RIP Robert Palmer.

Greasy Kid Stuff. When I was a kid, I spent about half my life from age 10 to about age 15 in the woods. Not because I wanted to; If we had lived in an area that was near someone else my own age, I might have done other things like played ball, rode my bike, or lit fires. But we were up on the side of a mountain, in a strange house, and the neighborhood kids were all maladjusted pricks. So I hung in the woods. I built forts, played army (defined as wearing a green T-shirt that said M*A*S*H and shooting an imaginary gun at imaginary Bad Guys) and, well, explored. During these five years or so, I crawled through brush, cut down trees, moved earth, and generally got dirty. I remember having poison ivy a few times, to the point where I had to get the pills (and let’s all thank God for the pills) to rid my blistered skin of the infection. I would usually get it while helping my Dad cut some kind of weed back from around the house—can you taste the irony there? it’s a bitter, bitter flavor—and it would be a small patch, somewhere on my arm or hand. By the next morning I would be a quivering mass of ooze not unlike a skinny Jabba the Hut (or even Pizza the Hut, if you prefer) and pleading for the pill. Ahh, the magical pill. Within a few days the itch was cut back to a dull roar, and the blisters would dissapear inside of a week. But I lived in fear of the Ivy. It was out there, waiting for me. Biding its time.

The doctor yesterday prescribed me the Corti-whatever cream instead of the pill. I have this crap slathered on me like tanning butter and it’s not doing diddly; the poison ivy is spreading like Kudzu and mocking me in a quiet, but persistent manner: “…itchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchyitchy…”

I want to claw off my own skin.

Last night I answered an ad in the local Pennysaver (bless her, Jen knows I’m addicted to the Pennysaver, and always leaves it out where I can find it) for a grape iMac for the low low price of $100. We drove to beautiful Glen Burnie, I paid the man cash, and we have a new fileserver waiting to be built. Not too shabby— a first gen 333mhz, 160MB RAM, 6Gig hard drive.