 This is what I remember, the very nice SCHROON LAKE in the Adirondacks of New York State.
Today: Joe MacLeod, Creative Director at INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG; and Luke O'Neil, author of the story collection A Creature Wanting Form and the newsletter Welcome to Hell World.
Issue No. 147What I Hurt On My Summer Vacation
Joe MacLeod A god of smoke
Luke O'Neil
What I Hurt On My Summer VacationWARNING: We will be showing you some pictures of minor injuries and one medical mystery sustained on Summer Vacation. They are not beautiful.
ALMOST EVERY YEAR my wife and I drive up to the beautiful and scenic and everything smells like pine trees Adirondacks in Upstate NY to stay in a rental cabin near our favorite lake, Schroon Lake. It’s pretty much all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, and then it’s fun and games again. It’s refreshingly and revivifyingly childlike, I think, the way we shrug off injuries when we are all lathered up and hellbent on having a good time. For us, a good time means paddling around on the lake in kayaks, swimming in the lake, standing around in the lake, walking to town, getting all sweaty from walking to town and then jumping in the lake, sitting in a comfy chair in the cabin reading a book, sitting on a deck by the lake staring at the lake, sitting on a dock on the lake drinking beer, and pretty much all the time listening to music. Also: eating food and snacks. Not good would be the normal crap like watching TV and looking at a computer and phone and stuff, feh! There’s a lotta recreational sitting, even in the kayak, so it’s not some sorta crazy athletic-lifestyle activity we’re talking about here, but I always manage to sustain some sort of injury, and this year my wife joined me, possibly by coincidence, in joining the ranks of the vacation walking wounded. I don’t think the beer drinking has anything to do with these injuries, honest. If I thought there was a correlation I would say so. I enjoy the effects of alcohol, I ain’t gonna lie, but I take getting loaded at camp very seriously as far as Safety First. For instance, we always try to rent a pontoon boat for a nice putt-putt up and down the lake. This year we even went all Heart of Darkness and took the boat all the way down the lake to the Schroon River, and then down to just before the dam, where you could really get in some trouble if you don’t turn around before the dam, because you would totally go over the dam, and you can make all the “dam if you do” jokes, but you would be very unhappy going over that sucker, and it would be a real mess in a pontoon boat, you would make the News and stuff. Here’s some relevant facts and figures from the American Boating Association. In the calendar year 2020, the US Coast Guard reports that there were 5,265 recreational boating accidents that involved 767 deaths and 3,191 were injured.
Alcohol use is the leading contributing factor in fatal boating accidents; it was listed as the leading factor in 18% of the deaths.
Daemon Rum! Stay Off The Sauce When You’re On The Water, is my slogo. It’s interesting to me that a lot of the seasonal media coverage of all the death and destruction happening each year on our nation’s recreational waters does not include mentions of alcohol use, but I think there must be lawyers advising on how you can’t be writing that a lot of these accidents happen because somebody was drinking, but c’mon, read this article, how can you not think that all this “inattention” and stuff isn’t because somebody was impaired by recreational drinking? I know I would be, just saying. So, when we rent the boat, I drive the boat, I am the Captain, and for that entire day I do not have even one tiny taste of any sort of alcohol. I watch all the safety videos and I take it seriously, Safe Boating Is No Accident, for real, people get fucked up and killed all the time doing stupid shit because they think a boat is a toy and they can drink a buncha beers and go zooming around. Not me, I watch out for my passengers, and more importantly, I keep an eye out for all the chowderheads screaming all over the lake in their speedboats doing waterskiing and towing people around on floaty things real fast. Apologies for the digression. I am now going to show you the minor Vacation Damage sustained by my wife and me in our 100 percent enjoyable / would recommend / would do again vacation to Schroon Lake, and then I am going to present my Medical Mystery. UNPLEASANT IMAGES THO: BLOODY FOOT  SCRAPED FOOT: I know it's not in focus my foot hurts I scraped my ankle climbing on some rocks to push my kayak up onto the deck. I felt it happen, but it didn’t really start to hurt until later, as the wound dried out and tightened, ouch, there ain’t nothing there but skin and ankle bone. I managed the injury with a daily application of petroleum jelly to seal it up and keep it flexible, but it took a really long time for it to heal. I DON’T KNOW WHAT ON THE BOTTOM OF MY FOOT  Bug bite? Did I step on a stick and get mini-stabbed? This is the bottom of my foot in "selfie" mode picture. I am not Richard Avedon over here. I don’t know if I stepped on something or if some bug got mad at me and bit me on the bottom of my foot, but it hurt a lot for a few days. It’s a circle-type skin disruption and I am always worried about ticks in the woods, but would a tick muckle on to the bottom of your foot? I don’t think I have Lyme disease (you know I went and Googled all that stuff, yow) but I also don’t know if I don’t have Lyme disease? I am gonna go get it checked out, because when people tell me about their suspected malady that’s what I always tell everybody to do, after I roll my eyes so very hard. [SLOT-MACHINE-CLICKS-SOUND EYEROLL] “Huh! Yeah, I would go get that checked out.” SHATTERED TOOTH CROWN  SPONTANEOUS BROKEN TOOTH CROWN: This was very scary for my wife she almost choked and then it cost money My wonderful wife usually stays off the Injury Report, but this year a crown on one of her teeth decided to give up the ghost and shattered and tried to kill its host via choking as it fell out, but all is well, and two thousand dollars later, it’s as if it never happened. We have terrible Dental Insurance and our wallet hurt most of all. GHASTLY POISON IVY  AIEEE!!! Yeah Poison Ivy, this was miserable, ouch, thank you, Science, for DRUGS. One time I got my Vacation Injury right before I went on vacation! I was doing a last-minute trimming of the back yard, reaching over to grab up tendrils of weeds from my neighbor’s yard that really like to climb the fence and get into our yard, and I brushed against some Poison Ivy, and I am highly allergic or whatever it is to Poison Ivy, and it didn’t manifest itself until we were in day three of our fun time and I had to go to a Doc-in-the-box to get shot up with steroids and stuff. It was terrible, I was in tremendous pain all over my arms and legs, I remember it sort of as an abstraction, I don’t really viscerally recall the misery, I don’t feel the bad things from that time the way I can really feel good inside when I stop to think about all the fun we had on that Vacation. BONUS: MEDICAL MYSTERY  ORANGE TOENAILS: I mean what the hell? Also kindly save your "trim toenails" comments Every time we go to Schroon Lake I spend a lot of time in the lake, and I always get this odd discoloration under/in my toenails, like it’s iron or rust? It always goes away a few days after I get back to Dryland. I searched on the Internet, and as we all know, the Internet is terrible!  Thanks for your help Internet I found a lot of inconclusive info on fungus and disease and bacteria, and I went to my dermatologist and they said, well, it could be fungus or bacteria! So right now it is a Medical Mystery, but I don’t think it’s up there with the ones they put in the New York Times. Also, I got a sunburn on half of one leg that I missed with the spray-on sunblock. THE END
HYDRAS IN THE WILD“Workers are people. Companies aren’t.” Flaming Hydra Hamilton Nolan’s latest newsletter at How Things Work is a bracing reminder of why and how human flourishing is threatened by the beast of global capitalism.
A god of smoke Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I don’t think it will ever pass The five of us spread out a blanket on the grass and watched a band play Doobie Brothers covers in a park by the shore. Later I had my first swim in the ocean which was pretty late in the season for me. I walked out into the water with my friend’s daughter who is maybe six. I don’t know how to tell how old kids around that age are. She reached out for my hand and I took it gently and it broke my heart. I didn’t even know we were close like that. I kept looking back to land like is this ok? Am I doing this correctly? Worrying that a rogue wave like in the George Clooney movie they filmed around here would come out of nowhere and steal her from my grasp and suck her out into the depths and drag me into a different kind of drowning. I gambled anyway because she seemed fearless and we waded out acting silly about how cold it was but determined to go in. To have gotten it done. I thought of a picture I had seen earlier of a child’s head in a shape I had never seen a human head in before. I don’t know how old she was either. Six maybe. There was a family of ducks swimming a little further out and my new friend said we should go out to the duckies and try to save them because there might be sharks but I told her that they were too far out for us to reach. We couldn’t swim fast enough to catch up to them I said and she didn’t believe me. They can fly away if they want to I told her. I looked back to the shore one more time and saw her father waving to us and we stood there shivering in the absence of current under an open and completely empty sky.
The Thing We were looking for something to watch and going how about this no not that how about this no not that back and forth like a tennis match as a metaphor for example but more literally like a couple trying to find something to watch. Or half watch while we each sneaked looks at our phones. I would be looking at Twitter which is masculine and she would be looking at TikTok which is feminine even though a lot of the tweets were repurposed TikToks and a lot of the videos were plagiarized tweets. Have you ever seen The Thing by John Carpenter she said and my body started vibrating and powering up in the Husband’s Levitation and I lied and said no we should watch that I’ve been meaning to watch that and so we did. After she went upstairs I decided to debut my new classic bit by creeping into our pitch dark bedroom and whispering in her ear I’m The Thing from John Carpenter’s The Thing. For some reason I thought she was going to love it.
No he never returned I was praying to God to please let it rain. Zeus maybe. Wasn’t he in charge of that? I can’t remember who the rain God used to be. Jupiter? They were mostly the same guy as best I remember which isn’t too well. It had been over 100 degrees for two weeks now and every day the weather app said there was supposed to be a thunderstorm arriving that was going to drop the temperature down but it never came. I wasn’t normally a conspiratorially minded type but maybe they were just trying to give us false hope by putting the little lightning icon on the thing? How on a plane when you’re waiting on the tarmac or when you’re standing around for a table at a restaurant they always say it will be thirty minutes which is a conceivably manageable time frame that doesn’t enrage the human mind with its infinity. Anything is tolerable for thirty minutes. Probably not torture. I take that back. Being tortured for thirty minutes would be pretty bad. Not as bad as forever but still. Then there was a loud alarm that shocked all of the phones in the house into discordant alert. It said there was a tornado coming and I suspected it was bullshit but I went out to the front porch to inspect the virgin cloudless sky and noticed the neighbors hadn’t taken their bins in and judged them for it. I went to the weather website and clicked on the big blocky red danger graphic to find out if I was going to have to get the dogs and kids and everyone down in the basement and I swear this isn’t an embellished detail to show what the future is like this actually happened it made me click through to a full screen perfume ad with a 30-second countdown before it would show me news about the supposed storm. SKIP AD>> Big Papi was being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame as all of this was happening and aside from the three World Series he helped bring us I’d have to say among the memories this stirred up for me was the speech he gave shortly after the marathon bombing where he did the whole “This is our fucking city” thing at Fenway. I could cry about that any time I think about it but it wasn’t the most pressing thing on my plate at the moment. Earlier that morning the Orange line had caught on fire as it was heading across the Mystic into Somerville and in part it was like haha that’s the T baby but also the people who had to break the windows of the train to climb out onto the bridge there must have been terrified. They didn’t know at the time that “no one was injured in the fire.” That’s a perspective you only get when you’re reading the news later on. One of the passengers jumped off the bridge into the river which is understandable in terms of panicking. But when a fire boat that was nearby pulled up and tried to get her to come on board she said no thank you and swam to shore instead and then disappeared. I do not have time for this shit right now I imagine her thinking. Maybe figuring it counted as a water ambulance and there would be a medical bill. It was like the old folk song kids in Massachusetts learn called Charlie on the MTA. Did she ever return? No she never returned. And her fate is still unlearned... The tornado didn’t come that day not just yet but the power in our town went out the next with the surge of air conditioners cooking. My phone still had a decent charge and as I was scrolling and wasting the battery for nothing but anxiety there was a story about an experiment on octopuses. It said they go in and out of an active dreaming state real quick like 30 seconds at a time then pop back out to reality. All the while their skin is changing color: orange and blotchy then smooth pink then smooth white. It all sounds like me if I eat pizza too late at night. It said they had some of them in captivity and they would play videos for them of crabs scuttering about and since crabs are the main assholes in an octopuses’ life this was supposed to be a big provocation. In this case though they didn’t react to the videos at all. So the scientists knew then that they weren’t faking sleeping. The whole time their big alien head would be expanding and retracting like a lung. No one could say what they were dreaming about. Probably biding their time for a signal to take over the planet when Dick Cheney and them let their guard down. Man the air was so heavy. Is so heavy. I forget what tense the air is in. Will have been so heavy. Whatever the pluperfect is it was also that. Threatening to dispel the heat somewhat then constantly pulling back like sorry you get nothing. Like the government talks to us. Out back on the water behind my house a boat had caught on fire and it was combusting now into the sky in arid black smoke. No one was coming to put it out. I sprung into alert as if I was going to swim out there to save everyone like a hero but no one was shouting toward land and so it seemed a safe bet the boat was empty. No one is going to risk their life for a boat at this point. I was trying to remember if there was a god of smoke in mythology. There should be one if there wasn’t already. Willie Nelson? I think I vaguely remember the Aztecs having one of those. Smoke billowing from an ancient obsidian mirror which is what they used for reflection at the time. To see what they looked like but darker.
This newsletter. This newsletter! We are revolutionizing media obviously, please support, subscribe, donate, breathe FIRE with us.
|
