Letting the world know
who’s a knot-head

Can’t say when I first noticed it. I suppose that, at
some unconscious level, I always knew it was there, and I just
suppressed it to avoid the disastrous psychological consequences.
But the time has come to face my fears and admit it – I’m a
knot-head. Always have been.
For some of you, that will come as no surprise. I’m
quite certain that there are legions of friends and acquaintances
who would be willing testify as to my knot-headedness. I’m also
certain that my parents, at various tense times in the midst of my
teenage development, would have testify likewise. To those accusers,
I plead the fifth.
But that’s not even what I’m talking about here – I
have a knot on my head. To be precise, it’s on the back of my head.
It’s quite hard, about the size of my thumb, and it protrudes
outward roughly in the shape of Mt. St. Helen before the mountain
went volcanic.
I think I have always assumed that it was just a part
of my skull, and I still do inasmuch as the alternative hypotheses
are, frankly, less than appealing, i.e, a misplaced malformed
appendage, a hernia of my brain, or a surgical implant placed by
those pesky aliens that are always creeping into my bedroom late at
night.
Either way, I have, for the most part, repressed it’s
presence except on those rare occasions when, as a kid whose
haircuts were accomplished by sheep sheers, the knot was patently
obvious to me if I stood on a stool and craned my head at a certain
angle so as to verify in the mirror what my fingers already knew.
Over the years, the ever changing hair fashions have,
more or less, saved me from relentless embarrassment and
introspective derision, and I have succeeded in hiding The Mark of
the Knot-Head by cultivating sufficient quantities of hair so as to
hide my offending protrusion.
But then came the most recent fashion amongst grown
men whereby the decade’s old yolk of the “comb-over,” traditionally
adopted by the receding hairline classes, has been overthrown in
favor of just cashing in all the hair chips and shaving one’s head
completely bald. And, I might add, thus exposing themselves to
paranoid skull bump watchers such as myself.
In that regard, I must admit that I undertook a
concerted anthropologic effort to chronicle the bumps on men’s
heads, friends and strangers alike. In the course of same, my
research led me to the inescapable conclusion that I was the only
knot-head in the “control” group.
Admittedly, the sample group was small and the
results possibly skewed by the willfulness of some “comb-overs” to
cling to the belief that their hair loss was but a transient dip in
testosterone levels soon to be rectified by a renewed vow to eat
more red meat even in the face of crusading health conscious
spouses.
Needless to say, the findings left me stunned and
shaken. While there were quite a few knuckle-heads, there were no
knot-heads to be found at all. Thus revealed, I fell into something
of a funk on how to deal with my head lump. And I guess that’s why I
finally unburdened myself by mentioning my defect to my brothers.
They were, of course, unimpressed by my revelation, casually
remarking that they, too, had knots.
I was stunned beyond words. “Why didn’t you ever tell
me?” I demanded. They told me that they thought I knew. All the
Sartains have them they informed me, suggesting a predetermined
knottiness buried deep within our DNA.
I guess I can live with that explanation. It is
comforting to know that I’m not the only knot-head in the family.
Also there is the outside chance that the knot signifies some
heretofore unknown mystical powers that speak to the cosmological
meaning of the universe.
That would at least explain the creeping aliens in my
bedroom.
Phillip
Bond Sartain is a Gainesville, Georgia attorney and
freelance writer.
Email Phillip at
attypbs@mindspring.com