If you charged in here looking for the latest Delay scandal or Chick tract or whatnot, sorry to dash your expectations.
Today’s rant will be dedicated to actual bloodsucking carriers of disease, and not the metaphorical ones. If you live in or near wooded areas, you know them as ticks. And they fucking suck. (Quite literally.)
My happiness greatly depends on outdoor activities, which invariably make use of the vast parklands and hiking areas near my Long Island home. I grew up in these Pine Barrens and I love hiking, mountain biking, ATVing, geocaching and generally enjoying the woods. That’s pretty much my weekend fun.
I remember getting ticks a couple times when I was a kid. Just a dab of Vaseline or a skillful application of the ol’ tweezers was all that was necessary to take care of the problem. We’d always hear about that kid who got Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever from a tick bite, but he was always at least six degrees of separation away.
Not so any more. Evidently, ticks have benefitted from some sort of government grant, as they’re now employing stealth technology and biological warfare. And now they rule the woods.
Last summer, I found two ticks on me after a hike with my then-girlfriend. We were positively swarmed by hundreds of the nasty little fuckers. Used to be that you could spot a dog tick on your body by getting nekkid and spending 5 minutes in front of the bathroom mirror. Now that ticks have made use of stealth technology and morphed into these ultra-tiny fuckers that folks call “deer ticks,” you might as well be looking for an individual speck of dust. You’ll never notice them until they’ve gorged themselves on your blood for three days.
Not that they’re satisfied with a simple meal. No, they’ve got to fucking inject you with some nasty disease that, left unchecked, will so royally fuck up your world that you’ll never want to go hiking in the woods ever again. Last year, the little fucker I found happily sucking away on my ass cheek decided to give me this lovely disease. That’s a sentence of four weeks of antibiotics and, by extension, no drinking.
Chemical weapons don’t work. Yesterday’s hike was protected by Deep Woods Off! with that magical chemical we all know as DEET. On top of that, clothes were protected with that other magical (and expensive) chemical called permethrin. As evidenced by last night’s tick-picking activity, neither apparantly did jack shit.
And now, as this welt on my shoulder swells up and likely develops into that wonderful telltale bulls-eye rash, I’m getting ready for four more weeks of not drinking and having to take pills that make my breath smell like ass. After Mexican food. With extra jalapenos.
Revisionist historians tell me that this danger has always been present. They’re full of shit. As a 10-year-old, I could run around in the woods all summer without any sort of chemical protection and maybe get one dog tick per summer, if that. Now I go for half-day hikes accompanied by chemicals that are probably going to get me invited to a dozen or so clinical research studies in about 20 years, and I’m bitten all over by stealthy parasites. No, it’s never been this bad.
The worst part is that you can’t win, unless you cede control of the woods to these fucking evil bugs. And I’m not willing to do that. Even if I have to order a lifetime supply of Doxycycline from a sketchy Internet pharmacy.
Goddamn parasites can suck my dick! (Oh, wait, on second thought…)