(no subject)
Fever dreams all night again. A talking electric eel that gives birth to milk-puddle ghosts and yearns to be encased in a stone mausoleum on a beach in Southern California. Don’t ask where all that came from. The night before I was stuck in the desert somewhere outside Tangiers and somebody decapitated a native with a broadsword. Intermingled with grandiose delusions and vivid nonsense-narratives are moments when I wake up shaking uncontrollably and end up curled in a fetal position for hours on end, eyes open. Or something similar.
Waking up, swimming in sickness, bathing in it. Alternating hot and cold. Shivering and sweating at the same time. Cleavers cross-hatching my throat. Nose backed up solid like a caved-in coal mine. Head pounding, stomache talking in gutteral notes, fever drifting over everything like the smell of spoiled cheese.
My worst fevers always feel like a hangover from hell.
And then I stand up and it’s like there’s another face inside of my head, the two faces separated by thin layer of clear fluid. And every time I turn my head its like the second face is trailing behind, lazily trying to catch up. I can’t judge distances so well and I scrape my hand on a doorjamb.
Undressing for a shower and my body feels like its running on a Uranium core. I’m radiating heat but still shivering. Sometime during the ensuing shower my two faces meld together which is nice. Then the hot water runs out because this is the sort of place where the landlord pays for the water and puts a water heater the size of a coffee pot into a nearby closet and I’m shivering again.
Coughing so hard that I feel like I might vomit, trying to choke down oatmeal at the same time. I’m popping Ibuprofin like M & M’s and laying on my couch (Thank God and all the angels in heaven that I bought that thing, it’s been my only good decision since I moved out here) I have twenty minutes to let the meds kick in before I go to work. If all goes as planned, I’ll be well on Monday and off to Austin Texas for a week to accept an award for Catch (Knox literary magazine). So I count off the minutes and press ice-packs against my head, since my eyelids feel like they’re being warmed by some kind of Bunsen burner in my eyeballs.
Yesterday I didn’t leave the couch all day. Thought about watching Die Hard but two months later anything relating even tangentially to Germany makes me go a big rubbery one.
Starting in January I’ll be doing direct care at an assisted living facility which I hope won’t end up making me sicker. Poison Ivy, food poisoning, now this thing that may or may not be swine flu. I dunno, it seems like people with Downs Syndrome are abnormally healthy. We’ll see. I gave a lot of hugs to developmentally challenged people and went to the shower rooms (I think I’ll be cool with bathing them) so maybe it’ll work out.
For now though, if all goes as planned, Texas. Really hope that comes to pass. I need out of the Midwest.
Waking up, swimming in sickness, bathing in it. Alternating hot and cold. Shivering and sweating at the same time. Cleavers cross-hatching my throat. Nose backed up solid like a caved-in coal mine. Head pounding, stomache talking in gutteral notes, fever drifting over everything like the smell of spoiled cheese.
My worst fevers always feel like a hangover from hell.
And then I stand up and it’s like there’s another face inside of my head, the two faces separated by thin layer of clear fluid. And every time I turn my head its like the second face is trailing behind, lazily trying to catch up. I can’t judge distances so well and I scrape my hand on a doorjamb.
Undressing for a shower and my body feels like its running on a Uranium core. I’m radiating heat but still shivering. Sometime during the ensuing shower my two faces meld together which is nice. Then the hot water runs out because this is the sort of place where the landlord pays for the water and puts a water heater the size of a coffee pot into a nearby closet and I’m shivering again.
Coughing so hard that I feel like I might vomit, trying to choke down oatmeal at the same time. I’m popping Ibuprofin like M & M’s and laying on my couch (Thank God and all the angels in heaven that I bought that thing, it’s been my only good decision since I moved out here) I have twenty minutes to let the meds kick in before I go to work. If all goes as planned, I’ll be well on Monday and off to Austin Texas for a week to accept an award for Catch (Knox literary magazine). So I count off the minutes and press ice-packs against my head, since my eyelids feel like they’re being warmed by some kind of Bunsen burner in my eyeballs.
Yesterday I didn’t leave the couch all day. Thought about watching Die Hard but two months later anything relating even tangentially to Germany makes me go a big rubbery one.
Starting in January I’ll be doing direct care at an assisted living facility which I hope won’t end up making me sicker. Poison Ivy, food poisoning, now this thing that may or may not be swine flu. I dunno, it seems like people with Downs Syndrome are abnormally healthy. We’ll see. I gave a lot of hugs to developmentally challenged people and went to the shower rooms (I think I’ll be cool with bathing them) so maybe it’ll work out.
For now though, if all goes as planned, Texas. Really hope that comes to pass. I need out of the Midwest.