After suffering from a chronic illness (bronchitis) for over six weeks, a disease with a proximate cause that is well-established and entirely my fault (smoking), it was rather a relief last Tuesday night to find myself beset with an acute illness (flu? food poisoning? rectoptical rectitis?) with an unknown cause but a predictable and not-too-distant terminus. Not only did this bug seem refreshingly finite in terms of time, but also in the sense that my body could only reject what it had taken in (more or less), unlike this ungodly stream of plegm, which seems to spring from an endless alien source. At any rate, it gave me some new sounds to add to my typical rhthym of cough cough puff wheeze cough cough puff.

More than anything--at least first--I was looking forward to the opportunity to play Sherlock Holmes with my sickness, to deduce its cause by finding out whether anyone else had gotten it and what we all had in common. It would be just like an episode of House, only with less sarcasm and a more humdrum variety of illness. Probably less gore and needles too. But before I could walk around with a cane and four days of facial hair, I would have to wait, with nothing to do but wish the sink were a little closer to the toilet bowl, because, you see I needed both of them at once.

The fun of playing doctor/detective did not persist. My mother got sick the next day, and it was much worse to think about someone else going through this misery than it would have been to play the martyr and be sick all alone, even if--I do have to admit--it was a bit reassuring that this was something that was contagious, rather than something I had developed. We figured, then, that it was just something we ate, some kid at last night's pizza shop not washing his hands before peppering (rather liberally, I might add) our pizza with toppings. Later, that day, however, the plot thickened. It turned out that several of the other guests in other cabins (I should tell you that the scene of this sad tale is an isolated village in Michigan's Upper Penninsula, which will be chronicled more thoroughly in an upcoming post), people with whom we had no direct contact, had come down with the same symptoms. This of course led to all kinds of speculation about the water, the cleaning practices of the staff, the water of Lake Superior, and so on. When my dad started feeling sick the next day, it became the only thing anybody talked about. Soon it seemed everyone in Copper Harbor, Michigan knew how many times I had barfed. And without testing facilities, a crack staff of interns, or even a medical book, it was no fun playing House anymore. It was all quite annoying, actually.

It wasn't just other people that got on my nerves. My own thoughts I found annoying, the way they often are when I have a fever. They become even more like broken records, repeating in the same stupid pattern over and over again. For example, my mind will turn over some snippet of some song that I don't know all the words to. This time it seemed to be novelty songs: Allen Sherman singing "I went hiking/with Joe Spivey/He developed/poison ivy" or John Denver, in his biting mockery of my hometown, "Just two lonely truckers/From Great Falls, Montana/and a salesman from places unknown/All huddle together in downtown Toledo/To spend their big night all alone," but Carole King's "Winter, spring, summer, or fall" made an intrusion, as did Beeg Tom's rendition of Wilco's "I'm Always in Love," which was actually a welcome solace. When I was a child I had a fever (another one) almost all the time. I'd continually hear a young girl's voice echoing only "it's" in a creepy voice that always brought to mind the twins from The Shining (more movie monsters I should have fessed up to in my last post that I was freaked out by when I was a kid). And maybe it was some mental feedback loop caused by my inability to deduce any further the cause of our collective illnesses, but my mind made all sorts of weird and pointless speculation into matters about which there was no hope of obtaining any answers, like whether regular seeming license plates are in fact subtle secret codes. Maybe GWC 227 has some connection to the Great Wall of China. I should look that up. I'll be right back. Sure enough, the wall was begun in the third century. It doesn't. But I'm sure KBS 411 means that the owner of that particular vehicle has information about The Kentucky Bullfighting Society. They should have included a phone number.

My thoughts were in some senses more lucid in my sleep, but no less bizarre. I'm not sure whether this was because of fever, because of  those stimuli-free UP nights, or because of the drugs (I had a scrip, kids, so don't even think about it. Plus, you see, it fits with the whole Sherlock House theme (I'd bet a dollar the Holmes/House pun is intentional, even if only subconsciously (more on whether subconscious thoughts can ever be considered intentional in another post, too))). I know, I know. There is nothing more boring than someone else's dream so I'll keep this brief, but I felt like I should have been paying admission for these. One involved a safe heist, only the safe belonged to a safecracker, one of the mad genius variety, who had it all booby-trapped and everything. Soon to be a major motion picture. Another dream literally was a movie, a kind of cop-/prison-/flick spoof with a huge ensemble cast that featured Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Mario Peebles, a couple of the Wayans brothers, both of the McKenzie brothers, and Bruce Willis in one of those minor roles he's always so much more tolerable in than he is in a lead. The budget would have been huge, but you'd have seen it. I also dreamt that my childhood friend Dave Jaeger worked at the newspaper where I as-of-recently no longer work and that he had breast implants. I should just stop now.

The flu of course subsided, and gave way to a cold. Perhaps the infection in my lungs has moved back up to my throat and face on its way back out. You probably would't care for any more details This I guess is just for anyone who might happen to care about me. Forgive a sick guy a plea for sympathy, won't you? Even if it probably is my own doing.

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