Another Lost Weekend

It's official ... I am ill. Just in time for the weekend. There is a god (or there are gods, depending your own particular belief system), and they are tormenting me, nay punishing me for a summer of sun, fun and play. Those who the gods would destroy, they first make mad (that's "insane" for those of you whose public school education didn't touch on "mad" being a synonym of "insane" ... although I must admit I harbor a residual feeling of anger that being ill falls on my time and not entirely on those of my new German masters).

I hate this. When you haven't been ill for a long while, you forget how miserable it feels. Despite the MediNait (the German equivalent of NyQuil), you don't sleep. You don't sleep, ergo it takes longer to get better. It takes longer to get better, ergo you don't sleep. The head throbs, and the nostrils stream a fluid volume of mucous that you start to believe exceeds the body's total fluid volume. You wish you were dead. Well, not really. b

I've had pain in my life before ... the broken digit from a bad parachute landing fall, a few serious cuts, a knife stab and a gunshot from being in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time, and a series of body-wide traumas from the 18-wheeler that rolled over my car, ending my Air Force career and changing my life perhaps for the better. I survived them all, and put them all behind me. Only when I lie in bed ill on a chilly, grey day bemoaning my suffering do I need to revisit them to remember what it is to truly feel miserable and be in pain.

What sometimes amazes me is that I might actually die in bed ... I don't mind the thought of that, except that I might prefer it be in the pursuit of "sport" and not simply in my sleep, although I once had someone tell me to think for a moment of what a horrible experience that would be for the person I died on or under. There is still something of a nice guy in me, so that hit home. Dammit.

I thought having made it this far that I might go out in a fiery Mercedes Benz pyre on the German Autobahns, but there has been so much Stau lately that I doubt it would be so majestic ... No, I am a mere slow-speed mortal these days, so unless I rig the fuel line to spritz me on an impact of X g's or better, I will simply die on on the Joanniter's gurney while the twisted remains of my chariot ruin the day of the thousands of others stuck in the resulting Stau. Every time I'm stuck I joke that somebody had better died for inconveniencing me (this remark has shocked every female passenger who has ever heard it, which means there are obviuos limits to what constitutes humor for most people) ... it would only be fitting that my Unfall results in my death,

Which is perhaps a good transition to the fact that, perhaps because we have such blessed lives, we Americans are prone to hyperbole on a grand scale ... I get a cold, I think of death.