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