Poison Oak Pride

[I'm no longer immune to poison oak. Man, when I was a kid, I'd be camping at least once a month, in any weather, pitching my tent right in the middle of a shiny, oily growth of Leaves-of-Three. There would be no effect, and I would laugh. Ha ha ha! I was so young and foolish.]

[A few weeks ago, during one of this year's many heatwaves that, usually so rare in San Francisco, are giving me old-fashioned superstitious feelings about global warming, Allen called me to suggest an impromptu trip to Baker Beach. As we all know, Baker is one of THOSE beaches: the nude kind where Teh Gayz get into all kinds of mischief. Sigh...it's when this subject comes up that I most miss living in Santa Barbara.]

[Anyway, those days are over in more ways than one, and since it was already like 4 p.m., I knew we'd just go, hang out on the beach for a couple of hours fully clothed, look at the waves, talk, and then return home. That's pretty much what happened, except that we had trouble finding the path down the cliff to the beach. We ended up thrashing our way thru underbrush and basically sliding the last hundred feet down the sheer face of a sandstone cliff. Ow, but not too bad. It was kind of a fun adventure, actually.]

[BUT. That "underbrush" mentioned above? Yeah, some of it was poison oak, and some of it must've gotten on the shorts I was wearing. I washed those shorts, but maybe my all-natural, biodegradable detergent from Trader Joe's isn't up to it, because the next time I wore the shorts, these odd blister started forming, first behind my knees and the all the way down my calves. At first I thought they were bug bites, but I haven't heard any mosquitoes whining in the middle of the night or anything. Then I though spider bites, because we all know Maison le Trou has enough dusty corners to house Shelob and ten thousand of her offspring.]

[Even before I made the mistake of starting to scratch, some of the welts started taking on a more rash-like shape, and I couldn't help but notice that they were starting to weep. At that point, I was also weeping from the MONUMENTALLY AWFUL itching. I mean c'mon; do I need to constant sensation of fire ants burrowing into my calves second-to-second? Is this my punishment for all that heedless mirth in the piney woods of my youth?]

[Soon I had big raw patches on the back of my once magnificent calves, and new blisters were forming every day. Without really knowing what was causing this, I went to Kaiser. My jolly nurse practitioner wasn't entirely sure what it was, but poison oak (which had occurred to me, but which I didn't know could present like a bug bite) was certainly on the list. She gave me prescription-strength anti-itch cream, antibiotics for the skin infection, took a culture, and sent me off laughing. She's a gem, and I kind of hope I see her again.]

[Well, it's Pride weekend, of course, and while I'm not terribly into It this year, I like to have my options kept open. One option that's certainly closed this year is exposing my legs to the general public, or even to one or two carefully selected members thereof. Ah, well; it's a First World Problem to be sure, and the Pink Saturday party I'm attending later today will be more about communal pride than communal nudity, so I guess it's OK.]

[Time to go apply more salve. The glamor around here is too much to take sometimes, I tell you.]

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