11.27

Whenever I see an old doggy,
My memory growing quite foggy,
I want to pet him
Underneath of his chin,
But his under-chin's sloppy and soggy!

11.14b

I have to wake up in five and a half hours to ride with my sister-in-law back to school to get my car so I can drive back home to take the dog to an appointment at the vet. I know this, and yet my subconscious will not allow me to be satisfied. Maybe it's the excedrin I took late in the morning and the residual caffeine kick. Maybe it's the twelve hours of sleep I got last night. Maybe it's the sickness still raking its way through my bones. I don't know. I can't be satisfied.

I'm a parody of a man in torment. I have nothing to be sad about, but I'm crying. I keep opening my eyes and expecting something around me to be different. The dark room does not oblige. I'm breathing in short, panicked breaths, but there's nothing to run from. There's no utility to any of it. I'm living it, so I can't doubt it, but it's certainly not connected to any shred of the reality around me.

I'm going to close this laptop screen and set it aside again. Within minutes, I guarantee I will feel the lame panic of an invalid trapped between sleeping and waking. I will return to the twilight realm of dissatisfaction. And what's worse: that I want to fall asleep but can't, or that I could fall asleep, but won't? I'm not sure either is true.

Begone.
To darkness with you, laptop.
Sleep fitfully, if at all, and see how it treats you. I know I'll be living it until the morning.

11.14

Passing Out 14 November 12:57am

Not a dream. It counts, though.

I am sick. I have already thrown up three separate times, once at around noon yesterday, once in the car on the way home with Philip (calmly opening my lunch box because I understood the inevitable, taking everything but the napkins out, and hurking four or five times into the plastic liner), and once at home pretty quickly after taking a few pills for the accompanying muscle pain and enormous headache. I could taste the medicine coming up on that one. Colors: Bright pink (spaghetti), dark brown-red (spaghetti and oatmeal from the morning), dark green (what? Some concentrated physical oat bits in this one). Each time I throw up, I spend the next few minutes sweating and feeling like a new man.
I wake up at (nearly) 1am and my computer is playing some poorly-executed Slacks-style segment from the Kuala Lumpur major. I guess the games are done for today, and I watch Fnatic players facing off against each other. They have to toss a small pyramidal bean bag up and pick up another before catching the toss. Some of them are mysteriously bad. The hosts, a man and a woman, can speak the players' language and do, but only infrequently. I think Ame wins the tossing contest. Little do I know, but I am about to toss as well.
The games are over. Secret play PSG.LGD tomorrow slightly before noon local time. I close my laptop. My mouth begins to water, and I know what's coming. All I want is to drink some water–I'm so thirsty. Nothing will come of that. I pick up my lunchbox liner and hunch over it. My drool spatters across the bottom. I had thought I was done with this pattern, since the last time I awoke, at around nine, I didn't throw up. I wait. My body is fickle. I know I'm about to throw up and there's nothing whatsoever to do about it, but I have to wait for my dumb secondary nervous system to finish its job. (I know there's nothing to do because at 7pm I tried. I didn't want to throw up, so I chose not to. I still threw up. I don't have the control I used to have, or the bug is much worse, or something.)
Finally, I hurk four small waterfalls into the lunch box liner and sit, sweating, trying to decide to wash my mouth out.
Okay. I can do this.
To the bathroom. Dump the vomit, which is nearly clear, but definitely not colored in any particular way. Run some water from the tub into the liner. Stoop over the sink to slurk some water up into my mouth. Rinse. Spit. Rinse, spit. Gargle--
And here I lose the story. Leaning back and gargling is the last thing I remember as real. I suppose I probably did spit, because I didn't have anything in my mouth when I came to, and I don't suppose I probably swallowed. I don't know.
My hands are twitching-terrified. My mind is tabula rasa. I don't know where I am and my butt hurts. I understand this, /in the way of dreams/, is because I hit the floor quite hard. What was that loud noise? Why did I seem to hit the floor twice? And where am I? I'm looking at things but not seeing. There's a noise I cannot comprehend. My arms are down at my side, touching a cold floor, twitching with fright. My legs are utterly weak. I might be dying.
I start to come to, and what do I understand? Oh, the loud noise was me hitting the uncle John step stool next to the bath. Oh, the sound is the constant rush of water into the sink and the drip of water into my lunchbox in the tub. Oh, I just passed out so bad I wasn't aware that I was passing out.

The last time I passed out so badly, I was at Katy's house. I forget what my overall physical state was, but since I have only been sick twice in 2018 (once at camp and it destroyed me for three days) and today, I can guess I wasn't sick. I just was lying on her couch, stood up, and my brain lost the thread. I was sure I was going deaf. I was trying to scream and I couldn't hear anything, so I must have been deaf. I was overcome when I stood up and stretched, and I couldn't even angle myself as I normally do, to fall down forward onto my hands. I fell over back ward and sat directly on my open laptop. (It didn't die then).

I sit on the ground, breathing. When I finally turn off the sink, I notice my flashlight has fallen in and is wet and working. I flush the toilet and empty the clean water from my lunch box. I don't feel as well as I did right after I vomited, sweaty and huffing. I go lie down and type this up. It was the worst I have ever passed out, and the weakness of it is still not gone from my fingers. I practically seized, honestly.
Good morning. Sleep well.

1:20am

11.12

A boy tried to start a cat city
By bringing home hundreds of kitties.
He would set a cat down;
It would not stick around
Leaving just cat poo and pity.


(Old version: Leaving him with just cat poop and pity.)

11.9

She was hiding just around the corner. She thought I couldn't see her, and I suppose that's true. I saw her shadow on the wall through the doorway. I was sitting in the half-dark room, sort of reading, sort of dozing off. Everything was quiet. But there she was. Waiting? For what? And then I remembered. Of course.
The anniversary of the Good Day. It was two years ago, wasn't it? And now it's my turn to get swept up in an adventure that she's made, my turn to ride somewhere with a blindfold on, my turn to be aghast at how much of our money she's spent on us. So. That's why we couldn't afford to go to the play last week, and the bookstore yesterday. I was just being blind.
The thought of it was enough to make me laugh.
She must have thought I was distracted, so she poked her head around the door to check. I only caught a glimpse of her, but it's enough to drive me to paroxysms of laughter.

I'm too lucky.

11.1

The atmosphere of this morning is dead to me already, buried, mourned, dissolved. Its creeping corpse has three minutes left, but I am not looking at it any more. I've let it go. It can't hurt me ever again.