As Seen On A Tee Shirt
Long & Short
My head is larger
my balls hang lower
my feet are wider
and longer, too
I’m getting shorter
and my hair is thinner,
just giving the next gen something to think about.
The Sick Dream
I love how my mind works through my dreams. It often surprises me, and frequently amuses me.
This was a few days ago. I was sick and feverish. My head throbbed. I couldn’t breath through my nose. My lips were dry and cracked, and my nostrils were peeling and raw from tissues. Light hurt, and tears frequently blinded me as the cold hunkered down in my eyes.
Falling into a fitful sleep, I dreamed I was in a computer video game. While most details are sketchy, I recall that I was shooting things. The things were about eight feet tall. They had short legs, arms, and torsos, but a huge head with a plain, blank face. Black hair sprouted from the crown of their head.
Running across open fields, laughing as I went under a sunny but cloudy day, I would see those things and shoot, and keep going. Upon awakening, I thought, yeah, I was fighting my illness through a video game in my dream.
Not quite The Illearth War, but what a trip.
A Fitbit Update
I’d been doing well, averaging nine miles a day of walking for the last three months through the end of January. I was able to walk ten miles on two to three days a week throughout January. Then, well, you know, we’re people. Shit happens. Plans get upended. People get sick.
I had to travel, and the travel from Oregon to Pennsylvania and West Virginia eroded my progress. There was an ill person and a death, and mourning, grief, and then a service. Very drily put. More travel to return home, and then, illness. Things didn’t work out. My average plummeted to six miles. Damn.
The Fitbit’s reports left me dubious about how valid it all was. For example, it showed that I walked seven miles and up eighteen flights the other day, but I had just twenty-four minutes of activity. The previous day, I walked six miles and twelve flights, but had over one hundred minutes of activity. That just seems out of kilter.
Anyway, now on the recovered side of the cold, and the weather is warming. Begin again.
Six Days, Seven Nights
I’m feeling so much better today. The cold seemed to have taken a cruise of my body for six days and seven nights. They really seemed to party in my eyes, for that was the worse day and lasted almost two days. The cold briefly ported in my chest at the end, and barely visited my throat in the beginning. Although I didn’t walk and exercise as much as desired, I wrote every day. There was no vomiting, and bowel movements were normal. Severe coughing only struck the last two days. As illnesses go, it was pretty mild and short, and I consider myself fortunate that I feel almost completely well today.
Thanks for indulging me as I complained about it. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time. Cheers
The Caring Cats
It was day zillion of my head cold. That could be an exaggeration but that’s what it seems like. Illness impacts time perception, just like being in school when you’re young and in school impacts time perception. My illness found me in bed at a time that’s not my norm. Apparently, that fact slipped past my cats.
I can’t say I was dozing. Motionless on my back, I was concentrating on the pains and sounds my body made, sometimes writing in my head, and sometimes attending the sounds and movements of the mucus streams in my head. The moment’s key is that I was motionless and quiet.
I heard the door open but didn’t think about it. Then I heard an unusual voice say, “I come with claws sheathed, brother.” It sort of sounded like James Earl.
“Claws sheathed,” other voices said as my mind said, “What the hell?” I opened my eyes but didn’t otherwise move.
“Why are you here?” a voice like Howard Keel said. “You’re not allowed in here. You’re going to get in trouble with the people.”
“I come to speak about Michael with you,” James Earl said. He’s been sick.”
“I know he’s been sick,” Howard Keel said.
Locating the sounds, I lifted my head and turned it. The bedroom door was open. My four male cats were in a circle. It astonished me. Pape and Boo didn’t get along, Tucker and Boo didn’t get along, and Tucker and Pape didn’t get along.
I had to be dreaming. This didn’t make sense. Why the hell would my cats talk like humans? They’re cats. They have ways to communicate.
“I’m worried about him,” the James Earl voice said. That belonged to Tucker.
“So am I,” Quinn said in a Ray Ramano voice. “That’s why I urged Tucker to come in here. We need to talk about it. If Michael dies, we’ll depend on K to take care of us.”
“So?” Boo said. The big black tailless cat was Howard Keel. “She’s done it before.”
“That’s right,” Pape said in a Doogie Howser voice. “She always take care of me. She likes me.”
Boo stood. “That’s not the point,” Quinn said before Boo could speak or do anything more. “Yes, she’ll take care of us, but I assure you, it’ll be minimal. I’ve lived with them longer than any of you. Michael used to be gone all the time. She took care of us when he was, but it’s not the same. She has an iron will. She can’t be manipulated like him. He’s a soft touch. You can’t give her a mew and a purr and get a treat or catnip. There’s little lap time with her. Trust me, it’s different.”
A cough welled up in me. I swallowed it down and fought to keep it in.
Tucker nodded. “I’ve been around long enough to witness what Quinn says. I can testify that it’s truth.”
“Okay,” Pape said. “So what can we do?”
“We can do our best to keep him alive,” Quinn said.
Pape said, “We’re cats. I don’t see how.”
“Monitor him,” Quinn said. “More than we usually do. Stay on him and with him. Pray to the Nine Lives that they hear our concerns and answer our prayers. Show Michael that we care so that he’ll care and fight to stay alive.”
“You really think it’s that bad?” Boo said.
I launched into a coughing spasm. When it finished, the door was closed and the cats were gone, except for Quinn. Tail up, he grumewed over the bed toward me.
After blowing my nose and wiping my eyes, I put my head down and thought about what I’d seen and heard. It had to be a fever dream. Cats don’t talk human languages.
“Mew,” Quinn said to me. Purrs pouring out of him, he bit my cheek in a gentle love bite and then nestled tight against the side of my head. His purrs thrummed through my skull.
Yes, it had to be a dream.
Nailed It!
Don’t you love it when your Fitbit says, “Time to exercise,” and you stand up to do so, and the Fitbit says, “Nailed it!”?
Yeah, don’t you think more of life needs to be like that?
Thursday’s Theme Music
As I endured the cold and its migrations, interactions, and pain during the last few days and nights, I began assigning musical instruments and notes to my experience, thinking, how would my cold sound musically? Just something to while away the sleepless, mucus filled hours.
Doing so reminded me of “Love Reign O’er Me,” by the Who. The song begins with a thunderstorm and rain. The song is the final cut of the Who rock-opera, Quadraphenia, and marks the final act and possibly redemption of the main character after chaotic struggles with love, drugs, family, violence, and identity.
Mom bought the album for me for Christmas 1973, based on my older sister’s recommendation. Thanks, Mom and sis!
Wednesday’s Theme Music
Ah, from 10CC, in honor of my illness, “You Got A Cold,” from 1977.
Your nose is runnin’
And your eyes are red
Your head is achin’
You’d be better in bed
From the bottom of your fever
To the throbbing in your toes
You’ve got a cold
The Green Tooth (An Abridged History)
I’d forgotten about my green tooth.
How did I forget? It was right in the front of my upper set of teeth. Dark green, it beckoned others’ curiosity, disgusting them. I saw that in their expressions.
The tooth was a product of playing blind man’s bluff in our Pittsburgh cellar in the dark. The cellar had a few steel support poles. I ran into one in the dark and broke off the bottom half of my tooth.
That was fifth or sixth grade.
We were a lower middle-class family struggling to get by. It took a few months to get my tooth repaired. Meanwhile, I walked around with half a tooth in my grin. Already a little shy, retiring, self-effacing, and insecure, I took to smiling and talking less. When I spoke, I mumbled, to avoid showing my teeth. Eventually, though, I received a nice fake white tooth on a post.
Then I knocked it out.
It was replaced.
I knocked it out again.
This happened several times. Eventually, that fake white tooth turned green. Nothing I could do about it. So I endured, thirteen years old, with a green tooth. A perforation developed in my upper jaw bone. The summer I became fifteen (the year I met my wife), my upper gums became swollen and infected. I solved that by thrusting sharp objects into my gum and squeezing until the pus burst out. It was a little painful and bloody.
Did I mention that I’m not too bright? That’s pretty evident by now.
I moved in with my father that summer. The perforation remained. My gum would become swollen and infected about once a year. I’d heat a steak knife, cut it open and drain it. I got pretty good at it. Yes, I know how lucky I am that the infection didn’t worsen and kill me.
I did this alone because my adventures with my tooth upset my parents. They were exasperated that I kept knocking it out. That exasperation spread to me. I also became aware of being studied and judged. I didn’t like the judgement I heard. I became overly self-conscious, and secretive about my tooth and what was going on with it. My mumbling increased.
Eventually, I joined the Air Force. Uncle Sam replaced my post with a pink, plastic denture. That lasted about ten years. I’d break that tooth off, too, then glue it back into place. I struggled to eat with it, so I’d take it out, usually wrapping it in a napkin so that others didn’t see it. Of course, that left a tooth-sized gap in my smile.
My wife would sometimes need to remind me not to forget it after I’d taken it out.
A metal bridge replaced the pink one. Also uncomfortable, held into place with little silver holds that wrapped around my bicuspids, Seeing those metal things, people would ask, “What are those silver things on your teeth?” I’d explain it was my denture, and offer to show it to them.
It was pretty flimsy. The bridge would end and twist. I’d try fixing it. Eventually, a new fake tooth on a new post was installed.
Naturally, I broke it off. While eating a hamburger, in fact. I glued it into place. It broke off again. That became my regular thing: glue it into place, and then break it off while eating.
After years of going through all this, I had a new, permanent bridge implanted. It cost me thirteen thousand dollars, but it was worth it. By then, I was fifty years old.
It’s interest how such a trivial matter affected me and my life, and how much of it I’d forgotten. Most of us have something like this that shapes us.
When I think of all the things that others endure, I’m fortunate that it was so trivial.
But I still mumble.
Michael Seidel, writer 