Morning Dignity

Setting: A campsite in central Wisconsin the morning after a dear friend's bachelor party. It's late July or early August... or possibly sometime in June.

9:13 am: I wake up alone in my three-person tent. I feel good. This is a small miracle. The amount of time I spent sleeping could have been hours or minutes... or days.

9:17 am: I am greeted as I cross the campsite. "Hey Curtis." I don't know who Curtis is.

9:23 am: I am Curtis. And apparently Curtis spoke very passionately the night before about the theory of evolution and agnosticism. Curtis is also worried that he has low testosterone.

9:31 am: I pull out of the campsite so that I can drive across the state and into Minnesota to attend my ten-year reunion. As I leave, I am told that I should stop listening to NPR because it might be screwing with my head.

9:33 am: I tune my radio to the local NPR station.

9:52 am: I stand in an A & W in Minong, Wisconsin. As I watch a greasy-haired teen fry a piece of breaded white meat for my crispy chicken BLT (CCBLT, I guess), I have time to think about the direction in which my life is headed. It's headed west after the CCBLT: west to Bertha and my ten-year reunion.

9:57 am: I burn my mouth on the CCBLT. The greasy meal does not make me feel better. In fact, I am steadily feeling worse and worse as the minutes go by.

10:13 am: I squint at my iphone screen. A blinking blue dot appears over Minong and at the far end of a purple line that leads home. "You can't go home again," I say to no one.

Well, I can't stay in Minong.

Goodbye, Curtis.

Luck of the Polish, Part 2

So... have you ever created a "Part 1" to one of your self-indulgent blog posts and then completely lost the desire to follow through with a "Part 2"? I know I have. What was I thinking? I rarely have enough to say for a single post. Now I've pretty much committed myself to two posts that are at least semi-coherent when read back-to-back. It's like a C&G mini-series. Who the hell needs that?
But, like I said, I'm committed. So, where was I? I have poison ivy on my legs. The pharmacist thought I was an idiot (or I projected my own deeply-rooted self loathing on to her completely impartial body language) and I bought a bottle of calamine lotion. That about catches us up.

Do any of you realize how wonderful calamine lotion is? I don't know that you do. I sat in my reading chair and dabbed my legs with the pink stuff. There was a slight burning- a comfortable sort of burning- like the calamine was there to kick the itch's ass. I put my feet up and let it burn.

On Monday, I felt good enough to take a trip to the beach. The water was unusually warm and I enjoyed a swim and an hour or so on a towel where I let the sun dry the ivy rash and beat on my shirtless back. On Monday night, my poison ivy (I had taken full ownership) seemed to be under control and I was pleased to join my slow-pitch softball team in our weekly game.

During one of my at-bats I hit the ball through the infield for a single. Upon rounding the base, I found that I had pulled a muscle (or had sustained some other injury that made standing or sitting or just plain existing excruciating). I managed to round the bases and then sat out the rest of the game.

When I got home, the soothing effects of the calamine had worn off completely and my legs were itching in a way that made me want to weep while running in circles. I needed more calamine. Unfortunately, when I tried to reach my legs to apply the stuff, my back protested loudly. In fact, my back decided it wasn't even going to allow me to lean over far enough to wet my toothbrush in the sink. Before calamine, I needed Icy Hot.

I squeezed the small white tube and a dollop of white cream came out. I started to rub it on my back. "Mmmmm," I thought, "icy to dull the pain and hot to... SWEET MOTHER OF GOD, I NEED TO TAKE A SHOWER RIGHT NOW!"

It turns out that I had sunburned my back at the beach and putting Icy Hot on the burn felt about like rubbing on lighter fluid and touching it with a match. So with back and legs on fire for two unrelated reasons, I hobbled up the stairs (at various points on all fours) to the shower on the second floor. Once in the shower, I used what little space there was to run in circles and weep.

After the shower, I covered the lower half of my body in calamine, took two Tylenol PM and started to compose a blog post. About half way through, I thought, "Maybe this should be two blog posts."

A week and one day later, I got around to finishing that thought.