Diablevert

I Hate My Nostrils.

And my sinuses. (Sinusi?)

This cold has been creeping up my respiratory system --- Wednsday it was a little tug in the chest, Thursday it was a scratchy throat, Saturday it had begun to clog every crevice of my cranuim. Now my throat's mostly healed, but sleep has become for me a flutter-by experience. My eyelids droop and my brain relaxes ever so soflty, sweetly, into sleep's succor, only to be yanked back to consciousness in fifteen minutes, because I've begun drowning slowly in my own snot. Foghorn, wipe, repeat.

I look like the ravel'd sleeve of care. Also, I alliterate a lot.

And I think I'm getting an ear infection. To be followed shortly by brain feaver, if the Up From My Chest Cavity progression of the disease continues, but it's the ear infection that bugs. During the score of years between my infancy and last winter, I'd never, ever had an ear infection. Last year, my unblemished record was, painfully, dizzingly, blemished. And now, my ears feel as I'd just been swimming, and that hold-your-nose-and-blow trick doesn't do a thing. Well, except make my nostrils stick together for about thirty seconds. It's beginning to dawn on me that each advancing year is nothing more than a chance to accumulate another infirmity --- fallen arches, weak ankle, trick knee, slipped disk, brusitus, arthritus, bridgework and a bum ear. According to the actuarial tables, I have another 50 years of this shit to go. I'm going to be a half-deaf gelantinous blob by the end of this, a sack of old bones held together by surgical pins. It's a damn good thing I took up smoking.

Not that I've even been able to enjoy that vice in days. And the cable's out. (Picture me waving aloft my Time Warner bill, in a pose reminiscent of Grandpa Simpson's "Man Yells at Cloud." Go on, picture it. I swear I'm doing it right now. Damn you, Time Warner! You are as remote, jealous, and vengeful as an Old-Testament God!) All I have left is tea and the ability to tap out crank-rants on the internet.

Damn, I wish I had cable.