San Francisco is going through a stretch of weird and marvelous weather: heavy rain followed by hot still days followed by windy sunny days followed by more rain. Today we are in a windy stretch of the cycle, our third, I think, since early March. The garden is going wild, and the giant garden of Golden Gate Park where I walk nearly every day is going wilder. Everything is in bloom. Everything is in doublebloom. Outside is magic, but inside, specifically inside my nose, is hell.
I’ve tried about seven different allergy medicines and still I’m walking around with spitball-sized wads of tissue shoved up each nostril. I mean I am actually walking around like that. I look like I’m healing from a nose job except I so obviously haven’t had a nose job, unless it was the sort of nose job designed to mask your true identity like on Parker: The Hunter and your previous nose was really small and dainty and you told the Mob doctor to give you the opposite of that.
Where was I? Oh yeah: how I’m suffering. Aside from the leaking eyes and that pang behind the brow chakra that means I’m about to launch into hysterical sneezing and the sandpapered nostrils and the head full of hardening cement, what I really hate about allergies is how they compel you to announce to other people how bad they are.
Allergies fall into the category of illnesses I call Worse for Me than You Can Easily Perceive illnesses. Here are some others:
back pain
menstrual cramps
asthma
stomach aches
the blues
pulled hamstring or torn something or other or inflamed whatsit giving me the pang in my leg
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted the kind of health problems that made other people immediately solicitous and forgiving. Broken arm: make that a compound! Black eye. Emaciation. Anything requiring crutches.
Instead I’ve always had the ones you have to remind people you have. Oh, yeah, sorry, even though I’m, like, six feet tall and really robust looking and wearing a baseball cap, I can’t help you pick up that chair because I have a bad back.
The closest I ever came to a broken bone was when I broke my nose, except I didn’t really break it. I just banged it on a water slide and spent the next ten years telling people I’d broken it so I’d have some explanation for its appearance. Actually I did break my pinkie finger rescuing ducklings. The nurse said I could just wrap it in gauze, and wasn’t I glad I wouldn’t have to wear a splint? No. Not glad.
Even when I got mugged and kicked in the head, the next day my mom was like, you look fine! But I was not fine. I was not fine at all, and I wanted to shave my head so the bruise would show, because then there would be proof that something bad had happened to me that I did not deserve.
