The 24 hour bug
September 14, 1998
One of the strange things that happens to me when I get ill is that I have nightmares. This is usually the first indicator I have that I'm falling ill. The most memorable of these incidents is when I got the flu as a kid, and dreamed (in monochrome) of being a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, and being gassed and buried in a giant mass grave. The worst part of the nightmare was that I didn't die; I was aware, but unable to move, as I was dumped with all the corpses into the mass grave, and then buried alive. The dream lasted for hours as I lay, in my dream, fully awake but unable to move or cry out.
Very unpleasant.
Most of my sickness-dreams operate along similar lines. I once dreamed of being trapped in some series of tunnels that was slowly flooding with water, trying to make my way under doors and through cramped, claustrophobic passageways without light, looking for something that I could never find, finding it steadily more difficult to breathe. Of course, since I'm sick, I find it difficult to sufficiently wake up from these dreams, and so the feeling of getting constantly sucked back into sleep makes things even worse. The worst of all, however, is when my whole body actually, physically locks up and I can't move or breathe, and I feel like I'm suffocating. This happens very, very rarely, but when it does, it's pretty damn terrifying. Not terrifying enough for me to overcome my aversion to doctors, of course, but bad nonetheless.
Hello, I'm Tom Brokaw, and here's what's happening.
I finished Moby Dick last night, at about 1 am. It was a little late to stay up, but by the end, I could no more have put down the book than cut off my own head. If you've read it, seen the movie, or otherwise don't mind reading me talk about the book, you can read what I have to say about it. Otherwise, onward.
I woke up feeling very ill this morning (last night I had nightmares all night, and most of my sleeping time was spent dreaming that I was awake and trying to get to sleep, always a sure-fire way to wake up saying hurrah), and so I didn't go to classes. I feel not a little guilty about it, but there's nothing to really be done for it now, so I'm trying to make the best I can of the day.
So far, I've been failing like all get out. I achieved truly heroic proportions in avoiding writing today. I reinstalled Windows (which didn't really need doing), downloaded the latest version of EditPad, made a song (available here in MIDI format, if you have an AWE32 or better -- with an SB16, I have no idea what it would sound like, but probably pretty bad), organized the office, jumped on and off the Net a good dozen times, and pretty much avoided like the plague the words I've been thinking about all day. If I wrote any book at all it's the one on procrastination.
Then, of course, there's this entry, which is more of the same if ever I saw it. Not to malign the worth of this project, of course. Oh, no no no.
Yeah. Well, anyway. I actually managed to pen a few words of the Ongoing Story this morning, before I distracted myself. While in the shower, I delineated a whole chapter in my mind, and by the time I got dressed, was ready to go. Then, I sit in front of the screen, and poof. Self-made distractions ahoy. Sometimes I think I should take Craig's advice and just do everything from a DOS text editor. No windows, no taskbar... NO ANYTHING.
Perhaps I should move to pencil and paper. Pull an Asimov and write my great work on the back of a bus ticket. I'm sure it'd fit, for one thing.
My frustrations finally led me to spit out a gob of text in an exercise that James told me about -- just start writing, whether it be stream-of-consciousness, completely incoherent, whatever -- and don't edit it. Don't look at it. Don't touch it for 24 hours. Then come back and look at it again. Even if the work is by and large worthless, you may find something there that you can take away and make something out of. Chances are, in any case, that you will find it's not as awful as you thought.
That in mind, here's what I wrote. I present it for your perusal. Unedited and live from the reptilian brain. Enjoy.
| "Why are you avoiding work so studiously? afraid you'll finish something?" Dan looks up from his keyboard, all innocence. There standing at the threshold is a magnificent angel, girt about the paps with a golden girdle, and in his countenance was strength, and out of his mouth shot a two-edged flaming sword. "CHRIST ALMIGHTY!" Dan yells and flattens himself against the wall, knocking over his stack of Mozart and his Windows 95 startup disks (You poor windows chumps will probably never see this HTML source code, because you know, we use LINUX and we're so FUCKING COOL), his ginseng tea goes flying, the goddamned ginseng tea he drinks like a madman to try to jump start his brain, the ephedrine he takes because some stoned-out guy at Tidyman's told him it keeps you focussed, the herbal speed he downs because John's parents work for some herbal remedies distributor and he got the bottle for 20 bucks and although it never makes him feel better (GINKO BOLOBA!) he still takes it in hopes that he can reach the Pain Zone, the coffee and cigarettes transcendance where the ideas fly so fast from his brain that his poor, cramped fingers, already stiff with carpal tunnels syndrome, can't keep up. "Yes, indeed," says the angel, with his voice like Jeremy Irons sizing up Lolita, and a casual lift of the eyebrow a la John Malkovich. "What do you want?" Dan stammers, still eyeing the exits, knowing he's on the second floor and assuming he could dash from his window, through the screen door, he would drop twenty feet to the unforgiving concrete, perhaps for the next door neighbor's kid to run over his broken body with her tricylce. "OLIVIA!" she shouts even now, bellowing from her TV sanctuary, TV world, Another World Calgon take me away, and that's what Dan is thinking as the Angel of the Lord faces him down like a stoveplate-bearing Clint Eastwood. The voices of the angels are the trumpets and accordion of Ennio Morricone as a fistful of souls rains down on the planet. "Indeed, yea and verily, forsooth and" the angel begins, but the cliche is too much and I scream at him "for God's sake will you just once say what you mean this time! I don't want to have a whole body of oral traditions to try to explain this one away, just this once, if you're going to divinely intervene or intermingle or divinely meddle, just tell me what you want and let's have done with it." The angel lifts his eyebrows again with this peel-me-a-grape look on his face, and then checks his fob with the distracted air of one who is eternal and finds himself, for some reason, caught in a traffic jam of earthly temporality. "Well, it's over, Dan, you're dead." I blink. "Dead, how's that, I mean, where's the angel of death? You know, big guy, sickle, great billowing hood from which the sepulchral breath of the grave emanates, and so forth?" "Well, he's on break. I got pulled off the Cool Whip Hotline to come and take your soul away, so let's go. Chop chop." He brooks no further refusal and pretty soon I'm yanked out of this mortal coil, like pulling the top off a can of tuna, and off we go. My rotting shell is left behind, crumpled amidst the Mozart CDs and the ginseng tea spilling across the floor and my stack of Latin papers is getting soaked and everything is knocked over, and oh man I left the candles burning when I died. At the very least the angel could have been polite enough to blow them out with the breath of God; I'm not going to start to smell yet for another few days and what's gonna happen if the place burns down? Misty's name's not on the lease and this is even worse than those guys who started a fire by growing "tomatoes" in their closet. "OLIVIA!!!!" We sail away on the celestial winds. I'm climbing a great, brightly lit stair of finely polished mahogany and there's Vaseline all over the camera lens, I wonder where Clarence is and if he's gotten his wings. It all seems too schmalzty somehow, I figured that Heaven would be more David Fincher and less Orson Welles. We think of hell in terms of a subway tunnel or a door that reads "helter skelter", lit by mercury-vapor despair and fluorescent madness, never thinking that the visceral thrills are the most effective, and imagining heaven not as a place of fluffy clouds and golden gates and boring, beatific cherubs playing Vollenweider on their harps, or perhaps that place where you desired most to go but never attained, that moment where everything was almost perfect but a sneeze or a car horn or the pinprick in your little finger spoiled the moment and then it was past, gone forever, a glimpse of heaven like deja vu in reverse, spoiled by the tyranny of the real. We ascend the staircase and there I am, Walden Pond, Walt Whitman saying to me "O Captain my Captain, our frightful trip is done / the ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won", but of course all my friends are back on earth because death has never touched me, and I can only hope I never run into my grandpa because if he's here in heaven I've lost faith in the structure of the universe. I have a notepad and a pencil that never goes dull, a tree to sit under where the apples never fall, a sky where the clouds never obscure the sun, and a river that runs blue all the year long, and a story idea a step as I wander in the autumn grove of heaven and write the tale of eternity. |
Wow, you made it this far? Good deal. That's all for now. Until next time...