Geo-caching; poison ivy; etc.

Soaped myself three times, today, in the shower. THREE TIMES YEAH THAT'S RIGHT.

I am trying to curb any potential for the poison ivy. I get shivers just thinking about the possibility of poison ivy. On top of the one-thousand ninety-three mosquitoe bites I'm dealing with from last week, I would not like batches of poison ivy, Sam I Am.

When I was a young boy, poison ivy ravaged my tight little body so many times beyond countability. Poison ivy vapors would rise off the surfaces of gleaming leaves of poison ivy, and intersperse with the summer air, and the wind would blow microscopic droplets of poison ivy past the short-sleeved skin of a young boy named Tim, who was busy attending to the latest Autobots vs. Decepticons battle in the backyard, (the event of the summer!) and the droplets would apparently get tired and rest on Tim's arm, and then decided that Tim's arm was a comfortable arm, and besides the droplets were burnt out on life on the road, and they needed a place to settle down, and maybe if they kept searching, they would never find an arm or skin as hospitable as this arm and this skin, and so they stayed, and they dug in.

I would have a small rash as I went to bed, and by the next night, my arms and thighs and calfs and biceps and triceps and forearms and wrists and neck and face and stomach would be covered in oozing, vile disease. And Kris would also be wrecked, probably worse.

And my mother would be at her wit's end with the coming of this unjustified onslaught, and she would cover us in cortisone cream and wrap us in gauze and bandages, like mummies, head to toe, and the lengths of the arms, only leaving the fingers exposed. I felt like a monster and it was definitely soul-scarring.

My old poison ivy episodes might be the reason why I am the shitty and worthless human being that I am. I am not scared to point that finger.

I guess you could say I was hyper-allergic. But it got better, as I got older.

But anyway, the reason I wanted to preclude the poison ivy so badly today, is that I was out wading in it, "geo-caching" with Lisa and a Marine named Wayne. I'm still not too clear on the definitive personal fulfillment of "geo-caching", but it gave me a good reason to explore parks and wooded areas that I've never been to.

Basically, geo-caching is treasure-hunting (for crappy treasures, btw) with GPS modules. People have logged in the coordinates of treasures that they have hidden from here to Timbuktu, and you get out your GPS module, and you punch in the coordinates, and you charter a ship, or a plane, or your shoes and magic stick, and you go looking for the little treasure, and when you find it, I guess that you can let other people know that you found it, and they can be proud of you. And by the way, you use a GPS module. Which neither Lisa nor I own.

ENTER WAYNE.

Wayne is not a crazy Marine, who would offer to snap your friend's neck to show you how it's done, or who would kiss Kevin Spacey in the driveway in the rain. Wayne is a normal everyguy type Marine. If your dad was in the Marines for twenty-five years, he would be like Wayne. Wayne said he wrote to Bill O'Reilly about Iraq, because Bill O'Reilly is dumb. Wayne's reason was not "Bill O'Reilly is dumb", and in fact he had elaborated on the precise reason, but I don't remember what it was, and I know from my own experience that Bill O'Reilly is dumb, so I am going to make "Bill O'Reilly is dumb" Wayne's reason for writing to Bill O'Reilly, for the sake of brevity in this post of mine.

Wayne was the man with the plan, and the GPS, and he didn't mind letting us come along with him.

So we foraged the underbrush in the parks that line the James River. Lisa and Wayne each found two or three caches. I didn't find any. For all of my schlepping through poison ivy and mud and branches and weeds, I came up empty. I did find a ratty baseball and a piece of quartz, though.

I guess that, at the end of the day, and this is the end of the day, that I'm tired of the great outdoors for awhile.

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Even now, after scrubbing myself clean, getting into fresh clothes, I have spotted a small patch of bubbling skin at the first knuckle of my right thumb, and this cannot be good.

And also, I'm kind of in a sad mood all of a sudden, and I don't know why again. There's something about staring into space that gets me down.

I should go somewhere, and I should let it be anywhere.

This is finally the start of my big wide-open summer, and I'm completely stumped on what to do with it.

I hope you're all okay. Goodnight.