I get by with a little help from my friends

I am in the final throes (note: everyone, in this context the word is “throes”) of an allergic reaction to amoxicillin. I can hear you, my crunchy friends, “Of course you had an allergic reaction to antibiotics! Chemtrails! Organic garlic kefir alkaline!” And I appreciate your input, all of you. But anyway, I was taking Amox for an upcoming root canal and evidently I am allergic to it. The internet told me it was an amoxicillin rash, which reminded me that 13 years ago or so, I had the same reaction to penicillin (ELDERBERRY ROOT! KOMBUCHA) and so it all made sense. Terrible, terrible, itchy horrible sense. It feels like poison ivy on my whole body. 

I tell you what. We should give the Taliban poison ivy. Because that junk is torture.

We procured some off brand Benadryl and I started doping, just to fight the pain. Or at least the itching. Our final service was Sunday morning, and we decided that Richy would ride ahead with the pastor and I’d drive the family an hour or so later. Pretty basic route, I thought. I have a GPS, I thought.

I live by a creed when it comes to driving: Never trust my instincts. My instincts drive me into 18 wheelers and deep into inner city dead-ends. My instincts are like an anti-GPS. But I popped 2 Benadryl and hit the open road. What could go wrong?

Well. It sent me a different way than I recalled, but I’m about 5 cans short of a 6-pack when it comes to directional ability, so I obeyed Pierce. Pierce led me to a trailer park, which, as I suspected, was somewhere entirely different from where I was going. I couldn’t get him to map to the exact location, so I tried to think of nearby landmarks, like a pizza place. No go. It was about this time, pulled into a gravel driveway between cornfields, with cornfields ahead and behind me, that I noticed we were almost out of gas. Also, it was getting harder to answer the 1 million questions from the backseat, because my tongue was so heavy. “Nuts.” I thought. “I’m high.”

For a minute, I thought about crying. “I could sit here,” I thought, “and cry, and then I could just drive anywhere, and there would be a Walmart or McDonalds or something and I could just stay there until the service was over and Richy is reachable by phone, and I will not die in a cornfield.”

But instead I mapped to a couple of cross streets I remembered, and I silenced all the haters in the backseat, with their “You always get lost, Mama.” And I drove to the right place. Almost. I was within a block but circled for another 10 minutes before I finally got my lucky break and found it. I came in, 45 minutes late, just in time for the offering, and sang one song, or at least I think I did. It’s a little blurry. And we never ran out of gas because the Japanese bank on our stupidity.

The moral of the story is: don’t do drugs unless you know where you're going. I'm kidding. The moral is leave the driving to the menfolk.