Wherein I took Benadryl.
We’re gonna learn real soon whether this was a good idea or not, but I just did a double-dose of Benadryl to put my poison oak in check, and man is the world ever getting stupendous all of a sudden.
Here’s a thing. A thing I have noticed. The most powerful force in the city is not steel, not concrete, not gravity, perhaps apathy but that’s not what we’re talking about here…
The most powerful force on the city street is eye contact.
Here’s another thing. Last night Kate and I went to go see the You Look Nice Today crew speak live into microphones. They were performing (or really, as they would have it, merely having a conversation as a sold-out crowd looked on) at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco.
It was Sunday night, right there in the northern mists of the legendary Financial District, and we figured we’d get dinner, you know, somewhere in the corporate economic hub of one of the largest cities in the United States.
Everything was closed. The Financial District does not exist outside of regular business hours. We walked for miles in our search for a single open restaurant, somewhere in the neighborhood on our way to the venue, and the streets were eerily empty.
Eerily empty.
Like a Friday night in the summer in the Twin Cities. That empty.
So. It was not the Financial District, I will wager, where I caught the poison oak, but likely bushwhacking out at Point Reyes last weekend that did it. Due to poor signage and sound judgment we found ourselves hiking an abandoned road. Then we found ourselves descending a mountainside. Then we found ourselves crossing a hundred yards of mud. Then a river. Then a hundred more yards of mud.
And so, now, I have crazy red splotches popping up all over the place, seemingly chasing themselves around my skin like the stripes of a barber pole. I am told it is a falsehood that poison oak possesses sentient and demonic properties, that it cannot take over your soul and make you speak in tongues, that all the intelligence we ascribe to it as it tours like a gremlin about our fleshes can be reductively described by your body simply breaking out in stages from your original exposure to the sinister leaves in question.
Now, that could be true, and science could very well validate it. But, this here being the internet, land of indefinites and poorly sourced claims, you can put me down as a mystic who clings irrationally to the historic accounts of poison oak.
Soiled rags spontaneously beget rats, the sun orbits the earth, and as far as poison oak goes…
…that shit is whack.
