My America

BY WALTER FALL

I've found myself rather obsessing about my face recently. Funny for a man who lives in the shadows, don't you think?


My face is, to this day, still its original size. It hasn't grown a speck since I was born. But certain curious things have changed it. My face, at any given time, has no fewer than eleven mysterious diseases. Science is flummoxed. Right now there are eighteen ailments worming their way under the skin on my face. It is hell!

My selfies, in theory, have proved, perhaps at one point, very popular among my more astute readers. These were better days. Look at how my face flourished. Oh, how it did! Yes. But this content is not exactly about selfies.

What is a selfie if not a picture of the face?

I have no mirrors here in my home in Anaconda, Montana, a small town by most measures, though the ninth largest in the state with a population just shy of ten thousand. People here take selfies, they use Apple FaceTime™. They are not immune to the powerful nature of the cult of the face and the ease in which we can share it with the world, the strange comfort that brings.

I always admired the Blue Man Group. Here was a group, a small human group, with faces, yes, but were their faces truly faces? No, they were blue. Blue, not for sadness but rather in tribute to the vitality of living? I should think so. Anonymous, rhythmic bards charging upwards of $59.99 [a guess-timate, sans groupon] for a chance to stare into their cartoonish cerulean abyss. The audience touching their own faces in wonderment, wishing that what these lovely, nimble gentlemen had was contagious.

But face paint, my friends, is no disease at all.