12/30/02 7:30 PM PST: To paraphrase Prince, I was feverish when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes too fast.

The wife contracted Fifth Disease (look it up, it's funny) from one of the godless urchins she teaches, and chances are it came home to me. That or something else that tagged along -- I have so little human contact (on purpose) that almost the only way I can get sick is for someone to put it on her and have it creep across the invisible Maginot Line in the middle of the bed to attack me unawares.

So I'm out shooting with a close friend (my first time shooting in years -- I forgot how much I loved it) and the room is so cold I can see my breath. I'm not dressed for arctic duty, and my body goes nuts. I used to have the immune system of twelve big healthy men, but after taking a severe beating over the last four years, it's not what it used to be. I came home with a 102.3 degree fever and have been laid up ever since.

The fever dreams were odd, at first -- literally tearing at one another for dominance. Like watching a put of vipers go at one another. Mad, dangerous stuff. Then there were the delusions -- that I was the King of Siam, that the color purple had gained sentience and wanted revenge for something, over and over trying to create the sound of one hundred thousand people saying "whop" at the same time. Better than drugs, I bet, and since I've never tried, I'll have to believe that.

So I'm hanging fairly solid in the 99 degree range, a temperature at which it would take months for my brain juices to boil and melt the gray matter out of my ears like so much candle wax. I already was scheduled to take the day off, but tomorrow, fever or no, I'm back to work. Yay.

Luckily, I'd done most of the typing for this year's Smackdown Awards already, I just had to code it. I can code HTML in my sleep, so I am confident I didn't break it too badly. I gotta hunt for pictures ... sooner or later. The site feels too lacking of imagery. Mm.

Anyhoo, gotta do the paper tonight, probably publicize the Smackdown Awards sometime on Thursday, and chances are I'm not gonna get my chapbook done by tomorrow, nor am I gonna do the three or four specialty CD mixes I promised before year's end. Life's rough in the big city.

Carry on.