one more cup of coughy

get well soon


the last time i remember getting sick was being slammed with a sinus infection on my girlfriend's sofa, lying there in an open-eyed catatonic sleep for days, vegetatively propped up in front of the television (until i was wrenched out of my stuper, with marty mcfly astonishment, after discovering on "access hollywood" that saddam hussein had been in captivity for four days now, while brad pitt was going to baghdad to lend his support to the troops).

aside from that episode, i usally don't remember getting sick. i remember almost getting sick, but somehow fighting it off at the last minute. this is probably because i remember very clearly the one time that i actually mastered the common cold overnite, through a combination of extreme blanketing, total stillness and the meditative practice of falling head-long into the feeling of discomfort rather than expending energy trying to avoid it. the idea was basically to free up any bit of energy i had and donate it to the just cause of the microscopic battle that my immune system was trying to wage.

and hand to god, it worked like a champ. i went bed with a sore throat and aching bones and chills and fever, pre-approved for a week of more of the same, and i woke up the next morning feeling tip-top a-ok number one. it was a pretty startling revelation, the idea that i could stop myself from getting sick simply by unleashing my awesome mental powers, and sweating a lot. what did my doctors know? with their "childhood asthma bla bla bla" and their "your tiny nostils make you more prone to infections"? i had found the second opinion i'd been looking for my whole life!

now in my third bout of the coughing head cold since january, it would seem that my wellness method, while tried and true, is not as easy to pull off as i was hoping. and as the sniffles once again go cat toy on my sinuses, i can also now clearly remember having watched "unbreakable" a couple of days before my little epiphany, which proabably gave me an inflated sense of super-poweredness.

it's not that i don't believe in the abilities of self healing, mind you. but clearly, with great power comes great disappointment.

me vs. the mailman

WWKD?



my life is divided into two halves:

one half pulls the curtains closed whenever he is not home, because he lives in a small single-floor bungalow in a charming, tree-lined but ultimately crimey city filled with what he imagines to be peeping thieves. he also generally closes the curtains in the evening, since the warm glow of open lighted window panes at night doesn't translate well when one's house is a mere gym-class-shoulder's-width-apart from his neighbors' homes. he understands the importance of this kind of squirrelly separation, and even relishes it at times.

the other half is a sucker for the metaphoric openness of allowing the sun and the green and the outside world into his home, and he leaves his curtains open during his weekday afternoons at the house. he even moves his home office out into the living room just so that he can have a little mini yoga/meditation studio to honor the idea of this openness and receptivity. almost every day, he can be found there practicing his kooky little "quiet calm and unobstructed beauty" exercises, usually dressed in his boxer briefs, because they're the closest thing he has to the "yoga shorts" the guy on the "yoga for athletes" tape wears. it's not his best look, as even at his most athletic physique, the whole thing plateaus somewhere around the level of a shirtless captain kirk kind of thing. but this half doesn't care about that because yoga and meditation and open receptivity is about getting the mind to let go of that which truly does not matter.

recently, the two halves collided when, just as one half finished some afternoon yoga, the other half began to panick about whether or not he had sent his mortgage payment this month. so he walks into his living room/office capatin kirk style and kinda sweaty, and sits down in his mesh office chair to quickly check his on-line bank account for the payment. just as he logs in, the mailman shows up at one of the living room windws with some letters and a small box.

with his sweaty naked back to the mailman, bare legs perched on the feet of the chair, hunched in front of his monitor in frozen terror, his eyes shift back as he tries to assess what his next step will be. any movement might attract the mailman's attention, whereas sitting still will afford the cover of the chair and possibly allow his presence to go unnoticed. "stay put" he thinks.

"knock-knock", he hears.

"the small box. he wants to give me the package. he sees me. just stay still and look like you're reading the screen."

(knock-knock-knock)

"oh my god he's still here. and he probably thinks he's busted me masturbating to my on-line bank statement. which is neither true nor plausibly deniable given my current situation. oh please just leave the package on the porch."

(shuffle-shuffle. knock. shuffle. fading foot steps...)

"stand up and walk away slowly at first, then quickly. don't look back...i wonder what's in the box..."

have you seen this man?

suspect, aug 2005; computer simulated image of suspect, aged 6 months and more accurately depicted


the suspect was last seen on this site in august of 2005, fleeing the scene with 100's in unwritten blog posts. he has been known to use the alias of "terd", although he will respond to "ted", "edward", "hey mister, you dropped something", or "miss jackson" if you're nasty. suspect is considered well-intentioned, somewhat lazy and full of excuses. approach with low expectations.

if you have any tips leading to the suspect's happiness, please post them here.