Delirium

I have been sick as a dog all week. Why do people say that?

I’m as sick as a dog.

Are dogs prone to a more dramatic, virulent kind of sickness than anyone else?

If that’s the case then it must suck a bit to be a dog.

I usually don’t get flus like the one I’m recovering from. I’m a sore throat, occasional tummy bug kind of person not this full-metal-jacket-apocalypse-is-nigh-all-shaking-all-sweating-can’t-get-out-of-bed-can’t-remember-who-I-am thing.

Influenza.

It’s a dirty word.

I got a fever. I never get fevers.

40.2 degrees C. In all the years I have been sick, even when I had that bad bout of tonsilitis when I was a kid I didn’t get a fever.

The fever made me delirious for one night.

Delirium is the wildest, weirdest dreamscape-while-still awake you’ve ever experienced.

I imagined I was walking through the city. I was a tiny speck of a person constantly being assailed by enormous buildings, looming, leaning towards me. The colors were green, grey, white and black all mixed together as if the world had been turned into a gigantic X-ray. It was like being plunged right into the Matrix or finding myself on the set of a Tim Burton film.

The world of delirium is a gothic world where shadows of neolithic birds sidle across your ceiling and men in long black coats peer at you through the windows.

And sometimes as the fever mounts, even weirder things happen like Charlie Sheen sitting on your bed reading a Betty And Veronica comic and he says that he would want to date Betty if she were a real girl but you just know the truth of the matter is he’d be all over Veronica like a rash.

And that she might just be tough enough to sort him out.

Thank God the delirium has passed.

Now it’s time to read all the blogs I have missed out on this week.

I also wanted to let you know that I did a guest post on the wonderful Gabrielle Bryden’s blog this week. I think I might have been in the grip of delirium when I wrote it. I know that Gabrielle would love it if you were to pay her a visit. I would love it too. So much so that I might actually once again become delirious.