Getting Down with the Sickness

I love it when I’m sick.  Flu, cold, sinus infection, whatever.  It’s great.  Every year, I look forward to the time off from work, batting around the apartment in my boxers and feeling sorry for myself.

Living alone makes it even better.  They’re wrong about misery.  It does not love company.  At least, not the sort of company you get when living with someone.  It loves the company the internet provides – people far away who do not always need a reply.

I spent last week battling a particularly rough summer cold.  Coughing, aching, fever, and my head stuffed full of colorful mucus – all pretty greens and yellows with a little red thrown in for flavor.

I’m still a little off.  My head is still clogged up, and I’m exhausted.  In the last six days, I’ve had about 11 hours of sleep thanks to the coughing, the fever, or that too tired to sleep early AM malaise.  It’s those early hours where being sick is really fun.  Sitting up in the silence of those small hours, coughing and blowing death out of my nose, and just watching the sleeping world.  Strange things happen at 3am.  Police cars glide by, giving that sense of protection.  Every regular car seems out of place, assumed guilt heaped on the driver.  Why are you out so late?  Dumping a body?  Coming home from a crime?  The occasional tow truck is a bizarre creature – a rumbling beast as out of place in that world as a dinosaur.

Even with all that, you still feel very alone at 3am.

Fevers are fun.  I had a steady 104 back in March for two days and, eventually, came to seriously believe that I was part of Stargate Command.  This time around, I only hit 102 last Thursday, when it finally broke.  Whenever my fevers break, I tend to wake up flailing and screaming.  Been doing that since I was a child… Don’t know why.  Maybe everyone does that?

I take lots of time off when I’m sick, because, deep down, I do respect my fellow commuters.  I hate being that sick guy on the bus or train.  The guy who’s always coughing and blowing his nose.  There’s always a sick guy, no matter the time of year.  I just think it’s the rudest thing – you should be quarantined, not sitting in a poorly ventilated train car with the common people.  Give us what you have and it’ll spread like a wildfire.  The plebes will die first, then the oligarchs will follow…because we’re the ones plunging out their toilets and changing their beds, hacking and shivering from fever the whole time.

I like the flu, especially.  A day of being really sick and puking, then a day of recovery.  It almost feels like some ritual, some ancient tradition.  There is a religious quality to throwing up.  The sweat-soaked, shaking relief when you’re finished.  Even better to do it into a trashcan from the side of the bed.

It’s not that I want to be sick, or that I try to catch a cold, or want to prolong any illness.  But I do enjoy taking a break from it all.  Maybe that’s what I’m really in love with – removing myself from the world.  On my own, it’s hard to do.  Even on vacation, I have to check my email.  But when sick, it just doesn’t matter.  Don’t check the news, don’t talk to anyone, turn the phone off, and fuck the world.  Set up a sick chair in front of the computer and watch an entire season of some low budget sci-fi show, fading in and out of reality and half sleep.  All sense of time lost – daytime and nighttime is the only clock.  Who cares what day it is, or what’s happening.  It’s the 3am people who worry me.  The shadows moving along the side of a building, the insomniac dog walkers, the cops looking for trouble, and everyone else right behind them.  The tow truck that’s never towing a car.  What the hell is happening in that world?  The world I only see because I’m too sick to live, and I really do feel like an intruder when I’m watching it.

It all changes at 4am.  That’s when the first wage slaves start to leave and the world stirs.  And when I begin to feel like it’s too late to try and sleep again, so I just retreat to my bedroom and puke, cough, or blow out my life before a few snatched hours of sleep, waking when the sun hits me shortly after.

Back to work today after four days of that and I can’t think straight…which means I shouldn’t be posting long rants.  The older I get, the more I realize that I really do want to be a shut in.  Though, of course, I want to be a healthy shut in!  But I want to just stay in my apartment forever and do nothing.  Set my alarm for 3am every night and go sit on the balcony and take notes.  Stop shaving and never dress above jeans and a t-shirt.  Go days without saying a word…