COUGH INTO THE CORNER, KID

What a completely wretched day.

Yesterday, I mean. Today is off to a more or less brilliant start and seems like it'll carry on that way. But yesterday was infested with so many cancerous elements - fatigue, envy, loneliness, exhaustion, and...is there a world for a feeling that the world is all moving one direction, in one lane of traffic, and after hours of unwittingly moving against it and getting dirty looks, someone grabs you by the shoulder and says, 'Hey buddy, you're supposed to be going the other way,' and so you turn and move with the crowd, but after some time has passed you find that once again you're colliding with traffic and getting dirty looks until someone grabs you by the shoulder and says, 'Hey buddy, you're supposed to be going the other way,' and so on to madness?

That feeling festered all day and culminated during my search for a thermometer, which led me in crooked spiral around eight or nine city blocks and into one drug store, one blood center, three different floors of the same hospital, and two pharmacies, the last of which sold me a thermometer for $9.79 and sent me on my way.

With the combined H1N1 hysteria, a public workplace, and my very visible symptoms, it seemed not only prudent but a civic responsibility to check for a fever. Just to be sure, you know, and possibly have an excuse to go home and lie down immediately. Though I was pretty sure I didn't have a fever, at least not on a major-network scale, just the kind that might manifest itself if a long, miserable day began to turn into a long, miserable night. And I bet I looked long and a miserable. I felt long and miserable. It was clear that no one particularly wanted to be near me, or hear anything I had to say, or even have me listen to anything they had to say except, "You know, you shouldn't be touching anything that the patrons might. Including the cookie display."

My co-worker shadowed me the entire night with a small grimace and a tube of disinfectant wipes and it didn't take long to get the hint - I am wanted nowhere but far, far away in quarantine. My fever never clocked over 100.2 F, but I was sneezing, dripping, coughing, and generally looking and feeling like hell, and with the prospect of staying late to help move incredibly heavy objects and return six hours later for a Christian college graduation ceremony, I graciously - swiftly - accepted the offer to leave work right then at 9:30pm and, thanks, not worry about coming in the next morning for the ceremony lest my superior carry home my unidentified disease to his infant daughter. Still I kind of felt treated like an ant detected of cordyceps infection.

But 98.6 F this morning. And some mild snot. Oddly, the general will to live seemed unaffected by both the onset of illness and the subsequent recovery to good health, hovering throughout at a steady 'This Too Shall Absurdly Pass'. And so it mostly has. Now on to the other stuff.

NEMBUTAL V. PNEUMONIA

I read a book this morning that had me welling up with some tears, not only emotionally struck but also hypnotized, burning through the last ninety pages in just under the forty-odd minutes of Beethoven's Ninth. Which paired up with the book terribly well. Which might be part of the reason it kicked me in the gut so hard.

It might be because I haven't read a book in a while that had a suicide attempt as such a central event, and because I've never read a book that dealt with the trauma of suicide by employing such a powerful narrative shift, which essentially forced brutal, earnest empathy with absolutely everyone involved and to share every moment of their quaint devastation. And thusly to reconsider all romantic ideas about suicide. Until, unhopefully, I read another piece of well-made existentialism and reconsider all romantic ideas about life and living.

The book, and some reflection on it, led to more thought about suicide. Suicide both active and passive. I'm sure such a split isn't a new idea, but anyways I was led to think about it. Active suicide being the conventional methods - off the bridge, through the noose, in the brain. Each one deliberate, with a specific, personally directed means to an end, with complete control (more or less) of the time, setting, context, so on. Passive suicide could be called the doctrine of Christ Scientists, the excess of alcoholics, or the general mayhem of thrill-seekers. Anything between gross negligence and absolute recklessness. I suppose any mindset that raises the value of a single experience above the value of all earthly experiences to follow could be called suicidal.

The context for this continued line of thought was my illness (see previous whining) and how it might be this new-fangled swine flu or anything else under the sun potentially life-threatening. If I refused to seek treatment for whatever ailment, would I be suicidal? Considering, of course, entirely secular motivations, beyond mild Ludditism. It's improbable that my sore throat, ashy brain and now runny nose will threaten my life, but the book this morning and the reflection afterward has me presently curious as to what I might really do if a sickness were to call my end near. Maybe life-seekers can be split into active and passive categories, in which case I imagine terminal illness would inspire me gently toward the latter. I can hope.

HUCK-HUCK-PHLEGM

Now I'm sick, with the following symptoms:

1) Sore throat. Right about where the interior mouth ends and things begin to slide down the neck, it feels cut up, swollen, and lined with acid. If I speak excitedly, it starts with, "Oh! I really love this -", then huck-huck-hack-hack-phlegm, but no blood in the sample. What's worse is the feeling when I swallow. It feels grey and alien. Like a bundle of strange flesh, partly organic and partly dirtied cement. But, I like swallowing - nothing is better for milkshakes, or a prolonged silence - and this inaccessible lump has spoiled that casual pastime.

2) Ashy brain. It's as if someone spilled an urn inside my skull. The synapses are clogged, dusty, and thoughts lag for hours if they come at all. It's hard to tell if any idea is worthwhile - they all seem mediocre, or strange, or unwelcome, anyway best unsaid or unwritten. But the idea that they are best left unsaid and unwritten also seems mediocre, so it's happened that this idea, of describing my symptoms, is being (cough-huck-huck) written anyhow.

3) Devil-may-care attitude and outlook. This isn't anything new, but it feels more at home now with the other two symptoms.

4) I watched a movie this morning that was really almost about death, but, like most movies, books, conversations, etc, ended up being about sex. About getting enough sex before death, or how sex leads to death, or how death inhibits more sex from happening, or how the fear of death resembles and uses some of the same mechanisms as the lust for sex, (huck-huck-phlegm) or how sex and death are all we even care about whatsoever. I just ended up wondering if it's more intelligent, or more honest, to care more about sex or more about death. And how that movie was kind of a waste of time.

STUBBORN PRICK

I've had this cut on my finger for a while that's been nagging my attention. Just when I touch or lift something, making direct contact with a little spot on the skin that's a bit raw, even though it's been weeks since the wound struck. I think weeks. Maybe less. More than one week, some odd days onto that.

They poked me with a tiny pricker to measure my iron level at the blood donation center. I'm usually torn about which finger to give them - those on the left hand are necessary to form chords on the guitar, and those on the right to manipulate pens and pencils. The young, hungover-ish individuals working the facility never seem to have the patience to let me deliberate so I just offer whatever finger they seem to be looking at. It's usually the middle finger of the left hand. That's the finger that's sore right now.

The way it nags my attention is somewhat unorthodox - first of all, it's sporadic, as in, only when I touch or lift something (or when I look at it and see the tiny dot, which was at first scabby and red and is now scar-tissue white [I understand that this listing of conditions actually implies a pattern - far from sporadic - but I'm kind of talking memory here, as in, I forget the rules for pain, so it seems sporadic]). Secondly it nags my attention by sporadically forcing me to reflect on the very sporadic-ness of the pain itself. It's only when I touch something directly on that little part of the fingertip that it hurts. When I do, there's a moment of confusion - at first I don't recall why I feel this odd, tiny spot of discomfort. Instinct usually tells me something on the surface of whatever object I've got is pointy or sharp, that I'm not feeling the burn of an old wound, but the formation of a new one. After four or five milliseconds of that false reckoning, I remember: they pricked me. They pricked me because I was going to donate blood. And it's healing slowly because I haven't been eating and living well.

Then I think about the little soreness I feel when I listen to certain songs, or watch certain movies, or talk about certain books, or walk along certain paths, where for a moment my brain can't place the pain - it thinks, for four or five milliseconds, that the injury is new, that whatever stimuli has struck me as sad did so for whatever reason, with no regard of the past. But then I remember: this song makes me think of a moment with someone. This movie, I watched with someone. I talked about this book with someone. Someone and I walked along this path. The someones can all be different, they often are, but whoever it was there was a definite moment, whether I knew it or not, that I had made myself vulnerable to this someone, and that shared moment pricked me somewhere between my brain stem and frontal lobe, and the wound remained a bit raw.

That's what's been nagging me, really, the finger and the brain and how they won't stop behaving this way. I have two choices with my finger. I can keep touching and lifting things and go through the whole ordeal of pain and memory, until if and when it heals enough, or I can stop touching and lifting things entirely. Which would require a level of tactile abstinence close to suicide. Anyway, it was probably best that I gave the blood in the first place, stubborn prick and all.