Plainly I jinxed myself badly yesterday posting a paean to spring. Soon after I hit "Publish," my lungs began to burn and I felt unnaturally cold.
Went home from work early, deteriorated through the day. Chest feels like someone very heavy is sitting on it, and the thermometer oscillates between 100F and 102F. The shaking sweats last night were sure pleasant. What do you want to bet it's something baroque like the Consumption, or mebbe the New-Moe-Knee.
So no Content from Neddie today. I was going to take a nice hot soak with some Epsom salts and then prop myself up in bed with a heating pad to compose some Alexandrine couplets -- but I scotched the idea when I realized that would just be going from bath to verse.
Mmmmmm, Scotch....
13 comments:
Better that than the sad diurnal circumstances of so many Teutons - "Bed to Wurst".
That went through our house. Luckily the three year old and the husband missed it. The two big kids and I had it though. We all had high fevers, wicked sore throats and fatique. My little girl was home from school for three day straight. Nothing you can do except sleep and eat popsicles.
"What do you want to bet it's something baroque like the Consumption..."
I hope not Jeddie!
You're so funny -- hope you feel better soon.
To paraphrase Margaret (Peggy) Atwood, 'the best thing for a cold is a double scotch and a neo citran, it doesn't do anything to cure the cold but you sure forget about it for a while.'
Man, I am so impressed by your dedication. You're the only person I know who'd get sick just so they could set up and deliver a bad pun.
Hope ya feel better soon (and that it's not what my family suffered through a couple of weeks ago).
'From bed to verse' would have worked better.
I think you gots de Plague, mon. Watch out for the buboes in your armpits. (I don't know what buboes are. But they sound kind of Lovecraftian.)
Why do all the best writers drink so heavily? A better question would be, as I want to be one of the best writers, why don't I drink at all?
...one might say that our hapless hero was felled by infernal internal hubris, brought on by huffing the vernal humus.
I think I need to unind.
After careful consultation of the entrails, I have determined that a miasma has caused a catarrh.
Place a poultice upon this pox.
I like your Pieter Brueghel the Elder header, with those ominous rooks overlooking the pond, as if waiting for skaters to fall through the ice. Notice the door at the right of this Breughel canvas (not visible in the truncated header), laid flat and propped up by trappers to kill the birds that venture under it for the scattered seed.
(Blogger won't let me post a url, but you can see the whole painting on p. 17 if you google "pieter breughel".) You know that, Neddie, but your readers might not.
The Brueghel from which you stole the header is another example of what W.H. Auden was talking about in "Musee des Beaux Arts," where he writes about Brueghel's "Fall of Icarus":
"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
See the painting, one of my favorites, with the poem, one of my favorites, here:
httpCOLONSLASHSLASHpoetrypagesDOTlemon8DOTnlSLASHlifeSLASHmuseeSLASHmuseebeauxartsDOThtm
I love that line, "the torturer's horse/Scratches its innocent behind on a tree." This sort of ironic dissonance also goes on in "Deadwood," which is a reason you and I like it.
As Ernest Becker wrote, people who live full lives are always aware of the terror that rumbles under everything.
Incidentally, Mr. Jingo, I am nobody's acolyte, though you claimed me after my note about Santorum's presence in your neighborhood, but I do enjoy your blog, more when you aren't self-conscious about the Koufax than when you are.
A speedy recovery to you.
Treepeony
Get well soon Ned. And if it is something like tubercalucus, then it will be baroque and roll.
Get well soon, Neddie.
god forbid you got the tuberculucas and the sinus flu!
"doctor told me son you're livin too fast,
one more rocket's gonna be your last,
but i wanna ball what can i do, i got the tu-ber-cu-lucas and the sinus flu"
first one to name the artist gets a virtual cigar.
Well, I like the David Lindley version, but I know he didn't write it.
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