Reading about other people’s colds can be a lot like reading about other people’s dreams. If this next entry bores you, sorry. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled, um, whatever, as soon as I get fricking better, damn it. Till then, I’m sucking it up and you will, too. Sweetness.

Mr. Bartender, come here.
I love the one-upmanship that comes with sickness.

Like this, for instance: Every damn time I get a cough, it’s the worst cough that ever there was. It’s worse than your cough, yours - and also that one you’re sitting there trying to tell me about that you got two years ago and for which you had to go to the doctor to get special prescription-strength cough syrup. Yeah, well, whatever, Mr. Fancy Health Care Plan. Listen here: In 1997 when I went to see The English Patient with my college roommate, I coughed so hard, I had to leave the theatre! I had to go out into the hallway! (Lucky for me, that fricking movie ran for something like five months in Chapel Hill after that, so I had ample opportunity to see it again. And again and again, had I cared to.) (Okay, so truth: I was a nineteen-year-old obsessed with The English Patient, so I did indeed care to.)

This coughing, it goes on, for days/sometimes a week or two and I start to think there’s something seriously and uniquely wrong with my (mymymy!) immune system. It’s very similar to that feeling of isolation you get with a bout of insomnia. Being sick puts the same sort of barrier between you and the rest of the world, as long as it persists. And then it goes away. And you forget how bad it was. And that you were so darn special in your aloneness.

Right now, I’m at that point where I’m beginning to think I’m unique again with my ill-equipped-to-handle-a-damn-cold immune system. This cough has gone on for four days. Prior to the coughing stage (at the sore throat/fever stage) I took very good care of myself. I napped! I rested! I took a damn load off just like they tell you to. I have consumed more oranges in the past week than you can shake a stick at, you citrus stick-shaker.

Now, though, the dratted coughing is trying to undo all that good care. It’s keeping me up at night. Robitussin does nothing. Nyquil, nothing. Nyquil doesn’t even make me sleep. It has zero effect. I just lie there. Coughing. I slather myself with Vicks. Which does something, admittedly. But its power is short-lived. I wake up three, four times, still, coughing and have to re-slather myself until I’m just about ready to take the bottle under the covers with me and huff it and huff it until sweet, methol-eucalyptus oblivion comes to me. I could write a folk song about this, sing it with a Celtic warble, maybe. … Could one asphyxiate from Vapo-Rub inhalation? I don’t know how romantic that would actually be.

I think I should just be put on night watchman’s duty somewhere. Only my coughing would give me away, probably, and the bad guys would find some way to kill us all off. Maybe my amazing powers of phlegm generation would actually keep our group alive, by keeping everyone awake and alert with my incessant hacking.

So I’m at this stage. I think my next-door neighbor hates me. Dextromethorphine is a lie, lie, lie. Earlier tonight, a friend told me that I should drink whiskey or bourbon. I sort of said, “Yeah, uh, sure,” till I remembered an old story of Hunter’s about being Sick Like Dog while out on tour in his youngsterlad musician days. It was New Year’s Eve and his old band, Pontius Copilot, was set to play but Hunter was shivering and shaking with fever and coughing up a storm. Then someone gave him some bourbon with lemon and miraculously, a half hour later, he was good as new and the show went off swimmingly.

I don’t even ask to rock, here. Only sleep. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe I’ll just get drunk. I’ll let you know. I know you’re out there with your bated breath, dear Henshaw. I can smell it. It's like camphor.