When I cannot sleep, I slide my mind along my body, envisioning rituals of beautification. The feet: honed pink and soft. The toenails: clipped, filed, cuticle-pushed, buffed, polished nude. The legs: shaved or waxed, then lubricated. The kitty: neatly trimmed. The happy trail: ripped from the root. The armpits: exfoliated — we can’t have red bumps, ladies — then shaved with the grain, like a man’s cheek. The face: rubbed with sodium bicarbonate and oil, steamed over lavender tea, masked with oatmeal and honey, clogged pores expressed, eyebrows edged, soothing calamine for spots. Most delicious to imagine, the scalp. Contemporary aesthetic science is riddled with limitations, not so the fantasy of preening. Temporarily remove your hair and let it float a foot away from your sun-starved skull just long enough to give the scalp a true sloughing, as an arm finally free of the cast so needs. Each fat, coarse, curly strand, before rejoining its eroded root, now to receive a shellacking of as-seen-on-TV Flex Seal™ Liquid Rubber Coating to make it look alive.