It's chrismas eve.
I've been sleeping.
My head is throbbing. My heart is pounding. There's a fire in my throat, and a pressure in my glands. There's an itch in my lungs, and a wall of force in my sinusoidal cavities.
There's a callous, on my thumb, from opening over-tightened coke bottles. There's slashes in the callous from opening bottles of beer.
There's a thin wall of cotton wool keeping all this from being a problem.
When I woke up today, next to the girl I love, I could barely breathe. Caught in that eternal conundrum - move, stir, wake her up, this incredible sleeping beauty beside me, or slowly gargle to death on my own lung juice, I waited.
I wheezed. She stirred. She was still beautiful, awakened.
Free of further moral issues, I coughed. And I coughed. And I hacked and wheezed. And I removed about half a cup of yellow death from my lungs.
There are several million extraneous bacterial agents currently in residence in my sinuses, above my soft palate, the back of my throat, and the top of my lungs.
In my stomach sits a white pill, amoxycillin and clavulanic acid. In my bloodstream courses codeine phosphate and pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, slowly losing the war of attrition with my liver. Soon, back-up forces will join them, or the wall of force keeping my sinuses in check will crack, and the precious life goo will flow from me, in a distressing fashion.
And I'll sneeze. I hate sneezing.
But that's not the point.
I've been sleeping.
This isn't something I do regularly, so it's a little disconcerting. My dreams have been filled with my current reading material, my current writing material, my current gaming material. Watching drug addictions and schizophrenia somehow express themselves as waving tentacles, on a map in my mind, superimposed on everyday life, has made sleep a somewhat unfufilling experience, of late. And tennis. I don't like tennis.
The point, the metaphor, the moral, is left as an excercise for the reader. I'm going to go, send chemical reinforcements, and sleep the sleep of the fitful and disturbed.
I am having a great day today.
The sooner I sleep, the sooner santa comes!