V. Disease on Vacation

Sunday, June 24 10:06am

Damned if I did not sleep last night with some sweatpants tied around my damn head ‘cuz my stubborn-ass damn sister would not turn off the damn Cosby Show at three in the damn morning. Apparently my twelve-hour prediction of overall disappointment should have included a special Nick-At-Nite Warning, accompanied by a Heavy Snoring Alert, and followed more recently by a The-Worst-Tasting-Liquid-Tylenol-You-Ever-Nearly-Threw-Back-Up Watch. Halleluia. It looked like blue laundry detergent, and after the rude awakening of the first sip it was an exercise in self-control to keep pouring it down my rebelliously ungrateful throat. Shoutout to McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals: this is the reason kids hate taking medicine, and it is entirely your fault. Although (to be fair) there does seem to be a makeshift vacuum now keeping my nose from physically expressing its discomfort, it comes at the price of torturing my tongue into a state of emergency. At least Echinacea gets rid of the disease entirely, instead of just incapacitating your face.

continued: Thursday, June 28 2:04pm

Yesterday, I hibernated. Woke up twice to eat, and once at about 1am to talk on the phone outside. I think that’s when I got the bite. We don’t know what bit me, but suffice it to say that many hours later, sitting on a riverboat writing this with a pen I stole from the Holiday Inn Express, the bite rises literally half an inch above the rest of my skin, and stretches about 2½ inches across. It looks like a tumor. A donut-glazed tumor, actually, since my grandpa put something that sounded like “Chiggerid” on it, (if you’re from the South you probably know what it is, I sure don’t) which hardened and really looks more like donut glaze than anything else I could describe. He says it could be a recluse spider, whose poison is “poisonous enough”. And yet, here we are on the Tennessee River, paddling farther and farther from the doctor’s office I should be sitting in. A toast!, I think as I sip my second Dr. Pepper of the day; a toast to rigid itineraries and nonrefundable tickets.

There’s a Spanish family here; they’re the only other people aboard, probably because of the dismal weather. I want to go over and say hola, but I’m afraid they’ll take it as a racial slur since they know I know they must speak enough English to have gotten here. I don’t know what particular nationality they are, but their faces remind me of the girl I read with at the poetry slam last March, (organized by the single best teacher I have ever had, Mrs. Casimiro) whom I’d met ten minutes prior to the reading, which was in Spanish. I’ll never forget the last line, whose meaning I probably misinterpreted, but I found beautiful anyway: El destino lo sabrá. Destiny will know.

If I don’t post anymore after this, the spider killed me.