The
more astute among you will have noticed that I was in a bit of a mood
the last time I blogged. This will have been mostly evident due to
the subject of the post being moods, but also because I was quite
clearly grumpy. So you can imagine how thrilled I was to wake up and
find that I had developed a fully formed cold over night. Yippee. So
my mood isn’t exactly improved but it is altered, and they do say a
change is as good as a rest, though they also say good things come to
those who wait and that cheaters never prosper, so I should probably
stop listening to them. It’s perhaps not the best idea to offer the
contents of ones mind when ones mind is at least sixty percent mucus,
but I’ve got nothing else to do and I can barely move so I’m just
going to go with it. Besides I don’t think I can really cause
myself any more grief than I’m already in, and any events that do
spiral out of the following words will be a welcome break from the
crushing predictability of the world.
First
of all I shall cover the illness itself. It is a cold. It is puffy
eyes, runny nose, scratchy throat and aching limbs. It probably isn’t
the Flu because that would be worse, it is unlikely that I would find
the energy to moan on the Internet if I had proper Flu. So it’s
probably not Flu. What it definitely
isn’t is Man Flu, because Man Flu doesn’t exist. Man Flu is what
unfeeling, thoughtless,
now-is-my-opportunity-to-make-up-for-the-oppression-of-my-sisters,
horrible husks of women say when a man they know has a cold or the
Flu. Because, though they are in complete ignorance of the suffering
of the symptoms of the male patient, they believe that as a gender
they deal with it better. Well, perhaps. Perhaps you do. Perhaps it
is better to pretend you’re fine. Perhaps it is stronger to keep on
trucking, spreading the germs and the snot and the moist, screwed up
tissues. Or perhaps that time you had a cold it wasn’t as bad,
maybe the cold and Flu virus actually does hit men harder. If a woman
is struck in an act of violence, falling to her knees, blood and
tears gushing, I don’t saunter over, help her to her feet and
suggest that she’s over reacting. I don’t tell her about the time
I got popped on the snoz and how I took the whole thing very
manfully, simply returning to the bar for another drink. I don’t
call it Lady Moaning, or Girl Victiming. I don’t call it such
things because it is grossly unfair, unhelpful and unsympathetic –
not to mention arrogant and sexist – to infer that you can feel
what the other gender is experiencing, and that they’re being a
pussy. So don’t tell me you know I’m exaggerating, because you
don’t. You’re not me, you never have been. Shut up.
The plus side to being ill is that I simply don’t care about what I say, what happens due to what I say, or what might happen further down the line. Not interested. So when someone I’ve not been involved with for a year suggested that I should have been more helpful in their recent move, I simply glazed over and strongly hinted that they leave, instead of caving their skull in with my mug of supermarket branded lemon flavoured paracetamol suspension. Not my problem, not worth the anger, and brain is very hard to get out of bedding. Even as I write this, the healthy part of my mind is desperate to go back and delete that last bit lest it’s consumption by that party make life a little more tiresome, but the rest of me is defiantly sick. Sod it, let it be seen and deal with the entertaining consequences, with a bit of luck we’re all grown up enough to know that I was thinking it anyway and that that’s fine. I mean, we’re definitely not, but let’s risk it anyhow. I try to be fairly open with my stance on any given subject, even though the generally expected response is to nod, or smile, and not really engage, but when I’m poorly I find it even harder than usual to give the appearance of uninvolved disinterest. And uninvolved disinterest with a smile seems to be what most folk are after.
When
this sort of illness descends I should really take the opportunity to
gather those around me who need a little bit of painful, awkward
honesty forced upon them, and just start shooting. The fallout would
have twice the half-life of Plutonium but it would be worth it, I
certainly wouldn’t be bored for a while. Unfortunately, no matter
how ill I get, I still have to go to work tomorrow and that is not
the best environment for spontaneous, ungilded truth. Not if I want
to be able to buy food, maintain friendships and explore possible
future unions. If I was at work today, and if I know myself and
others as I suspect I do, there would be tears, enforced sustained
distance, prolonged social leper-ism and no work to go to tomorrow.
So by the actual tomorrow I better sort myself out a bit. Thing is,
even though it’d be a really bad idea, I kind of hope that a bit of
dangerous truth goes unnoticed and slips out, then if the subsequent
moments don’t play out as hoped I can blame the cold, whereas if I
wait for the cold to pass and for the timing to be more appropriate
and things still go horribly, I’ll have nothing to blame but me.
You know those bits of your own life that you watch as if watching a
stranger on a roller coaster, completely detached, as if you have no
control over it, able only to witness the increasingly dangerous
looking rails carrying you towards an unavoidable horror? Yeah? Well
that’s what I’m like on a good day, so I don’t need snot on the
track as well.
The
most annoying thing is that there are a couple of topics I’d like
to write about that could knock the cart off entirely but I’m not
sick enough, clinging to my remaining lucidity, fearfully protecting
the status quo. What I really need is a good tropical disease, or a
poisoning of some kind, something that would produce the feverish,
hallucinogenic sweats of life changing gossip fodder. Something that
would shake things up a bit. By which I mean that I wish I was
braver. Or stupider. Or not ill. Time to pour another disgusting
lemonish solution, hit publish, and wait to see what tomorrow brings.
Probably Monday.
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