What day is it?
Tuesday I went to bed optimistic. I was feeling a little better. I’d had some laughs. The cold would certainly be gone when I got up.
It wasn’t! In fact, I felt godawful freaking horrible when I woke up. Though not immediately. First I laid there and wondered what world I was in? What day? What year? Who was I? Who were those people making those strange sounds just outside the bedroom? I felt no connection, because I am lost in a freakin’ Michelangelo Antonioni cold. Yeah, his films are a wonder and when you’re nineteen you think, “That film would make a great life setting…for a week, maybe a month”, you ignore the fact everything is so damn bleak because Monica Vitti is poetic in shades of gray and the shadows and light on Maria Schneider’s face are just perfect as she stands in the car and looks back upon a life barely begun…but you don’t really want to be the Jack Nicholson character staring up at the ceiling from his bed, lost in a terminal identity crisis.
Agh. So the mind as isolation tank connects with its taproot nerves and it came to me who I was and where I was. (Taking the Tylenol cold medication probably played its part.) I stood because I’m a parent after all and H.o.p. was in the next room and being a parent demands you stand and go in and see to your child. He was, amazingly, also still snotty, tissue dangling from his nose, still congested. So, I wasn’t the only one. My head felt like, I don’t know, it was filled with liquid lead. I went into the bathroom and blew my nose for the first time since I’d gotten up and what filled the tissue took me so by surprise that my first amazed response really was, “Eeeew, looks like a disgusting art installation”. A pond of colorful mucous like nothing I could remember having produced in all my many years of colds. And I blew my nose and blew my nose and blew my nose some more.
I got H.o.p. something to eat and blew my nose some more and put aside any thought of doing anything constructive, and no I did nothing constructive, at least not anything I can remember. I may have and it’s slipped my mind. We did watch some show on the Loch Ness mystery that I’d ordered from Netflix for H.o.p. and Marty made a really good hot hot peppers on chicken dinner because I wanted something hot that would cut through the morbid gackle that had been flooding my sinuses. He did a fine job but it didn’t, as he had promised, take my face off.
Today is I guess Thursday and I got a couple of hours sleep last night unimpeded by the cold finally and today I’m feeling better though the cold is still hanging on. H.o.p. was up all night again with it but he’s feeling better as well, wrestling with still being a bit sick but well enough to be peeved over being sick and wanting to party party party and Marty stayed up with him and spent his time coming up with pet studio peeves he posted on boards where occasionally producers and engineers let off steam. Which was fun to read because he never does that. And now Marty, who has a weaker version of the bug (didn’t hit his head as hard), is sleeping.
This cold will go down in my personal history as the Michelangelo Antonioni cold. Not as bad as some other colds I’ve had but had its own special disorienting quality with a special personal pizza of grotesque toppings.
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