Greg

Blog: www.noslander.com/entertainment.html
also:
FROM THE ATTRACTIVES
"MY FATHER’S KNUCKLES were covered in thick, dark hair, spaced apart like the hairs of a fly. From his palms he produced a fine, evenly-woven tissue of silk, ejected (or so a doctor once explained to us when I was very young and the condition had first manifested, all of us lined up single-file in a single white office, my father staring hard into his hands, looking a little white himself) from around 150 spinnerettes hidden microscopically beneath his skin. You will have heard of this condition, called Gossamer hyperhidrosis, because it’s quite common. Something like 1 in 25 males, and 1 in 150 females, are afflicted with it. Like other men, my father only produced this silk when he was depressed, and either because he was an alcoholic or in spite it, my father was increasingly prone to depression as I grew older, so he left very much silk around the house, embedded in the fabric of the furniture and bunched like tumbleweeds in the corners. The stuff smelled like day-old human sweat, and when he was having a particularly bad day our house would smell like a locker room. At these times my father would be exiled to the basement, or the garage, or the front lawn, until he could get it together and come back into the house. I wouldn’t mention such an unextraordinary thing, except that I wanted to talk about the very extraordinary thing that happened to my mother, and show what she was up against, dealing with a man like that in the house."