My previous post filled the site with horror and self-loathing, sending it on a weekend-long bender.

Funnily enough (in that way where it’s funny when an old woman falls down the stairs) my site and I felt more or less the same this weekend.

One of the lynchpins of marriage is that there is always somebody watching your back. I mean that literally. There is a person who can see your body from angles where your eyes don’t go and is interested in looking. One corollary to this perk is that there is always someone who can say, “This thing back here doesn’t look right. You should have a doctor look at this,” while you’re left asking, “What doesn’t? What?” and spinning around slowly like a dog chasing his tail.

At my wife’s urging a couple of weeks ago, I went to see her dermatologist about some freckle or mole that was just over my shoulder, living inconspicuously, preparing for the day when it was large and organized enough to strike. Literally plotting against me behind my back. I wasn’t terribly concerned, but I prefer to err on the side of caution where health is concerned. I wasn’t exactly getting anything out of the mole-having experience. I wasn’t attached to the mole. Except literally.

As it turned out, the doctor felt even more strongly about caution than I do: because I am so fair and so very pretty, she saw potential dark killers on every square inch of me. By the time I left her office the first time, she had marked several spots for extraordinary rendition, and I don’t believe any of them was the one that so concerned my wife. Eventually, she would extract two, cutting their roots out, bottling them up, and sending them off to the lab for questioning. (Both would turn out to be innocent, but by the time they were exonerated it was too late. There was no going back to their old lives.)

Unfortunately, the mole removal process is more involved than I thought, and by “involved” I mean “stitches-involved.” Weeks later, I still look like I’ve been mauled by a small, passive-aggressive bear. On the plus side, I have passed the point where I have to Saran Wrap myself before getting into the shower. Now I only do it for fun.

More unfortunately, I was still in my itchy and tender phase when I caught a nasty bit of food poisoning over the weekend. The inside of my stomach got jealous of the attention the outside of my stomach had been getting and attempted suicide. As I writhed for much of Sunday afternoon, I was comforted by the knowledge that this was only the second or third worst case of food poisoning I’d ever had. I ought to eat out less. Here’s hoping I don’t spend all week around Thanksgiving dinner tables saying, “Oh, no thank you. I’m afraid to convert food into energy. I’ll make due with another helping of fear of pain.”