WILL THERE BE SHADE? Every six months, I stand in front of my dermatologist, wearing my best and cleanest pair of underwear. Sockless and acting nonchalant, I wait for the examination to begin, anticipating a worst-case diagnosis. My dermatologist, Dr. Levi, begins by sliding a manila envelope out from my patient chart. The kind of envelope that is written into thrillers where a politician is blackmailed with a series of adulterous snaps. Black-and-white photos captured through a vertical blind reveal a middle-aged congressman kissing a sex worker. His shameful secret hidden safely ... for a price. Scandalous contents like that would be a welcome reveal. Unfortunately, my envelope contains medical photos: shot in a medical photography studio, by a medical photographer (a technician) who climbed his way out of Service Ontario and who is biding his time (making living people appear dead) until a position in the coroner's office opens. The photos are securely stored in my doctor's office and I would be mortified if they were ever leaked, not because they are NSFW but because they are so asexual it would create an entire new genre of pornography called pity porn. In the photos, a younger (twinkier) me stands in Calvin Klein underwear recreating awkward contrapposto positions found only on the tombs of pharaohs. The runway stances highlight the natural beauty marks that decorate my body. I am a hundred Cindy Crawford moles in one mortal. In the more risqué shots, I pull down my underwear to reveal my buttocks while internally trying to feel Costco Connection sexy for the camera. The entire lousy shoot cost me forty-five dollars and to this day these glossies remain the only nude photos of me (with my head not cropped off). I should have demanded the negatives. The photos are an archive, a mapping of the layers of cells and groupings of melanin that compose my skin, used to compare then to now (and future nows), a control to measure change. "You're a comedian? That's a terrible job!" Dr. Levi remarked during one of my first visits as he scanned the giraffe-like patterns on my shoulders. I admit: it is a terrible fucking job. But then I reminded my doctor that he actually went to medical school to stare at moles, herpes, and plantar warts until retirement, and that half his patients are white males above the age of sixty-five. (The same demographic of towel-less men who abuse the complimentary hand dryers in gym locker rooms, drying their saggy ass cracks and fanning their foreskins for everyone to see.) Most of my appointments with Dr. Levi consist of playing this terrible pointing game called Cancer? Not Cancer . The rules are simple: I point to the various parts of my body then ask, "Cancer?" and Dr. Levi shakes his head and says, "Not cancer." We go back and forth like this until Dr. Levi points to something I didn't see and says, "Cancer!" And we laugh. Levi plays this game for a living, which is probably why he wants to outsource his routine to someone less qualified, like a loved one. Dr. Levi once prescribed me a long-term relationship so that I could have someone "I trust" to "perform weekly mole checks" on my back. Because according to the medical community, the most successful relationships occur when all walls of intimacy are shattered, all mystery is eviscerated, and all Friday nights are spent watching reruns of Gilmore Girls while checking each other's moles for irregular borders. Only within the context of a stable relationship can one take a selfie of a heart-shaped precancerous lesion and text it with a personalized, "Does this look funny, bae?" Dr. Levi checks everywhere: the soles of my feet, my armpits, even my "down there" area. He is an eccentric professional who refuses to say the words "penis" or "vagina" because they "creep him out." Instead, he uses euphemisms during his examinations. Once, Levi took the Bic pen he was writing with and used it to examine down there .First, he shimmied the blunt end of the pen under my left testicle and lifted it up-and-out, forming a waterfall of scrotum. He inspected the skin underneath. Left side all good. Then he swooped over the right side and sawed his way back and forth until he got another gander. Right side all good. Finally, he lifted the pen up towards his mouth, placed the end that had been wedged under my balls to his lips, clamped down on the plastic tube, and hummed a pensive yet satisfying hmmm . I just stared at his mouth sucking on the pen. I teabagged my doctor by proxy. Levi's bedside manner is more appropriate for a bunk bed in a hostel, and it's a rare occasion that I don't leave his office biopsied into a piece of Swiss cheese, but if you're going to hear you have a dysplastic mole over the phone, it's best delivered like this: "Hey Shawn! Don't panic! You're not going to die, but let's just say ... you owe me a bottle of wine." * The largest organ on my body is a ticking time bomb. At some point, I will confront melanoma, more melanoma than the scars on my body already chronicle. This is the joy of being a redhead (a Ginger, a Ranga, a Stop Sign, a Viking Sunset); this is the fate of having Fitzpatrick Type 1 skin (a medical classification meaning you always burn and never tan). And I struggle with my inability to remedy this situation simply because I cannot undo the damage from the past. I can't negotiate with my childhood sunburns, the early exposure that now causes things shaped like the United Kingdom to appear on my upper thigh. As an '80s baby, I had the full force of the sun blazing on me before Bill Clinton single-handedly fixed the ozone layer. Back then, baby oil was applied liberally to a child's skin before they danced naked in a playpen filled with quicksand, ticks, and rusty nails while fighting off rabid dogs and stranger danger with a bat made of lead paint and asbestos. I have blistered and peeled more layers of skin than a California corn snake: these are irreversible circumstances. As a grown adult, you would hope that your skin would engage an innate survival tactic by producing a gorgeous even tan. Let's call it "the Italian Instinct." I had a roommate who had this theory that if I went to a tanning bed, I could build up a tolerance, so she bought me a package of ten sessions at a posh Yorkville tanning salon as a Christmas gift. I went to one session. I stripped down, lubed up my body with this gel, then slid into a non-stick neon coffin. I just lay there, illuminated in blue light, my skin searing, while the Backstreet Boys were piped in through a speaker. Our experiment didn't work and now every time I hear "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)" I stop, drop, and roll. I cannot will my body to generate a defense mechanism. I can't generate a fluffier tail for winter like a squirrel. I can't sweat blood to protect myself from the sun like a hippopotamus. So now I live my life like an indoor cat. I don't tan. I don't go to the beach. I know what time of day I can walk outside and in what direction, depending on the placement of the sun for the given calendar date. I wait at traffic lights in the shadows cast from a building instead of at the curb. I have a Lycra UV-blocking swimsuit that makes me look like a blue superhero sausage. I wear unflattering wide-brimmed straw hats. Whenever a friend invites me to an "awesome summer barbecue," I immediately ask, "Will there be shade?" Then I demand the architectural blueprints of their home and a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panoramic shot of the backyard as POS (Proof Of Shade) before accepting their invitation. I calculate the day's UV Index cross-multiplied by the time of sunset to determine what grade of SPF I should apply (the answer is never less than aluminum foil). Then I consult a local arborist and commission an environmental assessment to detail the species of shade trees indigenous to the postal code I'm traveling to. Finally, I soak myself in a vat of toxic sunscreen and allow it to seep into my lymph nodes. Then and only then will I enter an "awesome summer barbecue" two hours late and dressed like a slutty gay scarecrow. This is the reality of being me. I was born high-maintenance. DENIAL IN EGYPT I am from Egypt, Ontario. I will not embellish this statement by harkening back to my ancestry. I will not glorify it by saying, "I'm from Egypt, Ontario, but ... my grandparents and great-grandparents were World War I- and Depression-era immigrants from England and Denmark." I do not suffer the Canadian fear that by admitting you are from South-Central Ontario (and only from South-Central Ontario), you declare your origins to be incredibly ordinary -- which mine are . I am from Egypt, Ontario. My heritage is an intersection. Two country roads carved a path through rolling hayfields, lush pastures, and low swampland, and at their crossing families gathered. The surrounding cattle and sod farms caught in its radius created a border that was upheld and defended by proud farmers who agree, "It's always a great day in Egypt!" My family lived in a small discharge-yellow home situated on the northeast corner of Egypt's main (and only) junction. Adjacent to my family home, in opposite corners, sat the Egypt Hall and the Egypt Church of the Nazarene -- simply named for exactly what they are, no-frill structures for mayonnaise-based celebrations. Either one of these landmarks could have been adorned with the honorable name of humorist Stephen Leacock, whose childhood home lay unmarked by historical plaque only several fields away. However, Leacock is neither Egyptian nor immortalized as such, and if you've read Leacock, you are most definitely not from Egypt. The southwest corner remained an open field lined with crab apple and pear trees that bore inedible fruit. The land served as an important catch basin for speeding cottagers who would find their cars suddenly airborne and upside down after underestimating Egypt's infamous death jog in the road. For decades, my family has pried Torontonians from their engulfed vehicles, dragged them to safety, ushered them into ambulances, whispered a little prayer, and declared in police statements: "Someone should really put up a sign about that corner." There is still no sign. Egypt is not a town (you must drive fifteen minutes to get to town) but a mindset. It's an amalgamation of family clans where it's easier to flat-out accept everyone as a cousin than it is to map bloodlines and calculate generations of separate family trees grafted together and struck by lightning. This is my poetic understanding of what it means to be conditioned like an inbred without actually being genetically inbred: you're either a cousin or you're an outsider. My mother, Linda, and my father, Ian ("a townie"), partitioned an acre of land off my grandfather's farm in 1975, and they built their home from architectural plans selected out of a catalog of prefabricated bungalow dreams. This succession plan was established by my grandfather Clarence Smockum, who bought side-by-side farms with his brother Kenneth in 1952, and alongside their respective wives, Elsie and Norma, they tilled the earth, raising crops, herds of cattle, and flocks of children. Although we carried the last name Hitchins, we were very much raised as Smockums. Clarence was the very definition of an Ontario farmer, only he had magical powers. He could witch for water using a forked branch; herd the cattle from the pasture to the feed trough every morning by calling "ko-bah"; shoot a raccoon out of a tree without looking; mend tools, tractor parts, and fences using only baler twine; drive his brown GMC as slowly as his red Massey Ferguson (and his tractor as fast as his truck). He owned a hunting dog named Amos who was immortal and could change breeds every two years. Clarence struggled after Elsie died of pancreatic cancer in 1981. He would live in his farmhouse for a handful of years as an unhappy bachelor, which countered his nature as a vibrant, stout man with flat feet and a wreath of gray hair. When he met Helen Westgarth, a widow from nearby Udora, she arrived in Egypt with her own set of powers. Helen could switch stoplights to green by snapping her fingers, transform balls of yarn into beautiful blankets, sear a roast so intensely the smell wafted over hayfields and signaled Sunday-night dinner, paint an animal on any piece of wood. Helen also brought with her a large family with even more cousins, and Egypt grew tenfold on her arrival. Although Clarence and Helen would never marry, they became companions until his death in 1996, at the age of sixty-nine. Helen became the only grandmother I would know. My other grandfather, Albert Hitchins, was a solitary man who lived in town, in nearby Sutton. After his wife, Ethel, died in 1983, he remained a widower until his death in 2006, at the age of ninety-four. His only companion during that time was Chester, a foul-breathed, flea-ridden, ginger-haired dog with skin tags. Albert lived a short drive away, but we hardly saw him, except on the occasional Friday night when my parents would go curling and needed a babysitter. Then Lori, my older sister, and I would sit on Albert's twill couch eating meatball subs and drinking A&W root beer while watching WWF wrestling and John Wayne westerns until late the next morning: that is, experiencing the life of a townie. Albert was a reserved man who carried the coldness of someone born in England at the threshold of World War I. He didn't own a car or a set of dentures. He walked wherever he went and he ate the same thing almost every day: hamburger goulash with a side of HP Sauce. He was poor but resourceful, and he was ribbed for refilling old glass Coca-Cola bottles with water and storing them in his fridge. We could have been scions of bottled water. His home was small, dark, musty-smelling, and it seemed mathematically impossible that a family of seven could have been raised in such tight quarters. Inside his home it seemed as if time had stopped in 1983 when Ethel died, but his property was vibrant and full of life. There was a lush garden of mature trees, manicured hedges, and long thoroughfares of grass separating wide beds of perennial flowers and allotments of vegetable plants. Every July, the entire Hitchins family gathered in Albert's garden for a barbecue, an event that inevitably ended in either an anxious spat between siblings or a playful water fight that turned into an anxious spat between siblings. It was an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the other cousins (the near strangers) who lived in subdivisions, in cities, and out of province. Lori and I were recognized as the redneck cousins (the near strangers) who lived in the middle of a hayfield and didn't have access to cable or MTV. My mother has spent her life on the same acreage, and the stories of her childhood sound straight out of pioneer times. She attended a one-room schoolhouse where a strap was used for enforcement, slates and chalk were writing implements, and a commode (an indoor open well of sewage capped with his-and-hers toilet seats) was the only option. (Indoor plumbing, even in homes, was an unaffordable luxury until the late '60s for most country dwellers.) The children of Egypt were eventually bussed to a regional public school built on a swamp, and the schoolhouse was repurposed as a hall for the Egypt Women's Institute, before changing hands several times and then, in 1989, being razed. On that day, our front lawn was lined with fellow Egyptians who watched the decrepit building crack open with the force of four tractors pulling in opposition. The adults mourned the brittle snapping of the walls with tears, while the children obnoxiously cheered the revving of tractors and the giant plume of dust. The community banded together and built a new hall. The men worked in their spare time, after work and on weekends, year-round to construct the new building. The women made meals and supervised the children as they collected roofing nails and scrap from the ground and chipped mortar off the old red bricks so they could be resold. When the building was complete, the preserved schoolhouse bell was placed on its steeple as a symbol of pride. Its ringing signaled an Egyptian Spring filled with corn roasts, hay-wagon rides, community dances, and baseball games. Brown mesh trucker hats branded with "Beautiful Downtown Egypt" seemed to be the latest fashion craze. Egypt got its own Little League team, the Egypt Camels, and we practiced on a baseball diamond cut into a cornfield. It was our very own Field of Dreams. When lightning struck the school bell in 2012, the hall burned to the ground. The very next day, the community banded together (once again) and began rebuilding the structure exactly as it was. Yet they bemoan that the brand-new community hall "doesn't feel the same." Change is not a welcome force in Egypt, never has been and never will be. During the much-loathed Ontario NDP government of the early '90s, the prime farmlands of Egypt were slated to become Toronto's "megadump." Protest signs decorated the lawns and fences, simply stating, "NO DUMP!" This political action was my very first venture into scrapbooking as I clipped various articles from the Georgina Advocate and the Era Banner and proudly pasted them into a book I evocatively titled "The Dump." At the height of the anger, the surrounding hamlets banded together and a convoy of hundreds of tractors, trucks, and cars drove at a farmer's pace down the 404 highway and circled the grounds of Queen's Park, halting busy city life. In a burgundy Astro van inching down the Don Valley Parkway, I got my first glimpse of Toronto's skyline, including the CN Tower ... This was "The Big Smoke" that threatened our very existence. Egypt was spared Toronto's refuse, the city repressed its garbage crisis down an abandoned mine shaft somewhere else, and our sanctity continued. While it's not my intention to give a full and detailed account of the slack-jawed terrarium in which I was raised, it is important for me to establish that, like a veal calf, I was nurtured and raised for a specific fate. Like many young gay men from small towns who came into their sexualities in the shadow of the AIDS crisis and before Ellen and Will & Grace ,when my Rockwellian existence soured I became an outsider, no longer part of some greater whole that can only be explained in farm-speak. There is a copacetic relationship between the farm animals and the barn that houses them. The shelter provides a safe refuge for them, and the heat and moisture created by the livestock maintains the structural integrity of the foundation. The hayloft above stores food for the animals while insulating the interior wood from harsh winters. When you remove the animals and their food from the barn, the foundation dries out, the wood rots, and the structure falls to ruin. My exodus from Egypt triggered neither plagues of frogs nor water-into-blood transformations, but I no longer contributed to the provincial mindset that reinforced Egypt's existence and Egypt could no longer provide me shelter. I was raised with an intense sense of belonging and a blind sense of comfort that I've desperately tried to regain since I lost it. But normalcy has evaded me at every turn. So I surrendered to the margins and learned to survive in the undefined. I have done many bizarre things to push myself or to test my breaking points, to release tension the way an athlete stretches a cramped muscle. I have fallen apart more times than what I will admit to, not because I am fragile or weak, but because this is the reality of the stateless. We push to create a space for ourselves, and often to our detriment we are both the barn and the cattle. And sometimes we burn it and everything down like a nineteenth-century lunatic. I moved to Toronto and quickly learned that living in the Big Smoke is just like living in a small town. Both are full of gossips, bigots, boozers, sluts, addicts, criminals, and Jesus freaks, except living in a city I'm not related to any of them. Only with the self-flagellation of an elastic band did I erase the distinct twang (a confusing hybrid of American Midwest and Canadian East Coast) that is unique to my family. Every harsh snap of an elastic band against my wrist may have removed a "t" from the word "across" or replaced "eh" with a period, but no amount of office-supply therapy could unknot a crocheted way of thinking. It is a considered point of view that delicately weighs both horror and circumstance, life and death, action and consequence, past and present, then crassly concludes that either someone is a "fucking idiot" or something is "horse shit." Once, my mother's cousin Brad (the unofficial mayor of Egypt) rescued a distressed cow by shoving his entire arm inside the animal's birth canal to prevent its uterus from slipping out. It's a fatal complication for a cow having just birthed a calf, and a potential loss of income for a farmer. Arm deep in a cow's vagina, Brad instructed Mike (his son and my cousin) to take a jackknife and some twine and stitch the cow's vulva closed. Between each incision and sewing of the coarse thread, Brad inched his arm out while Mike vomited to the side. The cow was saved and a clearly traumatized Mike had experienced a gruesome rite of passage. This story was performed over beers and shots of rye in the basement of my family home, which served as Egypt's unofficial tavern. (These were the type of gatherings where the mixture of Labatt and Crown Royal would cause grown men to order fifty baby turkeys then forget about it until boxes of freshly hatched poults were delivered to our front porch. It was drunken nights like these that resulted in us raising turkeys in our finished basement until they were old enough to be transferred to the barn.) The fisting story killed. "That's not funny!" one cousin snorted uncontrollably; it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. "Well, if you can't laugh at life's shit, then go kill yourself, eh?" howled another cousin. In a world of common sense, where the golden rule was "don't put your foot in the thresher," life was rife with comedy. I was never privy to intellectual banter peppered with wit and bon mots, but to a bucket of harsh stories filled with obscenities, slopped and delivered with the cheer of a tole-painted duck wearing a lace bonnet and smoking the pipe of Jean-Paul Sartre. There is a tipping point to this type of humor, a danger that you might reveal too much. Learning to navigate this line was essential, because only by laughing at our situation were we given permission to complain, to express profound dissatisfaction, to show vulnerability, or to admit fear. The world of Egypt seems lives away, but I am a farmer through and through. I eat when the harvest is bountiful, fast during droughts, and laugh in the face of hardship. While there is no going back, I remain tethered to the land. Nostalgia is in my blood. When truth wades into darkness, I close my eyes. I am perched at the very top of a wagon piled with a hundred rectangular bales of straw. My sister and I are sitting side-by-side, laughing as the stack of interlocked bricks of compacted bedding sway dangerously to-and-fro, the coarse-but-sweet-smelling fibers sawing our bare legs red. We laugh as my grandfather looks back at us from his Massey Ferguson, making sure we haven't toppled off, as we chug towards the gray weathered barn. We squint at the horizon as the large black tractor wheels kick up dust and the late August sun burns bright, illuminating our world, making the ordinary, the simple, the nothingness appear anything but. This was home. Excerpted from A Brief History of Oversharing: One Gingeras Anthology of Humiliation by Shawn Hitchins All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.