Springtime Just May Kill Me

Daily temperatures have gotten warmer, and I'm not exactly shedding a salty tear. There's no longer any need to go on increasing my nightly chances of dying in an accidental fire due to portable heater abuse (my parents and I had a very pointed disagreement on just how low the thermostat in winter should go).

The mountains that surround the Salinas Valley are green. Bucolic, even. Flowers are in bloom, providing a visual cacophony that the third-rate poet in me just can't stop marveling at. When I venture outside to catch some rays, go on a walk, or simply seek to commune with this new season, I now return layered in a thick swath of microscopic allergens. More specifically, pollen.

After an allergy skin test three years ago, I discovered I was allergic to the world. Especially, the world during spring. The nurse administering the test determined that I was so allergic to trees, as I swelled up in a sterile room, arms all pricked up with various allergens, that she cut off the testing, fed me some Prednisone, and asked me to consider walking myself to the ER if my throat closed all the way up. Fucking great, I thought. Now I can't just blame all my sniveling on cats (generally, my favorite allergen scapegoat). Turns out, trees and grasses (like, all of them) are an even greater nemesis.

There are worse things in life than a physical response to spring that inspires a violent uprising of antibodies in my body, and the dénouement of a histamine surge. There are worse things in life than stuffed tissues (used and unused) in almost every pocket of all my clothes (often resulting in batches of newly washed clothing, generously sprinkled with tissue bits, as if I had just stood over my clothes generously grating tissue over them, like a fresh block of parmesan over a steaming plate of pasta). And if everything outside weren't so damn beautiful I might just give into the temptation to cut off my nose so as eliminate dealing with it at all.

Spring showers do bring May flowers. And those spring flowers give me incessant pollen showers, leaving me sneezing for hours, wishing for residence in a sterile tower - at least until June, or a move to the tundra. As long as there's wi-fi in the tundra...