Too Weird To Live, Too Unique To Kill.

As some of you may have noticed it’s been a few weeks since my last blog post. Perhaps you even went so far as to posit a hypothesis as to where I disappeared to. Alien abduction? I wish. Soul-searching hike through the Tibetan mountains alongside bald headed monks who seem particularly fond of the color orange and banana hats? Nope.

Or maybe I just stepped out to the corner store to grab a pack of smokes? Fifteen years later and you’re still that little boy/girl sitting on the stoop waiting for daddy to come back. Sorry, kid, daddy ain’t coming back. Okay, so where was I and why have I left ya’ll in the lurch? Welp, I was on…vacation. Oooh, a mythical word that is both a place and a thought. A state of being and a frame of mind. Vacation is a beautiful thing… except when your vacation tries to kill you. Lucky for you, I’m tough to kill. Like a cockroach. I’m confident in the wake of whatever nuclear disaster wipes humanity from the face of the planet, I, and my cockroach horde, fueled by an endless supply of Twinkies, shall endure. Lean in a little closer: I wan’t to tell you about my vacation. Ya see, some of you may, or may not know, that I am what you might call and avid rock climber. Though, truth be told, the word ‘avid’ as a descriptor doesn’t seem quite up to the task, so let’s amend that to read ‘obsessive’. I’m obsessive in general, but especially so when it comes to climbing inanimate chunks of rock strewn across mountainous/desert landscapes. So, I went on an adventure, hopped on a plane, flew to Minneapolis to meet up with some buddies, and then drove down to Arkansas to the Ozark mountains. At this point on the trip, besides having forgotten to pack any shirts, nothing has tried to kill me, so it is off to what you might consider a ‘good start’. Things quickly begin unraveling once we arrive in Arkansas, or more specifically, in Harrison, AR which, as it turns out, is the white supremacy capitol of the universe. Arkansas is a beautiful place, replete with an interesting cadre of characters. Everybody is nice on the surface, sporting smiles that more or less look genuine, with sexy accents that drawl through consonants and vowels alike like a steamroller over gravel. I try not judging people as a collective based on my predetermined stereotypes, but I’m only human and upon seeing a billboard that read “Anti-Racist = Anti-White”, I couldn’t help but butt up against those stereotypes on a daily basis. That’s my baggage, though. On the whole everybody in Arkansas seemed lovely and nice. We met plenty of people that didn’t fit the ultra-conservative, neo-fascist mold. Anyways, day two of climbing arrives and something peculiar occurs: my elbow spontaneously starts hurting. I study my elbow out of the corner of my eye with a “What the hell are you trying to pull?” type look.

It responds with a dull ache that grows as the day progresses. Now, at this point I am blaming myself for the pain in my elbow by assuming I must have knocked it against something during the course of the days activities. But that doesn’t quite compute, ’cause the pain is getting worse, and for the life of me, I can’t recall having hit it on anything. As the pain grows and the mobility in my arm lessens, I stumble upon a new hypothesis: I’m dying. Sure, you may consider that an excessive reaction to the situation, but remember, I’m on a climbing trip and two days into the trip my arm is hurting so bad I can’t bend or open it (which makes tying my shoes an arduous task, and says nothing of the impossibility the act of climbing now presents). By the end of that second day my elbow has swollen to the size of something really swollen, and is accompanied by a gigantic ring of red which, in my uninformed medical experience, means there’s an infection. I’ve had some gnarly run-ins with infections in the past, not personally, but as an ancillary character in the suffering and woe of loved ones. When it comes to infections, especially of that magnitude, I know better than to wait them out. So bright and early on the next morning we booked it over to the Harrison Urgent Care. After a 30 minute wait the doctor finally saw me for approximately 34 seconds before determining I did, in fact, have an infection. He scuttled out of the room in quick order and sent a needle wielding nurse in his place.

“This is gonna burn like hellfire,” she tells me with a sadistic glint in her eye. I don’t even try to act tough. No sense in putting on a show for this tiny woman with a heart of stone and veins filled with ice. She jabs that needle into my hip, twists it around a few times until she grates across bone, and then fills me up with what she had accurately described earlier as “hellfire”. I didn’t scream, but there was a healthy amount of whimpering. On the whole, after I brushed the tears away from my cheek, that little nurse seemed pretty impressed by how I’d handled the situation. She offered me a lollipop which I politely accepted. Anyways, fast forward a couple days, the infection has performed an impressive tactical retreat, I’ve regained mobility in my arm, and I can finally start climbing again. Not so fast, my body, and the capricious God overseeing my plight, says. An interesting drug interaction between the antibiotics and ibuprofen leaves me with skin that literally sloughs off my hands and bleeds for mysterious reasons I can only assume have to do with the stigmata. To add fuel to the fire Mother Nature sends a hoard of deer ticks to take up residence on my body in certain locations where a friendly “tick check” between buddies sharing a cabin in Arkansas pushes the boundary of said relationship. There are just some places you can’t ask a friend to look. The ticks seemed to know this and all congregated in that particular region. So, needless to say, it’s probably safe to assume I have Lymes Disease. In fact, I’ll go so far as to self-diagnose myself now. No harm can come from that, right? At this point the trip is almost over and I’m looking forward to escaping that cursed state which seemed to be punishing me for sins left unconfessed. Arkansas takes the opportunity to hit a man while he’s down and proceeds to throw a bat at me.

No, no… the blood sucking variety of bat.

Close enough.

It may, or may not, have bitten my finger, and it may, or may not, have given me rabies. If you’re asking for my professional medical opinion, well, you’re a fool, because I’m no doctor, I just play one on t.v. (ha, that joke never gets old! Right? Right?!?). But yes, I’m sure I now have rabies and will probably die a horrific death as Lymes Disease, my elbow infection, and Rabies all ravage my body in a comical Battle Royale’esque beat down. I write this to you now so you’ll understand why in a couple weeks you’ll probably be hearing stories in the news about a new ultra-virulent strain of Lymes Rabies rampaging across the Californian coast. I apologize now for being the Patient Zero of this inevitable outbreak. Hopefully you can find it in your heart to forgive me. I don’t know if there is a moral to this story, but if there is, it’s this: don’t go on vacation. Oh, and don’t get bit by bats. And also, don’t let deer ticks attach themselves to your body. You should consider staying in school and not doing drugs either. That’s unrelated, but equally important.