So people are spilling scar stories today?  Fine.

— Cluster on Left Elbow, Complete With Bonus Piece of Embedded Gravel (circa 1995): My dad and I were biking around the lake where my parents live and I was attacked by the most vicious of all domestic creatures, the eight pound West Highland White Terrier.  A dog, whose name was something menacing like Mister Sniffles, ran in front of my tire and I committed the biggest blunder of the novice Huffy pedaler, to clench the front brakes as HARD AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.  My bike stopped—immediately—and I sailed over the handlebars and, fortunately, broke the fall with my head.  My helmet cracked, although it saved my noggin, but my elbow took quite a bit of abuse.

Mister Sniffles was fine.

— 3 Incher on Right Shin (circa 1993): I used to slalom waterski all the time and I was pretty good, in that out-of-control middle school way, where you’re absolutely fearless and don’t hesitate to see just how close you can get to someone’s dock in an attempt to drench everyone who’s standing on the patio.  One summer someone paid to have a slalom course installed, complete with buoys you’d have to round, one after the other on opposite sides of the wake.  No longer content to just ski around the markers, I thought it would be even better if I could jump them.

I couldn’t.  I got half of my ski over one before my back foot slipped out of the binding and the metal fin of the ski traced its way down my shin.  Somehow, I was more delighted to come out of the water and leave a pool of blood on the back of the boat than I would’ve been if I’d stuck the landing.

— 2”, Back of Right Arm (circa 1988): My mother always told me that I shouldn’t climb the dogwood trees in the front yard, which meant that every time she left me unattended, I’d wrap myself around the trunk, ZIPS sneakers digging into the bark as I tried to pull myself into the branches.  Mom knew what she was talking about.  The day I managed to get high enough to see my shirtless neighbor push-mowing his lawn, the branch snapped and I caught the jagged end on the way down.  I was less upset about the gash in my arm than I was to discover I’d ripped a hole in my Spuds MacKenzie t-shirt.

—2” Horizontal, Across Lower Right Abdomen (circa 1995): Emergency appendectomy…as if there’s any other kind.  It’s not like anyone plans ahead to remove a worthless vestigial organ.  When I was in middle school, it was the line of demarcation for appropriate swimwear; if my bikini bottoms revealed that scar, they were deemed “too revealing”.  I appreciate my parents’ confidence that someone would actually have been checking out my scrawny carcass in the first place.

—Entire Left Side of My Nose (2/15/96): Black ice is a bitch, and I’m not just talking about AC/DC’s recent album.  I was on my way to school, behind the wheel of my dad’s Oldsmobile Touring Sedan that made me one of the few eleventh graders with sweet woodgrain accents.  It was a winter morning that was nasty enough that I tuned to 103CIR to see if we’d scored a two-hour delay, but not so bad that I wasn’t allowed to drive to school.  Fast forward to a couple of miles from my parents’ place when I hit a patch of ice, skidded off the road, through a ditch and into a tree.  I managed to take out all the mirrors in the car—and a chunk of the engine came through the passenger seat—but I could still tell I had all my teeth, so I thought I was fine.

I was not.  I broke my nose into four pieces, lost the left side of it entirely, cracked my cheekbone, and put a divot in my orbital bone just for good measure.  It took almost two hundred stitches to piece me back together (compared to 108 on a baseball), as well as one major surgery and I’ve since taken enough lasers to the face to become an honorary Jedi.

Thirteen years later and I’ve almost made peace with that side of my face, although it’s the first thing I notice in the mirror and I think I look misshapen in pictures.  Perhaps the longest-lingering effect of the entire incident is my eternal hatred of all things Billy Joel.

The song playing when my bumper made out with that tree trunk?  “Only the Good Die Young”.