So here’s the whole story about why I wasn’t feeling so hot at KGB.
Last Sunday I got together with a bunch of relatives at the local lake. I swam out to the raft with my cousins, threw my cousins off the raft, was shoved off the raft by my cousins, did silly dives, told jokes, and generally had a good time. I’ve done this many, many, many times in my life and have never had any problems. A bit later we were all sitting around at a picnic table in the sun and my shoulders started tingling. I said, “Hey, you guys want to move into the shade?” And they were all like, “No,” and “Don’t be such an old man!” I moved into the shade anyway, and then they were all like, “Hey, stop being such a pussy and come out in the sun with us!” But I stayed in the shade anyway. For all the good it did me.
When I got home I could see that my chest and shoulders were sunburned, but it didn’t look that bad. I felt fine all Monday and Tuesday, but then Tuesday night I was awoken by an awful prickly, itching on my chest and shoulders. I tried slathering them with moisturizing lotion, but that either made it worse or didn’t help, because it quickly started to hurt more and more. As I became increasingly uncomfortable and increasingly less rational, I started trying anything I could think of to salve it — ice, Gold Bond powder, milk, but nothing worked. The pain became absolutely excruciating. I started wondering if I was having some sort of allergic reaction. Finally I got in the shower and turned it to icy cold and stood there shivering with the water blasting me full in the face, and as long as I stayed like that the pain was almost bearable. I started wondering if I should call 911. I wondered if they’d give me morphine for a sunburn, because I didn’t think anything else was going to do the job. Finally, after maybe 3 hours like that, the pain subsided and then it just felt like a really, really uncomfortable itch. I got out of the shower and got back in bed, but I couldn’t lie down because I couldn’t stand to have my shoulders or chest in contact with anything, so I basically just sat there awake until daybreak.
Despite all that I felt pretty good in the morning. I’d made a lot of plans for Wednesday: Meet up with The Slush God for lunch, go see A Scanner Darkly, play frisbee in Central Park, go to the KGB fantastic fiction reading series, go out to dinner afterward, go out for drinks after that. It was probably insane to try to do all that after the night I’d had, but I was heading back to L.A. on Friday morning and this was the only chance I’d get until probably next spring to see some of these people. Plus The Slush God had already rearranged his schedule to have the day off. Plus I really wanted to do all that stuff. I crossed my fingers and headed into Manhattan. I felt fine at first. Then during the movie I started to develop a mild headache (otherwise I really loved the movie — though I’m a diehard Philip K. Dick fan; it’s certainly not for everyone). I figured some fresh air and frisbee would be just the thing to kick my headache, but it hung around, and by the time I showed up at KGB it had become moderately bad. Then by the time dinner rolled around it had become splitting and nausea-inducing. I told people I’d have to pass on dinner and went to contemplate the toilet bowl for a while. Nothing was happening, so I decided to try to walk back to Grand Central. I figured maybe some exercise and (relatively) fresh air would do me good. I stumbled along, trying to walk and hold my head at the same time, feeling a lot like Tom Cruise at the end of Mission Impossible 3, and noting every garbage can in case I needed to barf. By the time I reached Grand Central (40 blocks), my nausea had mostly gone away and then I just had a splitting headache, so I got on the train and went home.
I was really, really, really bummed to miss dinner, and I’ve spent the last several days trying to plot some way to destroy the sun. Or my cousins. Or both.
Update: Oh yeah, and thanks a lot to The Slush God for snapping this photo. That pretty much sums it up right there.
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