So. Irony of ironies, I did actually have swine flu. No lie – it was diagnosed by my doctor Monday afternoon and I have been instructed to avoid contact with people and write hilarious blogs about it. See, H1N1 is proof that god loves you and wants you to be happy, fair readers, as it is also proof that he wants me to suffer in order that I might eat heartily of the humble pe that have baked up for myself.

Dammt, my ii key just went zngng off my keyboard. i will now try to fx t and not erase any of my handywork.

Iiiiii8oiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii8iiiiiiii9iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiio

I think it is fixed now, but I have to be careful.

Basically swine flu symptoms can be divided into two categories- stuff that sucks about it and stuff that does not suck about it. Yes, there are advantages to being infected with a virus that wants to kill you. Or at least there are to me.

Stuff that sucks about Swine flu – First, it’s really like any other flu, but maybe another flu that drank a couple of Red Bulls and went shopping for a new outfit that made it feel fierce. It’s super contagious, which is both good and bad (more on that later), and it can kill old people and kids.

I’m not really a “woe is me” kind of guy when I get sick. I’m also not the kind of person who refuses to go to the doctor and insists on going to work to make everybody else sick. If I feel shitty, I’m staying home and sleeping until I feel better. I’m also going to go to the doctor because doctors went to medical school and can make me feel better with their crazy science.

This particular illness comes with a high fever, which is my kryptonite. If I have a 2 degree fever, I am out of commission – it makes my skin hurt and I’m only comfortable completely naked suspended from the ceiling in a sex swing. Best wedding gift ever. Thanks Grandma.

Monday morning I woke up and took my temperature with a thermometer that I did not know we had. Sara’s still a little mad because apparently it goes in your mouth but maybe the retards that made it should have put that information on the box. The number that showed up on the little digital readout looked like it should have said “Playing all the hits all the time” after it.

“Hey honey? How high of a fever can you have before it causes brain damage?”
”I’m almost ready. I want to get there by 6.”
“huh?”
“You’re taking me to the airport, right?”
“Yeah. I have a pretty high fever and I don’t know…”
“Okay buddy. You can take care of that when you get back from the airport.”

She really loves me and cares about me. If she got all dotey and tried to baby me when I got sick or hurt I’d get annoyed quickly. I’m glad she is who she is.

So I dropped her off and came back and flopped into bed like a bag of wet towels. I went to sleep the night before at 6:30 because I felt shitty. It was now 7 am and I already had 12 hours of sleep under my belt, but I was as tired as Mike Tyson after a spelling bee. I slept until 11 am and only got up then because I had to pee. While standing at the toilet making peepee I started coughing. Holy shit. I coughed twice, and I thought my eyes were going to pop out of their sockets. Every cough felt like someone was hitting me in the head with a hammer, and the desire to stop coughing was only overridden by the fact that I was now choking on some kind of salty lung mung. The pain and exertion of it all made me realize that I was about to pass out. Pass out and be found covered in pee and holding my wang. Just like I always envisioned it.

It was at that point that I realized that it was going to be a rough day. I was right.

Luckily there was no puking involved. I’ve heard that it can come with lots of that, and I’m glad it didn’t in my case. The fever and accompanying headache have been miserable, though. As I type this, I have the lights off in the room and my laptop monitor dimmed to its lowest setting. There is a scented candle on the end table wafting lovely notes of jasmine and chamomile and my shirt is unbuttoned to my navel, exposing my chest hair and skin glistening with…wait. What?

My eyes felt like they were being cooked. They were all red and constantly pouring water. Especially when I coughed- the tears would just stream down my face after I coughed. I was flipping through the channels between naps and stopped on a talk show where women were yammering and crying about losing weight. I thought how funny it would be if my wife or brother or anyone else I know came in the house and saw me lying on the couch crying my eyes out about a bunch of fat chicks on TV. I laughed to myself, which made me cough, which made me cry.

So that pretty much sums up the sucky parts. High fever, painful headache, oh, and every time I got up to do anything I felt like I had just run a marathon with a field-dressed elk strapped to my back. Those symptoms lasted about three days. But they brought about some cool side effects, too.

The best parts about swine flu –

One of the things I had forgotten about a 103 degree fever is that as parts of your brain die you are treated to some fantastic hallucinations. Especially when I was in that weird state between awake and asleep – usually when I’m in that state, I’ll write. I’ll write because my brain does a strange thing if the conditions are right- I’ll see something that looks sort of like a comic strip and the words will appear in text form scrolling across the top. Usually nonsense, but sometimes stuff I will write down. I also get a lot of solutions to nagging problems at that time, so I look forward to it.

The fever changed things a bit – lots more lights flashing and shapes moving around. The one I remember most vividly was these oblong shiny red objects like popsicle sticks. They had symbols embossed in them and they were turning and kind of moving back and forth. Sort of reminded me of watching microorganisms amble to and fro under a microscope. Each of the three objects had a bubble attached to it that would grow and shrink – more like a loop of string than a 3 dimensional bubble. I found that I could control the size and to some degree the shape of the loop by thinking certain things. One was controlled by a number. They say that the part of your brain that recognizes characters like numbers and letters is turned off while you sleep. That is why I always dream about trying to dial a phone and having a really hard time with it.

Anyway, the number I had to think of looked like 12000, but it was blurry and kept changing. One of the other two loops was controlled by a color, but it was a really specific bright blue color that I could only get right by concentrating on it. Of course when I did that, the number would get all dicked up and that loop would start twisting up. The third loop was controlled by something much more ambiguous – it was sort of a cross between a mood and a shape. Yeah. Weird. The object of this insane game was to get my brain to work on all three with total focus but completely independent of one another. When they got in sync, I’d hear a noise that I cannot even begin to describe and a white glow would start to appear.

Don’t know if I won the game or not. Just a psychotic hallucination.

I’ve been very interested in dreams for as long as I can remember, and the more I learn, the more I believe that dreaming (or semi-conscious dreaming) is a way to access parts of our brain that we don’t normally get to use. I don’t think I need to use the part that made the popsicle stick loopy things, but it’s good to know its there.

Another dream I had when I was fully asleep was one where I was going somewhere with a friend of mine I have not seen in about 20 years. We were going to pick me up from the train station. I’ve been reading this book (read it twice so far and listened to the audiobook at least four times) called Psycho-Cybernetics and the book is largely about recognizing and maximizing your potential through alterations of your self-image.

Usually I dream about people in an abstract way – they’ll look vaguely like one person I know, but act completely different and have a different name. I’ve never dreamt about myself from a third person viewpoint, so this was a new one, and I think it came from all of this self-image thinking I have been involved with lately. I was sort of nervous to see what I looked like and how I acted because I figured I’d be not nearly as awesome as I wanted to be.

Talk about digging up some buried insecurity…

So we picked me up, and the first thing I said to him was “damn, you are a fine looking sack of man” (even though he looked exactly like the blazingly average guy I see when I look in the mirror). The interesting thing was how he (I) reacted. It was exactly like I would react if someone I didn’t know came up and was a little too enthusiastic with me. My bullshit radar goes off and I begin studying that person and not really engaging them unless it is to try and figure out what they are really after. So the alter-me was standoffish, but I was excited to talk to me, so I kept trying to get him to open up. Then he got sick of me and hit me with a bitingly sarcastic reply to something I asked. I don’t remember what I asked or how he (I) replied, but it was pretty harsh and funny. Enough so that I was a little jealous that I hadn’t thought of it first.

For some reason we were now surrounded by some other people, and the alter-me got more and more dickish with his responses, much to the delight of onlookers. Eventually I thought I might have to kick my ass. Not sure what lead to the end of the dream, but it ended up with us having a beer and telling each other jokes at the train station and him heading off to somewhere I had never heard of with no intentions of returning.

I remember feeling a distinct finality about seeing me leave, too. So maybe something has changed…or maybe I need to lay off the Nyquil. Probably the latter, but if anyone out there is a dream expert, I’d love to know what the hell that was all about.

The other good thing about the flu was the same thing that is good about any illness – the first time you get a real nap and your appetite comes back. I remember waking up with one arm and one leg hanging off the couch, Chainsaw the cat staring at me as if she expected something from me, and feeling like a million bucks in small unmarked bills. It was now Thanksgiving day and Sara and I had long since given up the idea of going anywhere for Thanksgiving. We got under the quilt and watched movies and listened to the rain.

Aside from not getting to spend time with my family, I wasn’t too bummed about missing thanksgiving. I’ve never been a big fan of Turkey – I don’t care if it’s fried, baked, boiled, stuffed with four other birds and a marsupial, or whatever. The very best turkey is not nearly as good as an average wild mushroom stuffed ravioli, steak au poivre, or even a good bowl of cereal. Sweet potato casserole can suck it too. And that purple jelly chunder that is the shape of the can it came out of? Take that crap, anything with jello and a bunch of canned fruit in it, and “stuffing” (always tastes like cornmeal and onions no matter how you make it), and use it as a decorative garbage can filling. That’s my suggestion.

Of course, just like when I tell people that I don’t think one person’s children are any cuter than the next, they have an uncontrollable urge to say “Oh, you need to see MY kids.” Or “You haven’t tasted MY turkey or my grandmother’s stuffing.”

Yeah. Don’t need to. Your kids are as cute as all kids, and stuffing is stuffing. Not liking turkey is like not liking cilantro. It is wonderfully universal. When I was a kid I hated meatloaf. It still ranks up there with thanksgiving turkey on my apathy scale, but when I was younger my mom loved making meatloaf. She also thought I was dumb, because whenever she made it I’d say I didn’t like it, and she’d say “this is the kind you like” as if I had forgotten the one time I loved eating meatloaf.

In other news, I seem to have conned the good folks at Black Sky Radio into letting me call in on Thursdays and talk about stuff with them. So far it has been fun. Thankfully they are funny energetic people and it is much easier to have an entertaining spontaneous conversation with those kinds of folks. So they may soon regret it, but they have encouraged me to call in regularly. I will until they stop answering the phone.

So listen to Black Sky Radio on Thursday at 3 pm central (actually go ahead and start listening now and enjoy the only media outlet that doesn’t relentlessly play Lady GooGoo’s latest overproduced computer garbage) and I’ll just be an endless fountain of profound statements when I come on. Or mundane crap. Or maybe we’ll exchange meatloaf recipes.

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