Hey, Aqualung.
Stages Of A Cold
Day 1, Morning: You wake up with a sore throat. It doesn’t seem bad, but it’s a harbinger of things to come. You gargle with some warm salt water and assume that the gagging that follows must be enough to dislodge any infection.
Day 1, Late Afternoon: The runny nose starts. This also doesn’t seem bad. The fluid is clear and a few good blows into a tissue seem to clear it out. By the time you walk out of the bathroom and down the hall your nose is running again and you decide you’d better just take a couple of tissues with you.
At this point you could take some cold medicine but why would you when you haven’t got a cold?
Day 2, Morning: You’ve got a cold. Your head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, your voice is an octave lower, and you can’t pronounce glottal stops. You blow your nose into a tissue until it’s completely soaked through and starting to disintegrate. This takes approximately twenty-three seconds.
Day 2, Evening: You can’t remember whether the rule is “Starve a fever, feed a cold” or the other way around. Not that it matters because you’ve lost your appetite. The good news you still have your senses of taste and smell. The bad news is you don’t really want anything you can taste or smell.
Day 987: Actually it’s Day 3, Morning: It just feels like it’s been that long. You can’t tell if it’s the cold or the cold medicine that makes you feel like all you want to do is lie in bed and shiver.
Day 3, Late Morning: A scaly crust has formed on your upper lip. A quick search tells you the divot under your nose is called the “philtrum”. This is mildly interesting but you don’t see how you’ll ever use this information since at the moment you’re hot, sweaty, and leaking fluids and can’t imagine wanting to be near another human being ever again.
Day 3, Afternoon: All you want is just a few minutes of normal breathing, the kind you had in the distant, hazy past that was last week. And now the coughing has started. It’s just small coughs. You’re hopeful this is as bad as it will get. You’re also wrong.
Day 3, Late Afternoon: You remember seeing people put a towel over their heads and lean over a pot of steaming water. You decide to try this to see if it will work. The bad news is it doesn’t. The good news is you now know the fire extinguisher you’ve had in the kitchen for decades works. Next time will you take the pot of water off the hot stove before you hang your towel-draped head over it? Of course not. You’re never going to do this again.
Day 3, Evening: Still shivering uou take your temperature. It’s 68.9. Oh, wait, you have that upside down. It’s 98.6. Is the rule “Feed a cold”? Let’s just say it is. You heat three cans of condensed chicken soup. You’re halfway through slurping it straight out of the pan when you realize you didn’t add any water. While you’re finishing the rest you order a pizza. While you’re picking it up at your front door your six boxes of Chinese food arrive.
Day 4, Morning: The cold medicine you took last night is labeled as “working for up to eight hours”. At exactly seven hours and fifty-nine minutes terrible, hacking coughs cause you to fall out of bed. You stumble into the kitchen and blow your nose into a paper towel which now looks like someone hit it with a spoonful of crème brulee.
Day 4, Lunch: Your nose has become a gelatin factory. The less said about this the better. You’re cycling through hot beverages: cider, tea with honey, tea with lemon, tea with orange juice, tea with maple syrup, tea with yak butter.
Day 4, Evening: You’re tired but not so listless. You crawl into bed and almost immediately slip into a dreamless sleep.
Day 5, Morning: The cough persists but you can breathe deeply through your nose without any trouble. You think you just might recover.
Day 10, Evening: You’re out for Trivia Night with some friends. The host yells out, “What is that divot under your nose called?” You’re about to answer when a guy on the opposing team says, “Philtrum!” You avoid him. You don’t want to catch whatever he’s got.
As summer camp drew to a close there was always one final big campfire. Everyone, all the counselors, the support staff, the director, and all of us campers would set out after supper and climb the winding path through the crabapple orchard, along a winding, narrow path with pine trees on either side, before we emerged onto a little ridge at the top of the mountain. Most of the time we’d get there as the sun was halfway below the horizon and start the fire in the brick fire pit that had been there, well, I think before some of us were even born. As I’d look out over a seemingly endless swath of forest below I always felt it had always been there, and would always be there. By the time I was thirteen, though, I was starting to grow out of that feeling. I didn’t want to but it was inevitable. I’d been coming to the camp for three years, which, at the time, felt like a lot, because it was. It was almost a quarter of my life. And the group I was with had been moved to a relatively new section, set apart from the main camp. The main camp was a cluster of cabins, basically miniature houses with electric lights, clustered around the dining hall. We, the older campers, were sent to a spot several hundred feet beyond the bath house, which had previously marked the edge of the camp, and we changed, slept, and kept all our gear in “the hogans”, . These were large canvas tents thrown over arched wooden frames with wooden floors, as though a disorganized wagon train had rolled through the forest and then collectively gave up and rolled their wheels away into the woods.
Yelp Reviews by Odysseus
A friend of mine told me, “I’ve been having these dreams that I’m running through the woods on all fours. I’m chasing something and I think that running on two legs would be better, but somehow I find myself going faster than I could on two legs, and it just feels natural. Anyway if I’m not around during the next full moon maybe this is why.”
The writing group I’m part of decided it would be fun to try a round-robin writing exercise with everyone who wanted to join adding part of a story. And that got me wondering why it’s called a “round-robin” so I went to the Oxford English Dictionary and found that a round robin is, among other things, a small pancake, a sunfish, a hedge plant, a protective plate for a carriage axle, and, most interestingly, a letter signed by several people with all the signatures arranged in a circle so the recipient wouldn’t know who signed first. This was mainly used by sailors when presenting grievances to their captain, specifically something like, “If you don’t give us shore leave we’re all going to jump ship.” I’m not sure why who signed first mattered but maybe it was their way of showing there was no peer pressure.
March 18, 978-Well, this is really exciting. Lots of people are gathered here for the coronation of the new king. He’s only twelve years old so this might be a little scary for him but everyone’s really in a happy mood and ready for the coronation of Aethelred The Unready. We’ve been waiting for, uh, about three hours, but I’m sure he’ll be out any minute now.
In the past allergy season didn’t bother me. I feel guilty for saying that and perhaps I should clarify that I felt bad for my friends who coughed and had runny eyes and noses, even though it gave me the opportunity to call them up sometimes and ask if their nose was running so I could say “Well, you better go catch it!” and then I’d hang up as if they didn’t know it was me. And now I’m paying for that, although if there’s allergy karma it’s doing the equivalent of giving me the finger as it drives by. I wake up with a stuffed up nose and I have a few bouts of coughing through the day, all of which I’m pretty sure is because I’m allergic to something in the air right now.
April 2022-Things got off to a rocky start when someone said, “Hey, remember pet rocks?” This sent everyone off into a research project that uncovered, among other things, the fact that there was an official “Pet Rock” invented by an advertising executive and sold in a cardboard box with ventilation holes in 1975. Most staff old enough to remember the fad thought pet rocks were just rocks that people found and gave to each other as a joke in the mid-‘70’s. The fad was briefly revived by the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. A discussion of whether or not pet rocks should have googly eyes attached quickly degenerated into everyone sticking googly eyes on everything.