Spring Break scabies

The View from the Tower: It's the hard-knock life for us

As a young straight white male with a college education, a car, a girlfriend, two dogs, an unbroken home, a wallet full of money and a cookie in my pocket, I can tell you one thing for sure: life never gives me any breaks.

The View from the Tower: The physics behind being left out

There are some facts of life that scientists simply can't explain, such as the half-life of the proton or the shelf-life of a Twinkie. Perhaps the most perplexing of all natural phenomena is the one-body problem: loneliness. I don't have the answer for why people get lonely; I'm just good at noticing when they do and making fun of them for it. What follows is a day in the life in the overcast shadow of Loneliness based on true events, events that happen every day in my head, and things I've read on the side of a cereal box.

The View from the Tower

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

April 1, 2005

I like to think that I've been a good boy all my life. I walk the line against club drugs and riverboat gambling, I use sunblock lotion religiously, and I floss regularly. After I lather and rinse, I repeat. Recently, however, my life has begun to spiral out of control, like in a movie when the protagonist spins into a lollipop-swirl background while screaming "noooooooo!" What has been the cause of this slide from to control to crazytown you ask? Nine girls, ten days, and thousands of itchy bumps later identified as scabies.

Like all bad ideas, it popped into my head while loitering in the shower. Drenched in my own goodness and high off of maintaining my cuticles at the proper length, I entertained a voice that entered my head. The Voice told me to go south for Spring Break. Get a tan. Watch girls play beach volleyball while sipping a tropical cocktail and slowly enticing cancer to form on my unprotected pasty-white epidermis. It said this and so much more with only one word: Belize.

Belize is a developing country, so when packing for my trip I made sure to bring along all the essentials. For a ten-day, nine-night trip that meant plenty of antibacterial soap, fluoride toothpaste, bottled water, nine girls, and a frisbee. I made sure to remove all of these items from my pockets, as well as remove my shoes, before passing through airport security. With the soap, toothpaste, water, and frisbee placed in the overhead compartment and the girls underneath the seat in front of me I took off on a fateful flight to Central America.

Let's get one thing straight: I have no desire to "throw down" on a third world country left in the hands of the U.S., the country which supplies the tourism-teat on which Belize must woefully suck. I wish to engage in an academic discourse involving reason, a fair appraisal of all points of view, and really large words that no one ever uses except on Jeopardy. Within such an environment I would like to say that the nation of Belize sucks at life on the basis that if you go there your skin will burn and you will be infested with mites that hatch larvae inside you.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of my trip to Belize. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about a country filled with Mayan ruins, coral reefs, sandy beaches, rainforests, rare species on land and sea, a two-to-one currency ratio with the U.S. dollar, friendly natives, and cheap local rum. I don't want those things to distract you from the point: if you go to Belize you will become sun-crispened real estate for mites that bore beneath your skin and collect in the webbing of your hands at feet, leaving you ill and itchy (and yet still astonishingly irresistible).

The cure for scabies it to rub a harsh cream all over your body, leave that cream on for twelve hours, then wash it off. This cream is designed to smoke out the little daemons that are slowly eating your still-living flesh (you can't see them but late at night you can hear them laughing as they gorge). It turns out that the cream is the anti-cure for sunburnt skin in that it is the most painful possible thing one could apply to crispy cartilage. The fact that the laughter and pain emanating from your skin prevents you from sleeping is okay, however, since you can keep busy by cleaning every piece of clothing, furniture, drapery, tapestry, patisserie, etc., that you have come into contact with for the past week.

Don't let your story become mine. Stay in the cold, cloudy misery of Maine. Avoid mites. If you do get mites, don't also get a sunburn. If you have mites and a sunburn, do not apply the cream until after you have begun peeling. With any luck the peeling might expose the mite highways beneath your outer layers. There would be no medical gain from such a disgusting site; I just think it would look cool.

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