Dixie's Got My Number
The South rose again just recently and took aim square at my coal-encrusted northern sinuses with a fury not seen since Stonewall caught his own men drinking lemonade and looking at girly cards on the Sabbath.
Two days below the Mason Dixon line lured me into a false sense of security and all bets were off as we cruised down the interstate with the windows open and the pollen infested breeze flowing through the car.
When I was a kid, we used to take springtime trips down south. It was a ritual that started with us threatening each other with axes as April rolled around and another ten inches of snow fell. Then my mother would usually peel away two weeks and force the old man to declare a vacation plan. We'd drive two and a half days and wind up in some small efficiency motel near a beach in Florida. Along the way we'd play car games to keep me amused, like "Don't say a thing until you see a car with a license plate from, um, Minsk," stop in local roadside shacks for pecan, almond, orange and firework logs and wonder how long the old man's car could run with a dry oil pan before the engine shot out the top of the hood, one cylinder at a time.
Every year, as soon as we got to a state where the outside temperature touched sixty, the old man would roll down the windows and let the breeze in. Usually Virginia, sometimes North Carolina, but the windows opened and that night or the next would find me with runny nose and sneezing fits which my mom blamed on a "cold" I caught sitting in the "cold" air the windows were letting in.
Forget the fact that modern immunology actually existed in their time. To my parents, colds will always be the result of cold. It may also explain why I wore a lot of garlic necklaces as a child.
Now that I'm an adult, the sniffling and sneezing etc. that set in was not the result of cold, but of an onslaught of some kind of pollinating thing that found in me, a chance to get all the sluices running.
Teary eyed, sniffling, sneezing, depleting maid's carts of tissues I sought refuge wherever I could. In air conditioned rooms (no) in the middle of the city (hardly) at the beach (where a flower themed bikini was no doubt pollinating).
Apparently my allergies were so excited that it was time to once again have fresh oysters, they sneezed one out on the way to Target to pick up more tissues and boxer shorts that I had packed too few of. By the way, Target is no sanctuary for the sinus crowd either. Sorry about sneezing on the credit card machine.
It all didn't end until we got back north of Washington, DC which, incidentally was the same time we started seeing stupid bumper stickers and driver's middle fingers extended again.
I'll be back, and one day permanently as Thumper and I are devising the plan that will put our comedy twosome back out front and center of some other business we buy. In the meantime though, I'm heading into some allergist for tests. Yes I realize it will mean dozens of little pricks, but this is the north and we're fucking surrounded by them anyway.
Bunny on.
Two days below the Mason Dixon line lured me into a false sense of security and all bets were off as we cruised down the interstate with the windows open and the pollen infested breeze flowing through the car.
When I was a kid, we used to take springtime trips down south. It was a ritual that started with us threatening each other with axes as April rolled around and another ten inches of snow fell. Then my mother would usually peel away two weeks and force the old man to declare a vacation plan. We'd drive two and a half days and wind up in some small efficiency motel near a beach in Florida. Along the way we'd play car games to keep me amused, like "Don't say a thing until you see a car with a license plate from, um, Minsk," stop in local roadside shacks for pecan, almond, orange and firework logs and wonder how long the old man's car could run with a dry oil pan before the engine shot out the top of the hood, one cylinder at a time.
Every year, as soon as we got to a state where the outside temperature touched sixty, the old man would roll down the windows and let the breeze in. Usually Virginia, sometimes North Carolina, but the windows opened and that night or the next would find me with runny nose and sneezing fits which my mom blamed on a "cold" I caught sitting in the "cold" air the windows were letting in.
Forget the fact that modern immunology actually existed in their time. To my parents, colds will always be the result of cold. It may also explain why I wore a lot of garlic necklaces as a child.
Now that I'm an adult, the sniffling and sneezing etc. that set in was not the result of cold, but of an onslaught of some kind of pollinating thing that found in me, a chance to get all the sluices running.
Teary eyed, sniffling, sneezing, depleting maid's carts of tissues I sought refuge wherever I could. In air conditioned rooms (no) in the middle of the city (hardly) at the beach (where a flower themed bikini was no doubt pollinating).
Apparently my allergies were so excited that it was time to once again have fresh oysters, they sneezed one out on the way to Target to pick up more tissues and boxer shorts that I had packed too few of. By the way, Target is no sanctuary for the sinus crowd either. Sorry about sneezing on the credit card machine.
It all didn't end until we got back north of Washington, DC which, incidentally was the same time we started seeing stupid bumper stickers and driver's middle fingers extended again.
I'll be back, and one day permanently as Thumper and I are devising the plan that will put our comedy twosome back out front and center of some other business we buy. In the meantime though, I'm heading into some allergist for tests. Yes I realize it will mean dozens of little pricks, but this is the north and we're fucking surrounded by them anyway.
Bunny on.
posted by The Caustic Bunny at Sunday, May 27, 2012
1 Comments:
I had never seen pollen on anything until I moved to the south. It freaked me out when they told me what it was.
For some reason my cigarette smoking has made me immune to it. It's probably because all of the follicles in my throat have been burned off.
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