Halloween Countdown: October 9 - spreading the disease

Sorry, bats and ghouls, but Unca Andrew is feeling a little under the weather today. I have contracted a delightful little virus. It's symptoms are mild enough by day, but turn into uncontrollable shakes and a high fever once the sun goes down. As I have no way to tell if this night will be any different than the previous two, I'm going to make the most of my daylight hours while I can (by napping and playing videogames, naturally).

won't be worried long

One of my strongest childhood memories is of my mother relating a bit of family folklore to me. It concerned some great-great-relation of her father's side of the family, a stoically creepy bunch of Old Yankees from Maine's Androscoggin County. This particular relative worked in a lumber mill, and during the course of his duties got his arm stuck in the machinery. As his friends tried in vain to find the best way to extricate the ruined limb from the works, my laterally-thinking ancestor came up with an easy solution -- power up the machinery and let it take the limb off quickly and cleanly. So they did.

I can't help but think that lingering effects of my mother's story somehow figure into the following random, but characteristically "Andrew," autobiographical antidote.

I adopted Mia not too long after Zoe Blackfeet, my previous feline companion, wandered off and never returned. Mia had belonged to some neurotic yuppies from Winchester who had soured on the idea of pet ownership and dumped her off at the vet's office.

Unlike Zoe (or Budwina before her), Mia was not a personable cat. I don't know if it was from poor socialization or abuse experienced at the hands of her previous owners, or a simple matter of temperament. I've lived around cats my entire life; they're capricious creatures. Mia, though, wasn't so much aloof as sociopathic, and able to switch from snugglebunny to psycho-slasher with no warning whatsoever. (She also possessed the ability to shed her weight in long white fur on a daily basis.)

Even if she wasn't the nicest cat, I was still happy to have her around and living in a decent home.

On a lovely spring afternoon in 2002, I was in my bedroom reading a book when Mia hopped on the bed and stretched out beside me. I patted her. She purred. I scratched behind her ears. She viciously bit and scratched my left forearm, and refused to let go until my limb had been thoroughly flensed.

It hurt like hell, but cat scratches usually do, and this didn't appear that much worse than some of the previous feline-related injuries I had dealt with. I washed the arm with some soap and water and let nature do the rest. That the cuts seemed to be a long time in healing or there was a growing burning sensation in the arm didn't worry me a whole lot. Nor did the fact that over the course of the following week or so my forearm swelled up to near-Popeye proportions.

Maura, of course, was concerned, but it's her job to be. Besides, who is more familiar with my internal workings than I am? It wasn't until I had entered the second week following the incident that I was forced to acknowledge that something wasn't right. (Maura's mom was particularly persuasive with her worried stare and repeated use of "Jaysis.") While my co-workers and family (not Maura, because she understands me) chimed in with a loud chorus of "EMERGENCY ROOM," I decided to take matters into my own (swollen and healthy) hands.

Using a sterilized needle, I opened up the bite wounds that were the source of the infection and let the stream of pus drain out. Afterwards I soaked the arm in warm water and Epsom salt for an hour before slathering the area with anti-bacterial ointment and bandaging it up. It took about a week of such therapy before my arm started to resemble its old self (though I still have a few scars), thus proving that not only that am I too laid back for my own good, but that I can occasionally remedy the problems which arise from my complacency (in an extremely painful and disgusting way that could have been avoided with a glimmer of foresight).

Prince Buster - Pussy Cat Bite Me (from Wreck A Pum Pum, 1976) - Felis dentata ska.

Tom Jones - It Takes a Worried Man (from Along Came Jones, 1965; collected on Millennium Edition, 2000) - Devo's cover of this folk standard will always be the definitive version as far as I'm concerned, but Sir Tom's powerhouse vocals and that magnificent horn section are almost enough to make me reconsider my position.

Love and Rockets - No Big Deal (from Love and Rockets, 1989) - True, but a perfectly fine song, nonetheless.

here we are stranded

Doll Man lives in a little universe all his own.
After missing work on Friday (because I hate working Commencement) and Monday (because we had to make an emergency vet visit for Fergus the rabbit), I returned to the office on Tuesday to a whopping backlog of work (because the database waits for no man or sick bunny). A couple of my co-workers were out sick, the reason being that one of them chose to stay on the job most of Monday despite having a ferocious illness. Germs being the restless little busybodies that they are, the illness leapfrogged though the maze of cubicles to offer Grandfather Nurgle's benediction (Andrew = nerd) to most of the other people in my department.

"Watch out," I was told, but I figured I'd be fine since the primary vectors weren't around to spread the infectious joy.

So imagine my glee this morning when I woke up out of a sound sleep to discover that some playful pixies had run a power sander along the tender flesh between my sinuses and my trachea, and had also replaced the lymph nodes on both sides of my lower jaw with PGA-certified golf balls.

Yes, it has been one fuck of a week so far, though I did manage to score a much coveted LP from eBay this morning which will be featured in an upcoming post that could very well cement my reputation as the antichrist of Boston-based music bloggers. In other good news, Maura and the good folks from the Woburn Feral Cat Coalition managed to round up Tess's orphaned kittens (as well as a litter of Pepi's, which was a surprise that shouldn't have been) last night.

I'm still trying to figure out why Maura, who went gallavanting around in the rain and cold, and had more social contact with the folks in our office, dodged the sickness bullet while I, the cubicular hermit who spent the evening playing videogames, took it right between the eyes. Maybe there is something to that vegetarian business she's always going on about, after all.

Japan - Quiet Life (from Quiet Life, 1979) - "Hi, we're Duran Duran, and we were wondering if we could borrow a pint of your sound and a couple slices of your image? Thanks!"

don't mix with new groups

I'm a bit busy today, but not so busy that I couldn't take the time to post this important reminder....
...that the Good Old Days^TM were actually pretty damn horrifying, and wonder why our society is more germ-o-phobic now than it was back in the days when polio, scarlet fever, and the like were far more widespread and less easily prevented and/or treated.

Rip, Rig, and Panic - Beware (from God, 1981) - I had been saving this short but unsettling instrumental number by the genre-transcending postpunk-jazz-funk collective (which included a couple members of The Pop Group and a pre-"Buffalo Stance" Neneh Cherry) for this year's Halloween countdown, but October is quite a ways off and it fits today's topic perfectly in both title and tone.

that is I think I disagree

I was up until the wee hours of Saturday evening (or, more accurately, Sunday morning) dealing with my upteenth irritating head cold of the season. (A wiser man might be concerned about such a recurrence of illness, but I've never prided myself on matters of wisdom.) Having resigned myself to feverish and phlegmy wakefulness, I decided to finish rereading the final chapters of The Gun Seller, Hugh Laurie's quite entertaining novelistic mash-up of P.G. Wodehouse and Len Deighton, but ended up watching a late night showing of How I Won The War on one of the cable movie channels.

I've watched the film, a 1967 black comedy with an anti-war slant, at least half a dozen times over the years, but I'm still uncertain how I feel about the film. Directed by Richard Lester, it bridges the stylistic gap between the 1965 Beatle vehicle Help! and the surreal 1970 post-nuclear satire, The Bed-Sitting Room, in terms of Lester's appropriation of absurdist elements (which, I'd argue, reached an unintentional apotheosis in the Lester-helmed Superman II.)

How I Won the War follows the misadventures of the hopelessly inept Lt. Goodbody (played by Michael Crawford, who I'll forever associate with this, and especially this), who manages to stumble unharmed through the Second World War, though at the cost of the lives of those under his command. The events are presented as absurdist farce, making ample use of physical comedy, slapstick, documentary footage, and even elements of pantomime -- all wrapped up in a very 1960's, very self-conscious "avant-garde" veneer -- to bring its message home.

Despite all its creative ambitions and good intentions, however, the film never manages to equal the sum of its (frequently inspired) parts, and ends up falling into that oh-so-infuriating category of "interesting mess." Absurdity and war are hardly strange bedfellows, but what sets something like How I Won the War and better realized works like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Heller's Catch-22 (the twin pillars of the literary subgenre) is that the absurdity in those novels is presented as a natural consequence of the bureaucratization of mass slaughter, in which irrationality has assumed its own merciless and horrifying logic. (Mike Nichols's flawed cinematic version of Heller's novel managed to grasp the concept, though it frequently stumbled in conveying it onscreen.) How I Won the War, on the other hand, too often treats the absurdity as a matter of aesthetic window-dressing, which has the effect of undercutting the intended anti-war message and reducing it to facile sloganeering or wit for wit's sake. Imagine Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco cranking out a WW2 version of Candide for some quick booze and cigarette money at the behest of MoveOn.org, and you'd have general idea. An IMBD.com commenter described the film as a "sheep in wolf's clothing," and despite the well-documented caveats regarding information gleaned from that source, it's a very apt description.

The movie isn't devoid of effective moments or elements, it's that they are swamped amidst the gimmicky cinematic clutter. The replacement of fallen members of Goodbody's outfit with silent, single-colored ghosts who continue to serve in death I found to be an effectively macabre touch, suggesting the utter inescapability of the mad situation. There is one scene in particular which I found to be extremely haunting: Goodbody, taken prisoner by the Germans, is sitting on a rail embankment as he awaits interrogation. He looks behind him at a closed boxcar stopped on the tracks, and the fingers of an emaciated hand poke out through a gap in the door as Goodbody is led away by his captors. It's a very simple, yet brutally effective moment which draws attention to an aspect of the war (mass-graves, gas chambers, crematoriums) ignored in the countless boiler-plate cinematic depictions of the war up to that time. It's a shame that the film as a whole couldn't sustain that level of insightfulness.

These days, How I Won the War is mostly remembered for featuring John Lennon (in his only non-Beatles-related cinematic appearance) as Musketeer Gripweed, Goodbody's batman (small "b," but we can dream) and a petty thief who "never found anything worth stealing." It's a smallish supporting role, though you'd never know that by looking at the VHS box. A little bait-and-switch never hurt anyone, right?

It was during the filming of How I Won the War that Lennon began composing what would become one of the greatest (if not the greatest) pop songs ever recorded, an oblique tribute to his childhood in Liverpool. There's no excuse for not having your own copy of the original (unless who happen to hate The Beatles, which is more of an explanation than excuse), so I'm posting an interesting, if inferior, cover version instead.

I'm referring to, of course:

Plastic Penny - Strawberry Fields Forever (from Two Sides of a Penny, 1968) - Known primarily for their one hit, 1968's "Everything I Am," the various members of this psych rock/proto-prog outfit later moved on to work with Elton John, UFO, and Procol Harum. Actually, this track sounds pretty close to what I imagine a Procol Harum cover of "Strawberry Fields Forever" would have sounded like.

I trust the weather

It's insanely cold and windy outside and I'm suffering through some kind of bug that makes me feel as if my sinuses and larynx have been flossed with steel wool. Normally that would have been enough for me to call it a day and crawl back into bed, but the office holiday party is being held today and the wife needed me to haul our comestible contributions into work.

While I zone out over a small plate of BBQ kielbasa and Mexican dip, please consider this modest musical offering in lieu of actual content from me on this day:

Throwing Muses - Colder (from House Tornado, 1988) - House Tornado was the first Muses album I purchased (along with The Pogues' If I Should Fall From Grace With God, at the long gone Strawberries store on the Middlesex Turnpike in Burlington), and it still sounds as esoteric and bizarre today as it did twenty years ago.

Plymouth Rock would land on them

What I thought was a sinus headache has turned out to be something even nastier and more virulent, and I've spent most of the day feeling like I'm controlling my body via remote feed through a haze of electromagnetic interference.

My planned topic for today has been temporarily shelved. In its place are some highlights from the unsubtle, yet prescient What If? #44 (April 1984) -- "What if Captain America were revived today?" -- by Peter B. Gillis, Sal Buscema, and Dave Simons.

"...and the Federalist Society and the Project for a New American Century and the Board of Trustees of Regent College's Law School..." Actually, I'd be more comfortable with a secret ruling cabal that included 1930's movie serial villains, Revolutionary War re-enactors, and luchadores than with the one currently running the show.

"...and that's Giuliani's campaign strategy?" A tip of the hat to Cap for his clever decision to disguise himself as Billy Crocker.

The organizers of the White House Correspondents' Dinner thought they were making a "safe" choice by asking Cap to emcee. The video of his monologue went on to become the most viewed clip in YouTube's history.

The Cortinas - Fascist Dictator (from a 1977 single) - Straightforward, no-frills '77 Britpunk...and there's nothing wrong with that, really.

Ella Fitzgerald - Anything Goes (from Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook, 1956) - This marks the second time I've used a track from Anything Goes, and it's not even my favorite musical. That honor is split between between Show Boat and Bye Bye Birdie. (Unless you consider Clambake a musical, though wise souls try not to consider Clambake, period.)

and it's terminal

A tragedy, really. Though not as common these days as it was fifty years ago, Pat Boonitis (a.k.a. "The Wholesome Family-Friendly Disease") still remains a grave risk to the public's health and musical tastes. Symptoms include:

• cravings that can only be sated with an American cheese and mayo sandwich on Wonder Bread (sliced diagonally with the crusts cut off, natch)
• calling Pet Sounds a "hard rock" album
• considering a chaste peck on the cheek to be "getting to third base"
• taking fashion cues from H.R. Haldeman (males) or Pat Nixon (females) and/or exhibiting a fondness for pastel-toned cardigan sweaters
• seeing an ad for the local Methodist Church's "Christian Coffee House" in the paper and thinking that it sounds like a really hep scene
• believing the female orgasm is a myth propagated by the Communists and their feminist dupes
• wishing that you could have lived in Pleasantville before Peter Parker and Elle Woods ruined the place
• thinking that Andy Williams would have done a better version of "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud"
• voting Republican (This in and of itself could be potentially indicative of a host of disorders akin to Pat Boonitis, and should be considered as an ancillary indicator alongside any of the other symptoms listed above.)

If detected early enough, Pat Boonitis-A can usually be cured with the proper administration of Meet The Beatles! and James Brown's Live at the Apollo LP. Particularly extreme cases may require a crash infusion of G.G. Allin and The Scumfucs tunes, but extreme care must be taken lest the patient lapse into severe culture shock.

The B strain of Pat Boonitis is, unfortunately, incurable. Many sufferers are able to carry on with a semblance of life, despite their obsessive behaviors regarding golf, the capital gains tax, and why those goshdarn pinko Democrats hate the USA and Baby Jesus so much.

Fortunately for the human race, the highly virulent and contagious Debbie Boonitis mutant strain of the disease has not reared its head since the Great Pandemic of 1977. I was five years old, and the horror of that time left scars on my psyche that linger to the present day. The clouds rained blood and packs of feral dogs worried the flesh of the unburied souls whose lives had been lit up by the horrific effects of that MOR pop earworm. Just when it seemed all would be lost, the world received a most unlikely savior in the form of the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love." We were that close to going out forever. But three Australian brothers with high-pitched voices taught us to slow dance, disco-style...

Remember, kids: Forewarned in forearmed. The life you save may be your very own.

Mike Leander - Onward Christian Soldiers (from the Privilege OST, 1967) - From Peter Watkins' 1967 film about a fascist/theocratic British government of the future and how it uses a charismatic rock star to distract, indoctrinate, and otherwise control the youth population. Hey, it's sci-fi! No worries here, right? (This track originally came from the much missed 7 Black Notes.)

R.E.M. - Shiny Happy People (from Out of Time, 1991) - Okay, so there was one song on that album that I liked, due to the presence of B-52 (and Athens scene alum) Kate Pierson. Of course, it was the one song on Out of Time that my college drawing teacher would skip over during her maddening semester-long repeat loop of the album on the studio's CD player.

what reasons do you need

The first day back on the job is always the worst. I had such plans for today, too, but what wasn't burned out of me while playing catch-up fled to the blood-red beats of a whopping sinus headache.

The Boomtown Rats - I Don't Like Mondays (from The Fine Art of Surfacing, 1979) - Today especially, but unlike Brenda Spencer, I don't feel the need to inflict suffering on others because of it. Unless you happen to hate this song, that is.

Vacation II: Day 5 - The figures don't lie

+

+

+

x 5 straight days =

I'd like to say I've learned my lesson this time, but that conclusion is not supported by the empirical evidence. For a more in-depth exploration of the subject, I refer you to my forthcoming paper, "A Differential Analysis of Junk Food's Ability to Suppress Andrew's Better Judgement," which shall be presented at the 74th Conference of Really Depressing Science this fall.

Today's dinner specials include a classic bit of British Invasion fare, served with a side of Scandanavian neo-garage cuisine. Bon appetit!

The Troggs - I Can't Control Myself (from The Singles: A's and B's, 2005)

The Hives - Here We Go Again (from Your New Favourite Band, 2002)

and all I needed was just a breath of fresh air

A pox on:

- my deviated septum
- airborne pollen and other contaminants
- the canned air at my workplace
- meth heads whose stupid habit made it a hassle to get decent sinus medication
- the nausea-inducing sinus headache I have had for three days now

I’m going to lie down for a while. While I’m going to require silence, you can crank up these rather loud slices of fine punk rock.

The Replacements – I Bought a Headache (from Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, 1981)

Poison Idea – In My Head Ache (from Pick Your King, 1983)

the ache is in my bones

The head cold I mentioned a few posts back took advantage of yesterday’s round of snow shoveling to insinuate itself into my bronchial passages. As a consequence, I’m feeling a bit lousy today and not up to my customary levels of inspired posting. In fact, I think I’ll just hand things over to Kylie today, with a topically relevant song and its accompanying music video.



Kylie Minogue – Breathe (from Impossible Princess, 1997) – I got a lot of shit from a Diamanda Galás-loving friend of mine for saying I loved this song. Hey, misery and angst are fine, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world where they’ve completely supplanted dreamy dance pop.

One of my wiser drama professors, commenting on the works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and the like, once said “While it’s important to understand the significance of these plays and playwrights, it’s also important to understand that most people do not want to watch three hours of Scandinavian misery when they visit the theater.”

My wife taped the video for “Breathe” (and the one for “Did It Again”) ten or so years ago off of a pan-Asian music show that used to run on the International Channel without first realizing who the singer actually was. Reassessment of our opinions regarding Kylie and some import CD purchases soon followed.

(The show was also responsible for my love of Thai pop, but that’s a matter for a future post. Maybe.)

another battle was won and lost

I was going to skip posting anything today. I’ve spent the better part of the day dealing with an irritating head cold while trying to replace a fried hard drive on my work computer. I succeeded on the tech front, but the only person who can get me hooked back up to the shared network drive I need to use for my work duties is out of town until next Monday. Rather than sit around on my hands doing nothing except stifling recurring coughing jags, I went home early and crashed out while listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms’ World of Sleepers. The resulting dreams were interesting, to say the least.

I’m now wide awake, and still feeling, as a medical professional would say, “like shit.” Tomorrow has a whirlwind tour of veterinarian offices – one for our rabbit, Jack, in Wellesley at 11:30 and another for two of the outside cats in Winchester at 2:00. When it’s all over, I don’t think I’ll be able to tell where Super Lumina ends and I begin. We’ll be inseparably bonded in a man/machine gestalt by hours of the nastiest highway and surface road driving Massachusetts has to offer (outside of the Day Boulevard rotary, which is as close as one can get to The Road Warrior this side of the nuclear holocaust).

So in short, I’m feeling restless and sick, my paid work is backlogged by tech hassles, and I have a long day of driving ahead of me. At least I have my music collection to help take my mind off of things.

Generation X – Kiss Me Deadly (from Generation X, 1978) – In which a young Billy Idol and friends serve up the punk rock equivalent of a power ballad. Sure, it’s a little on the sappy side, but it really couldn’t work any other way.

The Hives – A Get Together to Tear It Apart (from Veni Vidi Vicious, 2000/2002) – Has it really been five years since this album was released in the US? Wow.

though I am poor, I am free

Something of a mixed bag this time out, as I’ve been busy with other things. I largely avoided listening to music while I was ill, well aware of how sickbed associations can linger. Twenty five years ago, a similar bout of the flu made it impossible to this day for me to even think of crème-filled éclairs or roasted peanuts without getting a case of the dry heaves, and any love I had for The Primitives’ debut LP was permanently soured by another bug suffered through in the early 1990’s.

There was the Camera Obscura album my wife had playing in the background while I was laid up, but overhearing from the upstairs bedroom isn’t the same as actively queuing up something to listen to. Those distant snatches and fragments of sweet indie pop could have been lullabies sung by solicitous pixies for how they registered on my consciousness. I spent a morning fixated on that Dead Boys’ song, but its charm wore thin rather quickly as the rhyming of “loser” and “reducer” began to grate on my nerves, and I puzzled in vain to figure out just what the hell a “sonic reducer” was supposed to be, anyhow. A “devil machine?” An “electronic dream?” Fine, fine, but can I see some tech specs, please? Or even a MSRP?

I did think that Bush could have shortened and livened up his State of the Union address if he had just lipsynched to Howard Jones’s “Things Can Only Get Better,” instead of defensively paraphrasing the song’s lyrics. Cheney and the First Lady could have put on oversized pastel sweaters and made enthusiastic hand clapping gestures during the “whoa-whoa-whoa, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa” parts to complete the effect.

The only other piece of music that happened to dart past my path in recent days was a Lily Allen video a friend posted in her online journal. It was an interesting piece that dared to answer the question “What would happen if one were to mix Len’s ‘If You Steal My Sunshine,’ Bjork’s closet, and an irritating British accent?” (Answer: The undying fealty of hipster music critics and the taste of crematorium ash in my mouth.)

On that pleasant note, here are some ever enjoyable palate-cleansing tracks culled from my favorites folder:

Devo – It Takes a Worried Man (from Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology, 2000) – This lovely, twisted cover of a folk standard was the best thing to come out of Neil Young and Dean Stockwell’s dead-on-arrival 1982 “cult” (read: obtuse and self-indulgent) movie, Human Highway.

The Fall – Victoria (from The Frenz Experiment, 1988) – I’ve never understood the appeal of The Fall’s music. I suspect there must be some recessive gene involved, as several people whose opinions I respect greatly seem to swear by Mark E. Smith’s serpentine musical vision. Perhaps I’ll send an email to the Human Genome Project folks and ask them to look into it for me.

I can appreciate an excellent Kinks cover when I hear one, though, and this certainly fits the bill.

Wolfe Tones – The Foggy Dew (from 25th Anniversary, 1991) – See, Bono, this is a rebel song, and unapologetically so, you pompous West Briton prick. I know it’s easier to champion the causes of people on other continents than of those in your own back yard. That might cause controversy, hurt record sales, and make people realize that your band’s postured idealism is a convenient front to mask the fact that U2 is nothing more than the college rock equivalent to Air Supply.

A note about the song: My wife pointed out to me that you can tell a performer’s politics by their choice of lyrics used in “The Foggy Dew.” Nationalists use the line “fought with Cathal Brugha,” referring to the Irish Republican commander killed by Free State forces in 1922. Fence sitters and/or apologists for the Free State’s brand of church and banker controlled quasi-fascism use the line “fought with de Valera true.” Although Eamon de Valera was also an Irish Republican leader who opposed the Free State, and did much to correct its course as Taoiseach (leader of the Irish government) in later years, the substitution of his name for Brugha’s glosses over the unfinished business of the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War.

I'll be a pharaoh soon, rule from some golden tomb

My four day long (or one month long, if you count the warm up exercises) bout with the flu has ended, leaving me feeling completely exhausted and with an unpleasant aftertaste redolent of a corn starch smoothie in my mouth.

Literary and popcult precedent would have me believe that the extended nightmare of this experience was supposed to serve a greater purpose – a virally-triggered vision quest with the objective of getting me to rethink my ways, burning away the petty flaws and unnecessary fixations to reveal a newfound purity within myself.

It’s not going to happen. The new me is the same as the old me, just a little wearier and slightly more introspective about whether a can of Hormel chili would make a wise recuperation meal. Small changes to be sure, but at least I have no plans to install my favorite horse to a seat on the Imperial Senate, like Caligula did after his bout with a nasty life-altering illness.

Today’s featured track, “If Looks Could Kill,” comes from Scottish indie poppers Camera Obscura. My wife picked up the album a few weeks back and has had it on repeat ever since. It’s sweet, breezy pop reminiscent of the 60’s girl group sound, with some Wilsonian (Brian, that is) flourishes, and a nice antidote to an influenza-induced funk.

Camera Obscura – If Looks Could Kill (from Let’s Get Out of This Country, 2006)

Come to think of it, maybe I have picked up some post-fever megalomaniacal tendencies, judging from the other song that has been lodged in my head during this morning’s convalescence… I wonder how Oscar the Chihuahua-pug would feel about being made a vice consul.

Dead Boys – Sonic Reducer (from Young, Loud, and Snotty, 1977)

and you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone

I did have another topic in mind for today’s post, but that was before Grandfather Nurgle decided to have a little fun at my expense. (Yes, that’s a Warhammer reference. Deal with it.) For the past week or so, I’ve been in a flirtatious little dance with this winter’s new and improved strain of the flu, but it wasn’t until last night that the perky little viruses decided to pull out all the stops and go straight for the jugular.

There’s being sick, and there’s being sick. The former is a minor inconvenience with a silver lining – “Oh, I feel I little shitty today. I guess I’ll have to call in sick to work and stay home and play some Final Fantasy XII -- I mean ‘get some bed rest.’” The latter involves writhing about beneath sweat soaked flannel sheets for a good twelve hours, unable to do anything but shiver uncontrollably and wonder if that cloaked, scythe-wielding gentleman standing at the foot of the bed is another hallucination or not.

I can’t remember the last time I felt that ill. Ok, that’s a lie. I do remember. It was toward the end of 1990, right after the college bursar’s office cut me my first “cost-of-living” scholarship check. With a wad of twenties tucked away in the pocket of my punk jacket, I went on a shopping spree down the length of Newbury and Bolyston Streets. I picked up a new backpack/bookbag and some military surplus gloves at Mass Army and Navy, then hit Mystery Train, where I bought some records I’d had my eye on, as well as an old promo poster for The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat (which is now in the downstairs closet, awaiting framing and display in the new house).

When I left the record store, I was already beginning to feel a bit off, gripped by the first stage of that mind-to-body signal distortion that accompanies the most virulent of fevers. By the time I made it to North Station, I was walking around in a dreamlike haze, wondering why the person who was supposed to pick me up at the commuter rail station in Woburn wasn’t answering the phone. She never did, and I ending up staggering the mile home through the sub-zero suburban wilderness. Once there, I did a quick reading of my temperature (103 degrees and change), then went to bed and remained there for two days.

I didn’t bother taking my temperature last night. I remember hearing the digital music channel play “Bloodletting” by Concrete Blonde and feeling my gorge rise. I also remember inexplicably replaying scenes from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in my head: the feral children chanting “Waaaah-kahhhh” and the line about getting jumped by Mister Death. I remember hearing my wife yelling at our dogs for barking too loud. Mostly I remember the unpleasant sensation of roasting alive in my own skin.

I think I’ve made it through the worst part, although it remains to be seen how tonight’s sleeping cycle goes. One thing I’m grateful for is that this bug never entered a vomiting phase. I’d rather burn from the inside than suffer through a puking jag.

The Pogues – The Sickbed of Cuchulainn (from Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, 1985)

Atari Teenage Riot – Sick to Death (from The Future of War, 1997)

Halloween Countdown: October 7 – a piece of my world

I caught a really terrible bug last spring. The illness peaked during the night, and my body temperature soared. The flannel sheets that my wife prefers for our bed during the colder months trapped in the heat, and tangled around my sweat-drenched body.

I spent hours fitfully slipping back and forth between conscious and dream states, to the point where the boundaries blurred. Fever nightmares, vivid hellscapes of swirling crimson skies, screaming faces, and clutching hands, alternated with brief flashes of lucidity. My wife had left the TV on when she nodded off, and I’d catch bits of Humanoids from the Deep (on Encore or some other movie channel), providing fresh nightmare fodder for my virally-induced delirium.

The illness passed after a couple of days, but the psychological effects of that night lingered in for months in the form of randomly triggered flashbacks, blindsiding me with soul-numbing horror as I went about my usual routine. Combined with my usual post-sickness hypersensitivity (“Roderick Usher syndrome,” it’s been dubbed), it made for an interesting convalescence.

This no wave track by Mars reminds me of that traumatic night. Too much so, perhaps.

Mars – Tunnel (from No New York, 1978)