<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t get sick often, but when I do, the Death Fever hits hard.\u00a0 I can usually feel it coming on.\u00a0 There are warning signs: the flagging attention span, the warm gauzy feeling stretching underneath my epidermis, the loss of sexual appetite.\u00a0 I snort that Pixie-Stix-type package of 1,000mg of vitamin C, go to bed early, and read the Old Testament, but these preventative measures are unreliable.\u00a0 When I wake up the next morning, it’s full-blown like news coverage of an uncovered cult mass suicide.\u00a0 There are no answers, only bodily wreckage.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I alternate in between needing extra blankets and packing the pillowcase full of ice cubes.\u00a0 There is a headache roving across the hemispheres of my brain like a slow-moving tropical depression.\u00a0 I can barely make the call into work, and when I do I frighten my manager, who is worried he\u2019s getting white noise from the afterlife.\u00a0 I lose two hours to a mid-morning nap, the worst kind.\u00a0 Waking up at noon only feels good if you\u2019ve let a liter of whiskey evaporate out of your body in the interim.\u00a0 In this case, it\u2019s only given the virus time to incubate.\u00a0 I tremble, feeling like the first victim of an alien-host movie.\u00a0 Some brusque man with a beard named Briggs will soon be telling the others that I need to be killed now before the contagion spreads.\u00a0 \u201cC\u2019mon,\u201d I cry out, my face buried in the pillow, \u201cBriggs, we went through the academy together!\u201d\u00a0 During illnesses like these, the hallucinations are always the worst kind of real.\u00a0 In the middle of the night I look at my girlfriend, wrapped up in a painters\u2019 mask and plastic pajamas to avoid contagion.\u00a0 I see light trails running over her outline as if she were a Tron racer.\u00a0 My dog asks me, \u201cDid I ever tell you how I got these scars?\u201d\u00a0 I eventually have to shut them all out, close the door, and surround myself with media.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seems like a silver lining: one week off of work, taken off the hook for daily chores, hours and hours alone.\u00a0 Time to catch up on all that backlogged culture.\u00a0 The only problem is I feel like a baboon raging through a mating binge, unsure of what I really want, only that a certain level of stimulus must be maintained.\u00a0 The fever can\u2019t focus on anything for more than half an hour, so the books are rotated, and when my back locks up from being in a supine literary position for too long, I sit up with the laptop, running TV marathons in a jukebox format.\u00a0 B7: Australian mockumentary.\u00a0 C16: 60s British tour de force.\u00a0 K3:\u00a0 NBC Sitcom du Jour.\u00a0 Comic books.\u00a0 I\u2019m getting back into them.\u00a0 Or maybe the fever was telling me I was.\u00a0 Word balloons and splash pages intersplice with the string cheese and fruit cocktail I eat for lunch.\u00a0 Or is it dinner?\u00a0 It\u2019s dark all the time in the fever room.\u00a0 I eat nursing home selections to avoid any circadian faux pas.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Music.\u00a0 Albums accumulated like cancer cells.\u00a0 \u00a0So much music it could kill a man.\u00a0 No time to think and plan now: just load up all 35,000 tracks in the player and hit random.\u00a0 Now I have a soundtrack for the unending MTV promo clip that is unspooling in my mind. \u00a0On top of all the television and comic book garbage and memorized Free Cell games is a firm candy coating of Real Knowledge from the books.\u00a0 The Plot Against the Medici.\u00a0 The Unification of Asia Minor against the Oncoming Crusaders.\u00a0 But the knowledge consumes me.\u00a0 Complex patterns occupy my inner thoughts where there should be simple, DayQuil daydreams.\u00a0 Conspiracy theories, rife with anachronisms, weave together in the deepest depths of the fever.\u00a0 Eight hours in bed, no human contact, only the insistence of my own mind that it is the greatest mind ever formed from God\u2019s breath and clay, the True Seer into the human condition, the solver of history\u2019s equations.\u00a0 What are the variables, what are the roots?\u00a0 I had it all figured out, but it didn\u2019t survive the antibiotics.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sane now, just ridding myself of the last bronchial leftovers.\u00a0 But the room smells like I imagined the surgery tents in M*A*S*H always would, the dog won\u2019t meet my eyes, and the girlfriend is always on the phone to someone named \u201cDr. Gavin.\u201d\u00a0 Going through death fever is like unleashing a new weapon in a war.\u00a0 Kudos to you if you\u2019re the one who survived, but understand that the world can never be the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don\u2019t get sick often, but when I do, the Death Fever hits hard.\u00a0 I can usually feel it coming on.\u00a0 There are warning signs: the flagging attention span, the warm gauzy feeling stretching underneath my epidermis, the loss of …<\/p>\n