some small aspect of the problem, and another part of the brain has to stitch it all together, like a tapestry or a quilt.
If one sins against the laws of proportion and gives something too big to something too small to carry it - too big sails to too small a ship, too big meals to too small a body, too big powers to too small a soul - the result is bound to be a complete upset. In an outburst of hubris the overfed body will rush into sickness, while the jack-in-office will rush into the unrighteousness that hubris always breeds.
And there I was, 225 pounds, perpetually lost and confused, short legs, ape-like upper body, all chest, no neck, head too large, blurred eyes, hair uncombed, 6 feet of geek, waiting for her.