another delay?

If the air quality remains as bad as it's been the last several days, I might not be able to do a walk at all, N95 mask or not. I'm not sure that it's actually worth the risk.

When I wrote, a while back, about how the air-quality rating system works, I noted that a rating like "harmful" actually meant "harmful if exposed at this level for 24 hours." In other words, spending a few minutes outside in the bad air isn't a huge problem for those of us with healthy lungs. But if I were to walk from Seoul to Yangpyeong again, I'd be out in the thick of it for hours—for the better part of a whole day, in fact (I'm anticipating a 17-hour walk). No mask is absolutely perfect when it comes to screening out all that microfine dust; forgive the pun, but that's not something to sneeze at.

Another factor leading to a possible second delay is something I haven't talked about yet, probably because it's uncomfortably personal. But to hell with it—I've blogged about my shitting habits many times before, so how bad could this be? You see, when I walked out to and back from Gwangnaru this past Sunday, I wasn't wearing my walking undies, i.e., my "boxer briefs," which protect my crotch from friction the way a pair of Spandex biker shorts will. As a result of my unwise choice of undergarments, I ended up rubbing my crotch pretty damn raw, and I've been paying for it ever since. Many guys leave brown streaks in their briefs; I'm leaving line-shaped blood spots. So I might need a week or so to heal up, but if I delay another week, I'm actually going to have to reschedule the walk for some time in April: I've got to start prepping for a large meal I'll be serving on Friday, March 22, so I won't be in any shape to go on a walk then, and on the weekend of March 15, I'll be doing all the necessary shopping for the 22nd. So there goes March. Ah, well.

We'll see, in a couple days, whether I'm in any condition for distance walking, but I'm not confident that I'll heal that quickly. Currently, I don't bleed unless I walk any sort of distance, and then the blood dries up, the crotch skin tightens, and it's fucking painful to stand up and walk around, reopening scabbed-over crotch wounds. I've got antibacterial/analgesic ointment, but maybe I need to buy some talcum powder...