When we last left our hero, he was rambling on incessantly in an attempt to hype up what would seem to be just another ordinary camping trip, at least to the common eye, that is! Little did we know, however, that this very trip indeed was quite different from your average, garden-variety romp in the wilderness because…

So there I was, knee-deep in quicksand with nowhere to go but straight to my own rapid demise… Ok, so actually I was sitting with some friends around a nice campfire, drinking a cold beer and pretending that I could once again remember how to play the guitar! We had gone through many a songbook and even more cases of beer over the past several hours, which is actually quite the common thing for campers to do to pass the time, but looking back at the situation now, I realize that they had us right where they wanted us and we didn’t even see it coming. All of the telltale signs were there – adequate tree cover to keep breezes to a minimum, murky breeding grounds only footsteps away, traces of blood from their previous victims – they had played this game many times before and we were simply fresh meat on the buffet…

The initial attack was a bit subtle, the bombers swooping in on our drunken bodies as singles and doubles, but once the word got out that our defenses were pretty much, well defenseless, the true siege began and it wasn’t long before we were reduced to intoxicated human pin-cushions. Of course, any entomologist will tell you that it’s not until you’ve been hit seventy or eighty times that the true fury commences, yet by this time the entire crew was flying high on a bizarre mixture of cheap rum and mosquito anticoagulants, so it wouldn’t be until the following morning, well after the sun arose and the hangovers succumbed, that we would have any idea just how bad the damages actually were. Even then, nonetheless, as our blood viscosity returned to normal and the immense, wide-spread swellings reared themselves, we came to find that this war had only just begun.

There’s not a whole lot that one can do to help quicken the recovery from mosquito bites, except sit on a lawn chair and moan about the pain for hours on end, of course. The crazies on television and in the park’s “convenience store” will tell you that they’ve conveniently got these nifty skeeter sticks available for only $5.99 a piece, which are supposed to lessen the effects of the bite, but all they really do is distract you from the bite for a short time while you try to figure out why the hell you wasted six bucks on such an idiotic piece of novelty crap! As sad as I am to announce this, the only real remedy for such a wound is time, which I must say tends to take her sweet ass self when you’re in that kind of pain…but that’s when our good friend beer comes in!

It seemed only obvious that since alcohol had gotten us into such a predicament in the first place, alcohol should have no problems alleviating the situation as well…or so we thought! Although we honestly did try our very best to simply live with the pain and continue onward with our agenda, we were only able to hold off for so long and by about 2:30 PM, it was time to wander down that rocky road towards quaint and pleasant inebriation, all the while getting in a little fishing at the same time! “They can’t possibly get us out on the water, right?!” Well, that’s a nice thought, but as it turns out, mosquitoes, as well as black flies and various other insects, have gotten themselves a hold of these things called wings that allow them to fly over both land and water, so needless to say, even though we did get many bites that afternoon, not a single one of them resulted in something that we could grill up for dinner that evening…

So if you’ve been keeping tally, by the time we hit land once again, we had bug bites on our bug bites, with a third and even more unbearable layer in the making as the night continued. Anyone who’s been in a similar situation knows that by this time, you’ve got enough toxins running through your body to make many, many days both numb and quite miserable at the same time and unfortunately, as the employee handbook clearly states, you simply can’t be drunk forever! Sure, I could go on and on and on about the pain and suffering, and chances are you’d probably listen – you have stuck around this long already – but in the end, after the swelling goes down and I finally find myself able to walk more than a few short steps at a time, it’s my civic duty to offer up only this brief advice: never go outside again! There’s really not a whole lot out there anyways that can’t be replicated either via television or the Internet, so unless the very pain and suffering that I’ve described in the last two columns sounds like your cup of tea, you might be better off just staying inside and watching reruns of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer…

If you do decide to venture out into the harsh wonderland that is the outdoors, consider yourself warned – mosquito bites hurt like the dickens, and besides, the pizza delivery boy doesn’t deliver to BFE anyways! Take it from me, as a former outdoorsman, a professional writer, and a man who’s been pro-couch for quite some time now – we’ll get through this one together, just don’t make the same mistake that I did.