Spent last Thursday up in the hills east of Gaston. Pretty spot but turned out to be full of poison oak.I tend to be susceptible to the noxious weed, so I was fully rain-suited and gloved, but something wasn't covered and a nasty patch of dermatitis turned up on my right wrist by Saturday. But the worse was Sunday, when a puffy redness below my right eye turned out to be more of the damn stuff.
I've tried the usual over-the-counter remedies but this is nastily resistant, and I suspect I will just have to wait and hope for the discomfort to run its course.
The last several days have been hot, mid to upper 90's, which...is where my daughter jumped in my lap and caused me to post this prematurely. Sorry. Here's the rest of what I meant to post;
Anyway, it's damn hot. And to add to the entertainment, my usual commute home blew up Wednesday, trapping me and about 7-800 other commuters on northbound McLoughlin Blvd. as an old (as in 60-year-old) 12-inch water main deconstructed, flushing out the subgrade from under 1/8-mile of street.After a half-hour wait in the 90-degree heat I managed to turn around, find a local place to eat (and several hefeweitzens...), and after an hour...it was STILL a parking lot. Wednesday evening I left the office door at 5:05 and stepped through my own at 7:15. Yikes.
The kiddos have been sweethearts - having their Auntie Kathie here to give them a daycare break has helped. But we're going to need to pool time if this heat keeps up. Air conditioning and nonstop kidvid is NOT a good substitute for getting outdoors.
Oh. I should probably mention that it turns out that I have developed an intestinal ailment.
There are people whose nature it is to suffer from interesting and picturesque ailments. "Consumption". Now there was a disease. You wasted away delicately, fastidiously, Greta Garbo dying scenically in "Camille".
Or leukemia. You could get somewhere with leukemia - hell, Campbell Scott dawdling grave-ward with leukemia managed to nail Julia Roberts in that perennial topic of Oscar-neglect, "Dying Young". Those are diseases a guy can make work.
But this one? Nope. This one will forever be associated with SNL's Joe Piscopo and Robin Duke moaning that they have diiiiverticuliiiitisssss... Yes. I have diverticulitis.
The is just no fucking romance in that.
Aside from the lack of theatrically pale wasting away, I've been taking antibiotics for two weeks, which, if your internal workings weren't screwed up before is guarenteed to screw them up fairly thoroughly. And I have been living with the sensation of having a roughly hamster-sized object wedged in my lower gut, which is about as much fun as it sounds.
In a world where it seems to me that undeserved praise, unwarranted ease, slippery self-justification, and special pleading are - and perhaps always have been - the rule rather than the exception, I have always found that Lisa is that rare person who seldom takes the easy path paved with excuses. She is a quality compounded of wit, knowledge, grace and beauty that makes Woman, a certain breed of woman, the crowning achievement of Creation. One that use hairy, less-evolved types would do well to simply admire in seemly silence.
I hope she feels better soon, because, like the sunrise on the ocean or the dawn chorus heard at the edge of the dark forest, she lightens a world which is a grayer and drabber place without her moving through it with lightness and verve.
And for her convalesence, a poem.
TWILIGHT: AFTER HAYING
Yes, long shadows go out from the bales; and yes, the soul must part from the body: what else could it do?
The men sprawl near the baler, too tired to leave the field. They talk and smoke, and the tips of their cigarettes blaze like small roses in the night air. (It arrived and settled among them before they were aware.)
The moon comes to count the bales, and the dispossessed— Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will —sings from the dusty stubble.
These things happen . . . the soul’s bliss and suffering are bound together like the grasses. . . .
The last, sweet exhalations of timothy and vetch go out with the song of the bird; the ravaged field grows wet with dew.
Jane Kenyon
Hope you're feeling more the thing soon, Lisa. Probae esti in segetem sunt deteriorem datae fruges, tamen ipsae suaptae enitent.
I tend to be susceptible to the noxious weed, so I was fully rain-suited and gloved, but something wasn't covered and a nasty patch of dermatitis turned up on my right wrist by Saturday. But the worse was Sunday, when a puffy redness below my right eye turned out to be more of the damn stuff.
