Wednesday, March 31, 2004

poison anecdotes Posion ivy (and oak and sumac, etc) has been one of the recurring curses of my life.  When I get it, I usually get it really bad.  I consider myself lucky if I can stop it before it spreads to my face and my private parts. Once in highschool I got it really, really, really bad.  It started on my forearms (as always) and then spread to my torso, groin, neck, face and just about everywhere else.  What was especially terrible about this outbreak was that the patches of poison ivy got really thick.  I remember when I walked the patch on my neck was so thick and heavy that it actually bounced like the triple chin of a fat person. And since it was really uncomfortable and irritating to let patches rub against one another, I had to hold my arms out to my side to keep the poison ivy on my inner arm from touching the poison ivy under my arm pit.  There were even patches on my side and back that made it too miserable for me to lie down. At one point I just went into my room and sat on my bed for hours, staring straight ahead with my arms up in the air--a frozen, miserable monster. A few years later, when I had my own tree service, I got it really bad again.  Someone told me that you could get a shot to knock the stuff out of your system pretty fast.  So I pushed aside my phobia of doctors and went to this inner-city looking walk-in clinic in Tampa.  I waited for a long time in the lobby among the screaming babies and a variety of sickly-looking uninsured folks.  When the doctor finally saw me, I could hardly understand him for his broken, Pakastani-accented English.  I had to point at the giant bubbling patches of poison ivy on my body for him to understand and make his diagnosis. Then the Pakastani doctor went into this dusty looking cabinet and pulled out a little bottle of clear medicine.  He put it in front of me to show me what it was.  Then he showed me that it was the same medicine that was listed in his doctor's book for poison ivy. "Is right medicine, you see?" "You're the doctor!" I said.  "You shouldn't be asking me." "Is right, is right," the Pakastani doctor said filling up the syringe.  After he stuck me with the needle he told me that I couldn't drive for a few hours because the poison ivy medicine would make me drowsy. Fortunately, the Pakastani doctor's little book was right and I got over that case in another day or so. I guess the poison ivy curse runs in the family on my father's side.  My grandfather was stricken by Parkinson's at a relatively early age, and because of that I had relatively few conversations with him before he died.  (Actually, I've had relatively few conversations with any of my living relatives either, so the Parkinson's probably didn't have that much to do with it). But one time, seeing how I had a pretty bad case going on, he told me about a poison ivy experience he had when he was a kid. "Where did you get it?" I asked him. "I was camping in the woods," my grandfather told me.  "We didn't have any toilet paper to use, so I just grabbed a bunch of leaves and wiped with that," he said. "Oh my, god," I said. ((The picture above and to the right has nothing to do with poison ivy of course.  I put it there to make up for the visual disgustingness of the rash picture, and to  try to lure back some readers who seem to be trickling away)). 7:39:52 PM    comment []

leeza Is it just me or does Condoleeza Rice look like she's about to break down and cry every time she gives an interview these days? (I want "I told you so" bragging rights if it happens on national television). 5:16:17 PM    comment []

tag team of miseries Like some sort of tag team of miseries from hell, just when the rolladough sickness subsides, a massive and horrible rash sprouts up on my lower belly.  The rash features pink, puffy blotches that kind of tickle and itch at the same time. Now the question is: is the rash something different than the poison ivy that has popped up on my forearms, or something completely new and disgusting.  Or maybe the poison ivy has inter-bred with the spots that came from John Rock's pool to form a completely new species of skin malady. All I know is that someone out there has a hell of Mark Michaels voo-doo doll. 8:09:56 AM    comment []