Sunburn in Texas

Yesterday while hiking at Tandy Hills Nature Preserve, sans shirt, it suddenly occurred to me that there is proof that we humans did not originate on this planet.

But, before I get to my epiphany, a short history of my sunburn issues. When I was 14 I fell asleep on the beach at San Luis Obispo State Park in California. I woke up to the worst sunburn of my life. The sunburn caused a blister on my back. When that popped and healed over, the new skin no longer had pigment, as in there is about a 1/4 inch in diameter round white spot on my back.

I have to put ultra-high sunscreen on my white spot or it gets incredibly sunburned, incredibly easy. So, for decades now, I've mastered a contortionist's act to manage to get sunscreen onto my albino spot. Sometimes I'm lucky enough to have someone to do this for me.

So, I'm hiking along and I suddenly I wondered why humans get sunburned. Shouldn't all of these eons of humans evolving under the sun managed to evolve us to a version of human with skin that does not burn? We humans haven't always worn clothes to keep the sun off us. Back before Eve took a bite of that apple, humans ran around naked all the time.

I think the fact that after all these eons of being under the sun we still have skin that burns is obvious proof the we humans came to earth from another planet, a planet where the sun did not burn our skin. And we have not been on this planet long enough to evolve into having sunburn-proof skin. Instead we have a huge suntan/sunburn protection industry.

Now, a registered known idiot aquaintance of mine told me that Black people do not get sunburns. If that were true, which it's not, this would mean that Black people are the only humans actually native to the planet. But it's not true, so we're all aliens from another planet. Black people are fortunate in that the darker pigment of their skin lets them be out in the sun longer before getting burned.

Well, it's time to put some SPF 60 on my spot and head outside to do some evolving in the sun.