Same old new year

This is mostly about having the flu and tangentially about a Frederick Forsyth story. I would like to write about a number of things, but I may only manage this, so if you've had enough of either, no shade -- tune in another time.

For the second year in a row, I begin the new year quite ill. I did get the flu shot, so this is some rogue strain which, by activating my asthma, has kept me within a block of my house since I got home on the 30th. However, I think I caught it from my three-year-old nephew, and there really isn't anything to be done about that, or even to regret.

I've been thinking about friends who are ill, or in peril, or both.

I've been thinking about Virginia Woolf, you know, the classic bit on the under-description of sickness... where is it...

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed... it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. (cribbed from Brainpickings.org)

...and how the problem of finding poetics for many illnesses is precisely that (by siphoning away energy, by fragmenting attention, by stealing sleep, by inflammation of the thinking instrument) they deplete the ability of the person undergoing them to describe and communicate that experience (though Woolf does pretty damn well). Maybe I'm also thinking about Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, though I don't really know it.

I'm just putting things next to each other -- I don't have the energy to knit them up into a thesis (QED).

I have mentioned before that on Christmas Eve my family traditionally listens to Fireside Al's reading of Frederick Forsyth's "The Shepherd", a pretty great example of a particular kind of winter's tale. Al Maitland does terrific British voices. If you are looking for a dark evening's listening, I think I can recommend it, though to explain what I like about it would be to spoil the story.

( The slightly spoilery reason I bring this up (will not ruin story, I don't think) )

I am, for some reason, eating salt and vinegar chips, and I can feel the vinegar sting my tongue, but not taste it. I can feel the burn of the ginger in my lemon-ginger tea, but otherwise it might as well be lukewarm water.

Other symptoms include feeling the ground shift continually under me as though I were on a ship making constant adjustments on high waves, or a plane buffetted by turbulence; blocked ears; aches and pains; sinus headache; light sensitivity; sore throat; regularly hacking up luminous ectoplasm (perhaps I'm haunted); and so forth. I'm sleeping in emergency configuration, with my legs curled up in blankets on the floor and my torso propped up on the bed in the only position which seems to control the aforementioned coughing fits and ectoplasmic production.

Still, I have a friend who lives in Australia, which is on fire, and where people are running into the sea to escape. And we were to visit my aunt after this family trip, but her husband is in hospital with complications from surgery, and we certainly could not visit him while still enshrouded in this virus. So. I go to bed and hope the second day of the new year will be better for all of us.

{rf}