Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
If you’ve been following along (and at this point, I have to assume you have nothing better to do), you’ll recall that in “I Know How to Fall,” I proved conclusively that I do not, in fact, know how to fall. I hit the ice like a man who’d been told the ground was optional, and my forehead paid the price. What remained was a gash that made me look like I’d lost an argument with a cheese grater, and the very real possibility that my devastatingly handsome face would be permanently vandalized.
People were concerned. Not about me, exactly, but about the sheer volume of things I was apparently juggling. Let me be clear: I cannot juggle. I tried once with tissue paper and socks, which seemed like a safe, low-stakes entry point into the juggling arts. It was not. All items were immediately lost to the evil dynamics of a ceiling fan. The tissue paper simply ceased to exist, vaporized into a dimension where ceiling fans send things they’ve consumed. The socks, however, launched into the ether, traveled through what I can only assume was a wormhole in my living room, and found my other missing socks. Every single one. Somewhere in my house there is now a colony of reunited socks living off the grid, and I am not welcome there.
The point is, I don’t juggle. But people assumed I was juggling anyway because I’m writing a novel (Truth Tastes Like Pennies, a story about government-enhanced conscious otters, because literature needed that). I’m pretending to enjoy my day job with the enthusiasm of a man whose smile is contractually obligated. And now I was staring down the barrel of facial disfigurement. Friends, family, and people who occasionally tolerate me at parties all asked the same question:
“Don’t you have too much on your plate?”
Nobody Has Too Much on Their Plate at the Life Buffet
I don’t have a plate. I have never had a plate. What I have is a tray at the Life Buffet, and I treat it the way any reasonable person treats a buffet. I take one of everything, stack it in ways that defy structural engineering, and then walk very carefully back to my table while things slide off the edges. Too much on my plate? I don’t even know where the plates are. I wandered past the plates twenty years ago and haven’t looked back.
But back to my face.
The wound was healing with the enthusiasm of a government contractor: slowly, expensively, and with questionable results. So I did what any rational human does when modern dermatology seems insufficient: I turned to livestock medicine as a natural scar remedy.
Specifically, I found a wound healing cream designed for horses and dogs. Not human wounds, mind you. Horse. And dog. Two animals who roll in mud for recreation and lick their own bodies as a primary hygiene strategy. But the reviews were solid, the price was right, and honestly, at this point in my life, I’ve stopped pretending I’m above rubbing dog ointment on my head.
And you know what? It worked. The angry red landscape of my forehead softened. The scar tissue retreated. Color returned to something approaching normal human flesh tone. I was so pleased that I showed Karie.
“You’re right,” she said, examining my forehead with the clinical detachment of a woman who has seen too much. “Now it only looks like you have ringworm.”
Marriage is a beautiful institution.
The Secret Ingredient in My Scar Treatment: Liquefied Bird
But here’s where the story gets interesting, or at least gets weirder, which in my world is the same thing. Because I made the mistake of reading the ingredients on my miracle scar treatment salve, and there it was, printed right on the label like it was a perfectly normal thing:
Emu oil.
Emu. Oil.
Let that settle in for a moment. Somewhere out there, someone looked at an emu (six feet of barely contained fury, a bird that looks like God designed an ostrich while angry) and thought, “I bet there’s oil in that thing.”
And they were right.
Now, I don’t know exactly how one extracts oil from an emu, and I’m not entirely sure I want to. But I have questions. Do you squeeze it? Is there a press, like for olives? Do you sit the emu down and explain that this is for the greater good, that a middle-aged man in Virginia needs its essence for his forehead? Is there an emu somewhere in Australia right now who’s just… drier than it used to be, looking around confused, wondering why its feathers feel different?
Or (and I fear this is more likely), is the process less of a cold-press situation and more of a… rendering? Because if so, an emu died so that my forehead could look slightly less like a topographical map, and I don’t know how to feel about that. Grateful, mostly. But also a little guilty. That emu had plans. It had a family, probably. Little emu kids waiting at home. “Where’s Dad?” “Dad’s not coming home, son. A man in Virginia needed face cream.”
From Snake Oil to Emu Oil for Scars: A History of Questionable Animal-Based Medicine
And the thing is, we’ve been here before as a species. We used to call this snake oil. Some guy rolls into town on a wagon, holds up a bottle, and says, “This’ll cure what ails ya!” And we all agreed that guy was a fraud, a charlatan, a huckster of the highest order.
But apparently, all he needed to do was switch reptiles for large flightless birds, and suddenly we’re fine with it. Snake oil? Scam. Emu oil? Science. Put it on a label with a picture of a horse, sell it at Tractor Supply, and suddenly it’s legitimate wound care. The snake oil salesman just had the wrong animal. He was ahead of his time, the poor bastard. If he’d said “emu oil for scars,” he’d have a TED Talk by now.
So here I am. A man with a forehead that looks like a mild fungal infection, a novel about sentient otters, a job I tolerate with Olympic-level grace, and the rendered essence of a large Australian bird soaking into my skull.
Too much on my plate? I told you that I don’t have a plate.
I have a buffet tray, and the emu oil is dripping off the side.
Key Takeaways
- The author humorously reflects on their injury from falling and how people assumed they were juggling too much.
- Instead of conventional treatments, the author turns to a horse and dog wound cream that surprisingly works.
- The cream’s ingredient, emu oil, raises questions about its extraction process and the implications for the emu.
- The author compares the acceptance of emu oil in modern remedies to historical snake oil salesmen, highlighting societal changes in trust in unconventional medicine.
- Ultimately, the author embraces their chaotic life, likening it to managing a buffet tray rather than a plate.
Related Links
See my Amazon author page.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos. He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- When God Closes a Door, He Needs to Go Get Some Paprika - March 5, 2026
- Monkey Testicles, Missing Documents, and the Eternal Quest to Stay on Top - March 3, 2026
- Under the Blood Worm Moon, Nobody Has to Learn Anything - March 3, 2026
