No Point to This

I sit here with a scratchy throat, clogged sinuses, and swollen eyes. The summer sickness has taken hold at last, though much later than it normally does. Usually I get sick in June, and again sometime in early August. I made it to September this time. An improvement. Always looking for improvements, which is the main point in athletics. If you aren’t growing, you’re dying, which is the same self-destructive mantra that capitalism, and the entire human race, repeats to itself over and over again as it cries itself to sleep at night.

Last night I got little sleep. My shoulder ached from swimming too many days back to back. My throat was a raw wound being scrubbed vigorously by a loofa-brush-armed obsessive compulsive. One stroke, two stroke, three stroke, four. Repeat. Till it’s bleeding, red, and pustulated. When you’re sick you need rest and water. That’s it. But with too much water and you’re up peeing all night. Acetaminophen helps with the aching throat, to bolster sleep, but pain killers reduces the pyrogen-initiated fever–the body’s own defense against the invading infection. Everything cancels everything else out. Nothing matters. We should all just take on a state of indifference, of nothingness, of sitting quietly in a darkened room without thought or action. A world of fully enlightened Budhist monks, so content with their suffering that they’re content with the human race abruptly coming to an end in two weeks due to dehydration because no one bothers to address their parched throat, dry, crackling, scrubbed raw and dry as beef jerky. Voluntary death by dehydration takes a week or more. Things that I have never gone without for even 24 hours:

• Liquid
• Human contact (seeing or talking to another person)
• Thinking about something impossible (maybe as a baby I did, though I don’t have any real proof that I ever was a baby)

Believing in made up things is what separates us from other animals, not our brain power, ability to use tools, or compassion for loved ones. A dog might not know why it rains,  but it doesn’t create fictions to come up with an answer for him or herself. A sick dog doesn’t think about pyrogen either. Or worry about missing a race due to sickness.

Okay that’s enough of this. I sat down to write without any idea what I’d write about, and this is what came out. I’m off to the store to buy chicken soup ingredients and two large bottles of generic Nyquil.