I woke up this morning and realized the world has turned into a rudderless ship, adrift in a wayward dinghy.

Earth has been without an authoritative birthmark spokesman for far too long. What's it been--ten, fifteen years?

Without Mikhail Gorbachev running around in a fit of Cold War excitement (1985-1991), wearing Joe Boxers and eating bowl after bowl of Grape Nuts, there is no one to say, "Hey, look at this huge goddamn birthmark on my head!"

What a card. Mikhail Gorbachev revolutionized the way facial birthmarks--or any birthmark for that matter--are viewed. I'm not sure who the bigger celebrity was during the Cold War: Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Mikhail Gorbachev, or Gorbachev's cranial birthmark.

I'm putting my money on Gorbachev's birthmark.

If ever the viewing public fell in love with a strawberry blemish, this was the one.

The red blot sits prominently on the right side of his head and streaks back, stopping just before it reaches the top of his crown. What a sight. His birthmark is amazing because it looks like the map of the southeastern United States--from Georgia to Florida and on up to North Carolina--BAM! Right there on his frigging dome.

As a child in the 80's, I was mesmerized by this marking. I actually wanted to lick it and then eat a bunch of Pop Rocks and down a Coke, just to see what the chemical reaction would be: 1 part Gorbachev birthmark, 2 parts Pop Rocks, 1 part Coke. Would my stomach explode?

I never got to test this idea because I never got close enough to Gorbachev to lick his birthmark, and I learned after about 74 tries that licking the television screen or the cover of Time Magazine (Man of the Year, '88) were sorry substitutes for the real thing.

In all seriousness, though, I really wanted a birthmark like his. I often asked my mother to pour scalding water over my head in order to give me a bigger mark than Gorbachev, so that when he died, I could take over where he left off. But my mother dissuaded me, telling me birthmarks come from God and pouring scalding water on my head would merely make me a burn victim. But there was no cure for my envy.

I was jealous of Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. Did they get a special pass to study Gorbachev's birthmark up close and personal when they were doing research for Spies Like Us? Did they get to lick it? If so, what did it taste like? They never responded to the forest of fan mail I sent asking them to tell me what the next-best-thing-to-Gorbachev's-birthmark would be. I needed to know. But an answer never came.

And then something happened.

Maybe it was in the early 90's when we were distracted with the first Gulf War. But when the first President Bush reneged on his no new taxes plan and pictures of burning oil fields peppered the evening news, everyone forgot about Gorbachev and birthmarks and how much progress had been made in the realm of red splotches.

Then Clinton got elected and the rest is history: no more widespread infatuation with birth marks.

And I think the after effects are still being felt today. I think Gorbachev's birthmark, in a way, was like the world's compass. It showed us that, yeah, you know what, it is possible to rise from the rubble of communism and pose for multiple photographs with the President of the United States.

It was like lightning in a bottle--and I'd rekindle it all over again, even if it meant going through another Cold War. At least then we'd have a birthmark spokesman.