The men of my family have an endearing trait.\u00a0 Whenever we\u2019re sick, even to an almost imperceptible degree we carry on like an antique hero in his death agony and expect our wives to baby us to an unhealthy degree.\u00a0 Now this week as it happened, Camera Girl is seriously under the weather.\u00a0 She\u2019s been slowly recovering since Saturday.\u00a0 Today she\u2019s at 60% and improving.\u00a0 But today I woke up with muscle aches, possibly a slight fever and a headache.<\/p>\n
Ahhh, the perfect malady.\u00a0 Just bad enough to be recognizably sick but not bad enough to distract me from my act.\u00a0 So, all day today I\u2019ve been an invalid caterwauling about my aches and pains and the bravery I was demonstrating.\u00a0 Like the great titan Prometheus, I was shackled to a crag in the Caucasus Mountains (or maybe my recliner in the living room).\u00a0 I could feel Camera Girl going through the slow burn.\u00a0 It\u2019s a delicate balance.\u00a0 If I lay it on too thick, she\u2019s liable to poison me or smother me in my sleep.\u00a0 But with just the right touch, the day is passed for both of us in a tolerable haze of delirium.<\/p>\n
I spent the day watching YouTube videos about artificial elements in the island of stability and mockeries of string theory.\u00a0 With enough aspirin and turkey soup I almost felt human by dinner time.<\/p>\n
But later my fever returned and I descended into madness.\u00a0 To go along with this mania, I put on a pretty bad prison movie from 1947 called \u201cBrute Force.\u201d\u00a0 Burt Lancaster is a prisoner who stages a jail break to save his wife from a cancer diagnosis.\u00a0 The pipsqueak, Hume Cronyn is completely absurd as the sadistic captain of the guards.\u00a0 But as ridiculous as the movie was it was perfect for my delirium.<\/p>\n
When Camera Girl addressed me I started changing my \u201cthems\u201d to \u201cdems\u201d and \u201cthese\u201d to \u201cdeese.\u201d\u00a0 Pretty soon I told her that no \u201ctwist\u201d was gonna tell me how to run a jail break.\u00a0 I reminded her that no prison could hold me for long and I added for good measure that no one would take me alive.<\/p>\n
Eventually I passed out from a combination of malaise and bad acting.\u00a0 When I woke up a mortally wounded Lancaster tossed Cronyn from the guard tower to the mob below who tore him apart.\u00a0 Ahhh, those were the days.\u00a0 No transgender prisoners, no pronouns, just good old prison justice for stool pigeons and screws, see?<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m wrapped up like a mummy trying to keep from getting the shakes.\u00a0 I think I\u2019m done with bad movies for the day.\u00a0 I\u2019ll put on some country music and try to sleep my way through the worst of this.\u00a0 Funny thing is Camera Girl now seems genuinely concerned with my health.\u00a0 There\u2019s a word in Italian that means pity; peccato.\u00a0 Of course, in the dialect that Camera Girl\u2019s people spoke back in the old country it was pronounced like \u201cpea-cod.\u201d\u00a0 Well, my pathetic weakness and whining have finally broken through and I\u2019m garnering the attention and peccato I so richly deserve.\u00a0 I win again!<\/p>\n
My hope is that I\u2019ll be almost human tomorrow.\u00a0 But one never knows, do one?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The men of my family have an endearing trait.\u00a0 Whenever we\u2019re sick, even to an almost imperceptible degree we carry on like an antique hero<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous"],"yoast_head":"\n