The rash is about nine inches in diameter on my upper thigh, with a darker red center about the size of a two pound coin. The center is a little firm to the touch, but the rash as a whole is a bit warmer than my surrounding skin. The doctor asked when I first noticed it – about four weeks ago – and asked if I remembered what gave rise to it. I told her I thought it was a spider bite, but I really had no idea what had caused it – it had itched, though, and I was pretty sure it was some sort of an insect because at the center of what was now the dark red bit, I remember feeling a mosquito-like itch.
Happy Jack
I’m traveling this week, so I don’t have time to do a normal post – but I wanted to post something because I spent a bunch of time trying to reformat the home page and postings page of the website. Thanks to all of you for your comments on the site; it’s helped inspire me to learn a bit more about how to make it work, although not nearly enough to make it spiffy. Bear with me – I’ll do my best to make it functional and easy to use.
I’m on my way to London. I’ll be there for just a few days.
Stop falling
Have you ever fallen? I mean falling hard on the ground – smack, thud, scrape. It could have been some time you fell off a wall or down a hill, or you lost your balance on your bike and scraped the road, or maybe you were trying to carry something heavy and you lost your balance. If you’re able to pay attention to your body as you’re wavering and tipping over, you’ll sense a quivery feeling in your limbs and your gut well before you actually lose your balance, before your momentum tips entirely. It’s the last chance you get to right yourself – your body is giving you a warning shot. You can avoid the plunge but only with a bit of an heroic effort, and only if you know you don’t want to drop.
Our bodies are real, beautiful, material things, and as such, they are subject to gravity on this earth. And if you look at our bodies, they are well designed for most of what we do, but then we push them and do dangerous things beyond their design limits. Falling is one of the inevitable results. We learn as children to use our muscles to adjust our balance and prevent falls before they occur. The mind and soul learn to fear uncontrolled surrenders to gravity, learning the lessons of the breaks, bruises and scrapes of our physical self.
Swimming
It’s been a long, dry summer in Seattle, which has been perfect for swimming in Lake Washington. I love swimming outdoors. I’m not a particularly good swimmer, mind you – mostly I just doss about in the water, eventually rolling onto my back and simply floating, but I try to get a good swim in when I can. I’ve always loved lakes best, back to when I was a child in Maine and we’d head up to Kezar Lake every summer. The water was cold, pure and deep, but to a ten year old it was perfect – there was always a moment of complete fear, knowing that the initial drop in would be a shock, and then splash, you’d be in, and the shock would be even worse than you could anticipate but with it came exhilaration and then my body would quickly squirrel around to rise and take a breath. My head would quickly cool off and I’d realize that it felt, at least, warmer in the lake, and that I could swim for a long time.
I also swam a lot in the ocean as a kid, which was different but not quite as good. On the positive side, the beach always had some wave action. This made getting into the water less an exercise of dread and shock and more of a rolling series of little surprises, as the waves lapped up my body, first hitting my groin with a gut shot of cold and then the line of my tummy above my swimsuit, another hit, and finally my chest and neck, and then I’d just be bobbing on the waves. The rollers also meant more immediate fun than in the lake, where “fun” mostly consisted of simply swimming or potentially splashing my sister or my mom. I could body surf on the rollers, especially when I was little, and the feeling of being lifted off the bottom and tossed towards shore was a little like being thrown up into the air as a very little boy.
Byron in Utopia
There’s an increasing trend in denser neighborhoods of people putting up “little lending libraries”. In my neighborhood, there are two old newspaper dispensers – the kind where you’d put in some change and the handle would release, you’d open it up, and grab a paper from a stack inside – which have been unlocked and made available for book swapping. In my son’s neighborhood, which is a little more upscale, a number of people have built miniature houses with glass front doors and a couple of shelves inside. Some of them are marked “children’s books only”, and my son loves rifling through them and bringing a couple of books home when we take the dog for a walk. Some are all-purpose, and on a recent walk with my dog, I found a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia in one of them. I hadn’t read it since college, so I thought what the heck, I’m vaguely underemployed these days, let’s have a go.