When I was four, I got zits on my face. I don’t remember them showing up, but I remember them being there and my parents telling me to quick picking at them. But I was four and still picked my boogers, so while my parents watched MASH, I picked my zits.
Another thing happened when I was four. A few thousand miles away from where I sat with my zits, some guys sat around a conference table in Hollywood and came up with the idea for the Pee-wee’s Playhouse show. In this meeting, some loser had the idea for a segment of Pee-wee’s show called “Connect the Dots”, in which Pee-wee would sing a song about connecting dots while he connected dots. For the next six years, horrible children, children who should have been in prison camps and not Britt Elementary School, sang this song to me.
When I was ten, the Oxy commercials came out with their very clever “Oxecute ‘em” slogan. In these commercials, flawless skinned teenagers walked through high schools holding books and laughing with their friends. They had all oxecuted ‘em, and all the girls had nice bangs. This slogan did not bode well for my life.
(Last year I found the prick on Facebook who once told me to oxecute ‘em while I was walking down the hall in middle school. He’d gained a lot of weight and was at a bar with Miller Lite signs on the walls. I felt better.)
(Then I repented.)
For about fifteen years, different doctors prescribed me all sorts of potions and creams and pills and antibiotics. Plus, every other week they’d shoot me up with steroids for good measure (which would come in handy these days as I still come in last at my CrossFit gym). One derm even had me in a tanning bed – seriously, he had a tanning booth in his office!
Every new drug gave me hope. And while some would make the zits fade for a bit, nothing ever worked for real.
When I was twenty-one, I found a doctor willing to prescribe me Accutane, the strongest acne drug on the market with some wicked side effects. The pamphlets showed disfigured infants who’d been in the womb whilst their moms took the drug. It caused depression and blindness and one kid even killed himself on it.
And I at that stuff like candy.
And my zits went away.
I bought my first spaghetti strapped shirts. I wore my hair in a ponytail at the beach. Benson and I were engaged at this point and I bought a strapless wedding dress.
I LOVED HAVING NO ZITS!
But then something happened. When I was twenty-four, I stopped taking my birth-control pills.
Within three weeks, all the zits came back.
They were all, “HEY! Where you been, girl?! We been lookin’ for you!” I tried to stop them. I bolted the door, I called the feds, but nothing worked. They were back.
But then…
When I was thirty-one, after watching some very clever food documentaries that scared the pee out of me, I started eating a plant-based diet and eliminated meat and dairy from my cooking.
And guess what?
My zits went away.
I tinkered with the plant-based diet a bit and finally realized that it wasn’t the meat that’d been causing my zits.
It was the dairy.
And guess what I’d eaten every single morning of my life since I was old enough to eat solids? Cereal. With milk.
So these days, I can eat a piece of fish, which I do about once a week now, and nothing happens. (BTW – even though I don’t think meat is going to kill me anymore, I really just feel better without much of it in my diet. So don’t go writing me letters and telling me that I need to eat more buffalo burgers. I’m just kidding – nobody writes me letters because this is a blog with no purpose.) But when I eat pizza, I know my skin’s going to break out a bit afterward. And if I eat pizza a lot (which sometimes happens because pizza is so wonderful), I’ll break out even more.
And that’s the story about my zits.
The End.
Categories: This and That
Stuff I Talk About 
If there was nothing else in the blog,,, the Devil Milk carton would have been enough for me to laugh!