Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Man flu

I really am a little embarrassed by my reaction to a minor illness.  Right now I've only got a stuffed up head after a few nights of poor sleep. I've been blowing my nose leprechauns.  There have been chunks of banana coming out when I cough. Physically I'm drained as if a vampire sucked my blood just last night.  My will to live is whimpering.  I doubt I could fight an argument.  Call me what you will but I am a whimp.
This is called a 'manflu' by the contemptuous.  Internally I'm questioning my belief in life, belief in God, wondering what I could barter for a future and certain of near death approaching.  A part of me wonders if this is a taste of what I will receive in pestilence for sins from masturbating to not flossing and definitely second helpings of hagen daz ice cream.  I'm actually thinking seriously sick thoughts like going back to bed.  In bed alone like this I just imagine more despicable death. My infectiousness is minimal if I don't speak.  Speaking I could convince the world to suicide en mass like lemmings.
I feel what aetheists must feel. I think my mental acuity has reduced to that normally experienced by  communists or jihadists.  I know it must be such a nasty bug that one would hope to improve their inner being by chopping off the head of someone else.  I feel removing my own head would be an improvement.   Indeed I've always known I could feel quite a lot better anyday whacking off my head or the the head of some of my superiors Not all of them. Just a particularly grotesque creature of middle management whose pompous stupidity has on occasion had me thinking his head might better be used for a book end. I've not done it.  I wouldn't do it.
Indeed, the thought only materializes when I fear I might die through man flu. I honestly would rather let the authorities know about this deceitful little prig and leave his future in their capable hands. Its just that if I'm dying from manflu why go out alone.   I find my resentments grow stronger when I'm alone contemplating the possibility I have ebola.  If I had ebola right now and didn't particularly want to visit a hospital since I rather like doctors and nurses who could I visit instead?  Naturally tax departments come to mind.  But tax departments are not the real problem in society. They are just obedient functionaries of those greedy rich folk who take away my hard won earnings to give them to their useless cronies.  So if I had ebola I might well visit a 'law maker'.  But I voted for these people. How come taxes have grown throughout my life and my percentage of the pie has decreased? I don't know what radiation sickness would feel like but this must be how it feels the day before.
By contrast the cost of headstones hasn't really increased so much.  That's what I really need to focus on. My immediate future.   If I have a terminal flesh eating disease right now maybe I should purchase a "preventative" headstone.
Alternatively my nose may just be the first site of alien invasion of nano warriors intent on messing with my mind.  What should I really  do before an American drone targets my nostrils or a black car comes to take my nose to Rosswell.
Well, I confess, right now I'd like to thank everyone.  I'd really like to thank everyone, all my enemies, ex wives, their mother in laws, the tax men, the thieves, the bullies and especially the lovers and the friends and families, and the wonderful pets and all the entertainment, yes, I'd like to thank them all. Because frankly without cold there is no hot. Without evil there is no good.  It's all been a particularly interesting story that's captured my attention. This life has been the best interactive movie I can imagine and the cast of characters in this movie have been awesome. I truly love my co stars and the arch villains who in my mind, though doubtfully in theirs, have been most like comic book characters because they've been so characatured. 
If I'm to die today blowing my nose and bursting a waiting genetic aneurysm I want everyone to know that I loved you all.  I really did.  It's been a tragicomedy of first order so no doubt God has taken tips from Shakespeare and Spielburg in writing up this life I've somehow bumbled through. It's been a really long run. I didn't expect to live till 30 and here I am twice that age. 
All the people I really 'hated' when I was younger, especially the older bigger guy in the YMCA locker room who kicked me square in my naked nuts so hard I fell over breathless. I forgive him.  I forgive everyone who wronged me.  Even the beaurocrats who lied and cheated and covered up their killing and tried unsuccessfully to pin their deaths on me while still getting away with the money.  I forgive them because really they were never more than comic strip rats. Little pacman cheese eating characters in a bigger drama.
I forgive even God because frankly I've been looking for and calling on God all my life. His appearance has always been a best a 'wee small voice' or at worst an obvious 'god print of a very big shoe on my butt." I've thought the main problems were between me and the writer ie God.  I always had this love hate thing going with the writer. There I was in my dream world with the most perfect woman in the world, a regular modern day Helen, when next thing I know I'm pissing her off something fierce because the writer screwed up my lines.  At other times I've thought the writer had good lines but it was the director that made my delivery something less than 'attractive'.  Mostly I wish I'd just shut up in a generation that said 'let it all hang out'.  Well I would have done a whole lot better if I kept some of my sick secrets to myself.  Like the time I ogled her friend.  Now what writer would put such temptation in a script.
I figure there are these lives that are written by men. We're great and courageous and make things and fight wars and stuff. It's all Viking and Valhalla and serious and Veblem and intellectual and Neitze and then when the writer sleeps his wife writes in some challenge. Then Cupid descends on the hero and next thing he knows he's got arrows not in his heart but in his penis. I've known that itch.  It was years ago, decades really, half a century or so but still I remember how I hurt her.  The true love who I later found out herself was sleeping with a friend.  But that was then when "love the one you're with' was all the rage and no one knew about aids or morality and we all wanted to re invent the wheel like Marx and Engles and other such fools. 
I was passionate then. 
Now I'm dying with snot surely bombarding the blood brain barrier seeking to establish meningitis in this instrument of higher learning I've used so infrequently.  More often than not I've been trying to get money and stuff to impress the girl or show someone I'm not just anyone.  I've been a lower companion. I've been a person who was concerned about appearances. I've bought a name brand item and flaunted it , slyly, all the while hypocritically making fun of those whose lives are shallow like mine but care not what I think.  I've prided myself on my being an outsider. I've made a virtue of necessity.I've made fun of the rich and when rich I've made fun of the poor and when poor I've made fun of everyone. I've been judgemental and superior and snarky as any journalist or writer can be all the while seeking to be attractive to the very one who 'gets me'.
Now dying of man flu I love them all.
I've already said that my family will have all my possessions. My brother is my brother, wise and good.  He's also administratively sound and sorted out my parents stuff when I personally would heave before a mess of other persons stuff, barely capable of keeping track of my own underwear and socks each day to be able to show up to work.  I've always been a bit absent minded and distracted and truly would have been diagnosed ADD OCD and any other acronym if my teachers and others weren't just satisfied with calling me 'BAD".  I was different. I had odd ideas. Mostly I've seen that my odd ideas were simply decades ahead of their time.  I'm on some track waiting for a bus that's picking me up at a different time and place than the herd and then I'm somewhere behind the lot at other times.  I don't even know if  I care anymore though I can honestly say I've been lonely a lot of my life. My loneliness has been greatest in love.
My back aches. I've joint aches too. All the places where I was unkind to a joint demanding it Flex or Extend to the max to protect the rest of me from a fall or kick or some such physical trauma.  My joints have taken the beating.  Now they tell me of weather changes.   Now I've a manflu they hurt the worst.
I'm popping ibuprofen and aspirin by the handful so my brain is not inflamed.  I'm sweating, clammy.  My body wants to over heat and blow a gasket but the medications are keeping me cool. My arteries would clog with blood clots were it not for the thinners I've poured in the system to keep it working. I'm messing with the internal chemistry and yet believing God works through us to the best. Why does he want me to suffer this minor manflu. Must I read the book of Job again to remember it's not all about me. I don't have any special corner on suffering.
Am I being asked to remember how little I can truly tolerate any disease before I'm a screaming idiot. My optimism is lost when I'm unable to breathe. My optimism depends upon my open nose. Without oxygen I'm a rather depressing sort. I know my snoring alone is soon likely to cause neighbourhood noise restrictions.
Garrotting once fashionable rapidly has been replaced again by beheading.  Kill Bill,  I took personally.   A return to the sword. When the ammunition for the AK47 runs out you can always depend on a sword.  I really should be practicing with mine. Today I need a microscopic one to get the little bug that's wasting all the white cells in my sinuses.  Some Brad Pitt demon at Troy has Trojan Horsed my sinuses. I'm a mess.
I'm too young to die.  Death has no respect for age. Should I not be lying on a southern beach with a bikinied babe rather than going to work in the cold rainy north. I can at least be thankful it's not snowing.
 I miss the days I worked out of my home, I miss the country and the cleaner air.  Now that I cannot breath I know I've accepted city air.  My nose may simply be in mutiny. It would rather have  more of that wonderful fresh country air I used to love.  I followed a woman back to the city.  I keep returning from the high seas and deep woods to the city for culture and women and friends. There is more comedy in the city.  But the very air leaves something to be desired.
If I died right now I'd just be thankful. It's been a good life. There's so much I wanted to do though. I have books to write. Several books. I've sails across oceans to make and motorcycle runs and northern hunts and fishing to do. I've languages to learn. I've drawings to draw. I miss dancing. I'd like to dance again.  Viennese waltz.  Ballet. I would do more tai chi. And swim again underneath the seas. I'd like to ski again.  Yes, go up to Whistler and Blackomb or even just Grouse and glide forever to the bottom. No longer interested in black diamond trails but just wanting to enjoy a Blue Trail forever. I miss trade wind sailings. I want to fly. I want to feel my soul leave my heavy body and return to the light.  I want to laugh more.  I want to make more music. I want to  play more tunes with friends.  I miss the boat bands and harmonies.  I want to hike more.  To do the Grouse Grind again.  I want to see the Sphynx and visit the castles of Ireland and Scotland.  I want to walk on the great wall of China and visit the monasteries of Tibet. I 'd love to lie on the beaches of India and visit Madras.  I want to visit Chile and Peru.  There's so much left for me to do.   I once only wanted to visit Mars. Now even that may be possible in a lifetime or so.  Now that we know the moons not cheese it holds so much less appeal.  Maybe there's something better to eat on Mars or Saturn. I'd like to meet a truly pink lady from another galaxy with a way of orgasmic congress that didn't involve a defecatory organ.  Somehow a Spock mind meld would by pass the ancient taboos.  There'd be the possibility of great love without lust.  Do I really want to forego the carnal? Even God did a turn on earth.  I'd like an organic intergalactic space ship with built in vacuum cleaner and self laundering clothing..
I had hopes and dreams that have not been fulfilled.  I fixed he toilet on my sailboat dozens of times replacing pumps and bowls. I've sutured up hundreds of bodies and convinced a thousand or so not to kill themselves and leave their carcasses about for others to clean up.  I've thought there was no end of people I was asked to see. All I sometimes do is  convince them not to shit where they eat.
Every once in a while I'd meet a person looking for something more than money and lust. I liked most giving solace.  I like empathy.
Today I'm not sure this man flu will last more than a  day. I could get well and muddle on with my life.  I might not even thinking twice about my own near death experience.  We take for granted our often daily brushes with death. All around me there are those dying of viruses. People die every day and I don't say thanks enough. The anti vaccine gang have invited measles back into the world while those who don't remember to wash their hands pick their nose and rub their hands then handle my food and money. I found a couple of hairs in my food this week.  There are countless regulations but ignorance spreads quicker on the internet than all the health and truth teaching that had taken millennia to acquire. Fear mongering passes as science.  And religious nuts around the world insist they have the answer.  I think they want  to enslave the minds and hearts of the terrified.  At the same time children are given guns,
 Mohammeds wife was 7 and Mary had Jesus at 14 and Radical Feminists would jail any man who looks at a woman.  I've always been attracted to breasts.  And legs.
Now I'm attracted by beds and clean sheets.  I'd like more bombs and satellites and rocket launchers and  a cave where I could hide in peace and die. I worry about the future. The administration has changed the care places into their own private domains of beaurocratic chaos and irrelevancy.
I have no better idea. I'm just afraid. I forgive those who 've been in accounting and decided we didn't need ammunition or antibiotics or antipsychotics. Those bean counters who didn't quite get it right and those judges and law makers who complained about the street people hoarding but wouldn't jail the speculators.  Right now there's no place to own and live in Vancouver because those that would profit have created an appearance of scarcity by manipulating markets.  I just want to get away from people that even think like that.  I want to clear my head.
I want my nose to stop dripping. I want my face to unswell. I want to crawl into a hole and pout. I have a dose of self pity. I'm whining. I'm boring myself to tears. I'm being silly. I'm not dying. I have a little bit of manflu and not even a  saintly woman would respect me in my ambivalence and uncertainty. I'm assailed with doubt. My normal self confidence is depleted by the malaise I feel in my body. I have this dull ache in my head.  I'm depressed. I know other people whose lives are like this.   . I can't concentrate. All I can do is try to breathe.  I am desperate for air feeling uncertainty about the next breath. I have this pain in the back of my throat like something is trying to reach up into my mid brain with a pick fork.  What did my mid brain do that offended the world or God that I got man flu.
Oh well, I have a patient. I 'll try to cheer him up. Anything is better than thinking of my own demise. 

No comments: