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03/04/10

WHY? WHY? WHYYYYY! We’ve all been good, haven’t we? We’ve already suffered through more than our fair share of snow, wind, rain and ice. Why punish us further with more of the same? After months of careful research and observation, I can assure you that being cold sucks, and I’m pissed off about it. Aren’t the real estate prices here punishment enough for living within spitting distance of the beach? I think all the tax reform brouhaha going on at the Statehouse should include a minimum temperature amendment.

Dear Resident-Type:

As a result of ridiculously low temperatures, the value of living in the state has dropped considerably. Therefore, in consideration of having to live here and deal with all the stupidity and weirdness that goes on without the benefit of being warm and having a nice suntan, the state of South Carolina hereby grants you a tax rebate.

However, because of recent budget cuts, there is no one left in Columbia who knows how to operate a calculator, and our office recommends you get in touch with a tax attorney, who will be more than happy to assist you in getting everything sorted out after months of hassle.

Sincerely
Clancy J. Muckitymuck
State Office of the Dudes Who Send You Letters

It could happen. Write your congressmen, and tell ’em the Surfblogger sent ya.

To be fair, we did have one warm day that I remember on Saturday before last. I remember it for a couple of reasons. First, is that it was the day of the annual ESA awards banquet. A good time was had by all. The ESA might as well just go ahead and engrave a bunch of trophies now and give them to the Tanner family. It has to be genetic, it’s the only explanation. Plus, I have to give a shout-out to Rick Anson, who continues to be the guy to beat. To consistently surf competitively at the highest level is truly amazing. I don’t really know a lot about other local amateur sports, but I’d be willing to bet there isn’t anyone else here who has stayed at the top of their golf or tennis game for the (20? 30? 40?) years that Rick has dominated the surf contest arena. I just wish he was either older or younger than me so I wouldn’t get completely thrashed in every heat.

The other reason I remember that nice Saturday so long ago is that it provided impetus for Mrs. Blog to assign me various tasks in the yard. And my assignments invariably involve the use of some cruelly barbaric tool, like a shovel. For, you see, Mrs. Blog can look out over a yard and see any number of bushes, shrubs, flowers and even trees that would look ever so better growing where they are not currently doing so.

Now this is a skill completely foreign to me. When I look at bushes, shrubs, flowers and trees, they are either dead or alive. If the former, too bad for it, and if the latter, whoopee — think I’ll have a beer. But, if there is one thing I have learned after more than 30 years of marriage, it is to dig when and where instructed and shut up. So I did, dug, and after a few hours, old shrubs were in new locations and everything was right in the world.

The following day, I came down with a terrible cold that I can only attribute to being in the dreaded Third World Terminal on my return trip from Rooster Island. Other than the misery of it, no big deal. Until the next day, when I woke up covered in itchy bumps. Like, EVERYWHERE. So that’s when I freaked out and became convinced that I had caught some rare and lethal tropical disease that would make me into a snotty, itchy, crawly, flesh-eating zombie until I was excruciatingly rendered a dried-up corpse found in a closet years later.

You can imagine how much patience it takes to be my doctor.

I know why my doc carries a clipboard. It gives him something to hold on to while listening to me raving about voodoo curses, tropical diseases, decayed appendages, painful death from the outside in and the inside out, flesh-eating zombies; you know — the usual. So after a few minutes of ostensibly keen interest in my raving self-diagnosis and deep knowledge of accursed tropical hexes, a half-lidded stare and some white-knuckled clipboard gripping, he calmly informed me that I had a common cold and had gotten poison ivy from digging up Mrs. Blog’s shrubs. “Oops, hehe, well uh, never mind the whole zombie thing there, Doc. But it could happen, I’ll tell ya that.”

So I got various pills, unguents, nasal sprays and the like and pushed the zombie/death fear back into my subconscious, where it can live to fight against reason another day. One of the pills I had to take for the poison ivy is this prednisone stuff. It’s like some sort of steroid, and you have to take a bunch of it at first and then gradually lessen the dose. That stuff will make you nuts. Not like I need the help. I’m usually pretty mellow about everything, but this stuff made me really angry. I knew there had to be something wrong with me when I was standing in line to order a sandwich and was really pissed off at the people in front of me for talking and laughing. How dare they.

Bev accused me of ’Roid Rage. This pissed me off even further, because if I’m going to be a roid droid, I want to stomp around the office all sweaty with Mark McGwire guns, gnarly tattoos, six-pack abs and a Jay Leno jaw with a big wad of chew in it. Spit brown juice into all the trash cans at people’s desks. I want people to cross the street when they see me coming. Get some respect, know what I mean? Being really angry and skinny is like being the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. And we all know what those flying monkeys did to that poor little dude.

So what I’m going to do is go dig up a bunch more shrubs and get another gnarly case of poison ivy, go see the doc and get a bunch more of those pills. Then I’m gonna take ’em all the day before the next ESA contest and show up on the beach like some demented pro wrestler, flexing my deltoids and shouting incoherent slogans about the weather and tax rebates. I’ll never be able to out-surf Rick Anson, but I could damn sure chew the fins off his boards in the parking lot.