Thursday, January 30, 8:22 pm
I just threw up. Earlier today I knew I was going to, I had that feeling. Numbness in the throat. Excessive salivation. Constant, shaky anxiety. I ate today with it in mind, knowing that what went down would eventually come up, so I tried to make it easier on myself. Plain oatmeal with a bit of maple syrup. Some dry toast and flat Sprite. No fruit juices, no coffee or dairy, nothing acidic or malevolent, if it is possible for a food to be malevolent. I think it is. I fought it off as long as I could, and when it hit I panicked, like I always do. Throwing up isn’t a big deal for most people, it’s just something the body does. I have a friend who considers it no more than stretching the stomach muscles with extra content at the end, a description that horrifies me. I, however, am severely emetophobic (from the Greek emesis or emein – an act or instance of vomiting). So when I feel sick I pace back and forth, I take slow, purposeful breaths (in count to three, out count to three and so on). I do anything I can to force the feeling into non-existence, and if it doesn’t work a wave of fear buckles my knees. And so it went today. In my bathroom my knees buckled and a stream of partially digested oats and profanities echoed off of my formerly pristine toilet bowl. Fuckfuckfuck my voice reverberates off the miasma. My temperature is 101.3 degrees.
Thursday, January 30, 11:30 pm
Perhaps there were too many details listed above, unnecessary and ultimately futile, as I don’t believe I properly conveyed my sense of fear and dread of having the flu. Even the word influenza makes me cringe with adrenaline. This is also very untimely, not that there is ever a proper time to come down with the flu. Why does one catch a cold but one comes down with the flu? There is also the matter of the indefinite article for cold and the definite for flu, as if to attach a bigger sense of importance to it. THE flu. Fuck off high-falutin flu. But anyway, this is untimely. There is much to do. Reading to be done, facts to be memorized, words to put onto page. A test in Spanish, a story to write, and all I can think about is how I can’t, at this moment, picture doing any of it. I close my eyes and I see awkward blobs of spinning effluvium, I open my eyes and tunnel vision prevents me from seeing much of anything at all. What to do? Open then close, open then close. It’s now cyclical and neither position is comfortable. What to do what to do. Temp: 101
Friday, January 31, 10:42 am
Tepid water. Saltine crackers. Fucking chicken noodle fucking soupfuck. I hate chicken noodle soup and all of its implications. What a banal food, which I guess is precisely why people eat it when feeling under the weather, nothing exciting or unexpected there. It can’t be because of any restorative properties, as some grandmothers would have me believe. Chicken broth is not a poultice for the immune system, its appointment as such seems arbitrary. Why, then, couldn’t whoever chose chicken noodle soup as the cure all for what ails you instead have chosen something tastier and less anger inducing? Why can’t ice cream cake be a poultice for the immune system? What in the blue fuck am I talking about? At least I haven’t puked again. Temperature: 100.3
Friday, January 31, 1:00 pm
I’m bored. Bored bored shit borrred brrded. That’s one thing no one ever mentions as a symptom of the flu. Symptoms include fever, stomach cramps, nausea, body aches, vomiting, soul-punching boredom. I can’t focus my eyes enough to read, playing videogames requires a dexterity in my hands that just isn’t possible and standing up makes all the blood seemingly evaporate from my body, so I just lay here on my couch, amorphic, and look around my living room. Framed on my walls are four Radiohead vinyl albums (the irony of framing music instead of listening to it not lost on me), a print of one of Monet’s Haystacks (the ones at dawn, I believe), a noted absence of pictures of friends and family, as I am not given to sentimentality, a charcoal drawing of Thom Yorke that my older sister did. It is this drawing on which I choose to focus, as it fascinates me. She took a picture from a magazine and recreated it in charcoal, and it’s so goddamn good. This isn’t what fascinates me. Many people are good at drawing, sometimes in charcoal. So then. My sister earned a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, Suma Cum Laude, an MBA from the University of Chicago. She holds two patents – one for a surgical blanket that keeps the body temperature higher during surgery, thus helping to prevent infection, and another for some chemical compound, the purpose of which is beyond my understanding – and yet she is somehow exquisitely artistic. Apparently she is neither left-brained nor right-brained, she is just brained. Obviously I revere her, she resents me. Despite all of her accomplishments, and despite her being older than me, I am the golden child in my family. They expect big and important things from me, while she is already doing these big and important things. She is distinguished and holds degrees from fine institutions, I am a junior at Illinois State University. We are both highly confused by my familial designation. The mind wanders. None of this, however, alleviates my boredom, and deadlines loom. I try to think of ideas to write about and come up empty, so I wonder what my classmates might be writing about. Stories about the loves of their lives and horrendous, life-diminishing breakups. Stories about first drug use and that time they really got to know their grandfather. Stories about sex, fights, when they were kids, when they knew they were now adults, when they knew, with complete and devastating certainty, that what they lost cannot be regained or what they gained was not all they hoped it would be. Stories and stories and my fucking boredom and excuse me I have to go vomit again. Temp 101.4
Saturday, February 1, 3:18 am
I woke up. Have I slept? I opened my eyes and it took moments to realize it wasn’t day, that my light was still on, that I was in my living room, that the same repeating fifteen seconds of audio I was hearing was from the top menu of a Sopranos DVD. My brown leather couch has absorbed every degree of heat emanating from me, and is now cooking me alive underneath my blankets. I am claustrophobically hot, trembling, and drenched in sweat. I stand up and move on detached legs into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror for the first time in days. My hair is matted and chaotic, my skin is sallow, my face is sunken in as weight melts off of me and the blue of my irises are drowning in pools of red. I have demon eyes. I look vaguely sinister. I turn on the shower but don’t get in, instead I crumple on the side of the bathtub. I sit with my head in my hands as the bathroom slowly fills with steam. I breathe it in and out for I don’t know how long. Twenty minutes? An hour? Have I slept again? I risk standing up, feel incorporeal. I glance in the mirror, it has fogged over. I am a hologram projected onto smoke. Temp 102.8
Saturday, February 1, 1:13 pm
More water. More crackers. A handful of pills that look like jellybeans. I feel asymptotic (read: not asymptomatic, to avoid such confusions), constantly moving towards healthy but never getting there. One moves half the distance to the other side of a room then stops, then moves half the distance again, then stops again, on and on. One never gets anywhere. How clever. I am still without ideas. Temp: Increasingly irrelevant
Saturday, February 1, 3:30 pm
I called in sick to work, which I hate doing, mainly because my boss acts like it is such a monumental difficulty to fill a shift and that the work with which I am charged is of the utmost importance. He was still angry and not entirely convinced I was ill even though he could hear my broken voice over the phone. What an asshole, especially for someone who owns a bar that still has wood paneling on the walls. He forgets that he owns a bar, and I am one of his bartenders. It is a noble thing I do, after all: opening beer and pouring shots for people who have probably had enough already. Although I shouldn’t bitch, I actually like my job, it is endlessly amusing. I do realize the irony of an emetophobe (see above) working in a bar, but our crowd tends to be older, out of college. We have mostly regulars, well-off middle-aged men and their various trophy wives and girlfriends, and those regulars are seasoned alcoholics. My amusement stems from the fact that these men might be seen as leaders of this community. They are business owners, city councilmen, aldermen. A former gubernatorial candidate, the former chief of police (whom I have watched ingest what must have been a full barrel of whisky, stumble to his car and drive off. All while wearing sweatpants and loafers). I tutor some of their girlfriends who went back to community college and am tipped handsomely. I listen to them argue their Rush Limbaugh arguments, I pretend to care about football more than I actually do when they ask who the starting inside linebacker for the 1977 Pittsburgh Steelers was. I watch them hit on any college girls that happen to come into the bar. They abbreviate my already-abbreviated name, call me Adj (pronounced: age). Hilarious. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yes. The point is that I am not the only bartender there who knows how to make an Old Fashioned (sugar, bitters, bourbon, soda water, cherry juice, garnished with an orange or cherry, for those inclined to know) so please, allow me to be sick and take the night off. All will be well, I promise. Temp 101.1
Saturdayferuary1952pm
ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggoood good god this is so dull. tedious. 7 pages 2000 words i still have nothing i need food. sustenance. a brain needs food to think right. right. jellybean pills just arent cutting it anymore. a nice piece of fish or some pasta how much do i weigh now anyway. i dont even like fish but ive heard its brain food. ive moved past hating feeling so sick and now am just annoyed nonplussed with this fever-addled or aided rantrantrant. im tired of looking at the same blinking fucking blinker on the screen it makes me dizzy. blink blink blink fcking hell. Anyway, in sticking with established patterns: My internal temperature, according to my Vicks electronic thermometer with digital display, which also glows in green, yellow or red depending on the reading, in case one doesn’t understand the concept of numbers, is one hundred and one point two degrees Fahrenheit.
Sunday, February 2, 9:38 am
Temperature: 98.2. I wake up and my fever is broken. I feel so drained but know that it is hunger that causes my limbs to shake and my stomach to seize up, not sickness. I have reached the other side of the room, I open the door, I step outside, I smoke a cigarette. Tonight I will go to work, where I will watch a silly football game and be sufficiently impressed, after which I will read and memorize all relevant and applicable facts for the week to come. I will eat something other than insipid chicken noodle soup, I will drink a very cold beer and laugh with stupid relief. But before all of that an idea strikes me, and I like it very much. Save as. Print.
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