Homegrown Psychedelia
Sudden adventures in consciousness-altering illness
I spent last night in the grip of such wild vertigo that I really felt like I had done drugs. Good drugs. The gradual head-spin was strangely not-unpleasant even though it signaled that something was wrong. After strange bouts of overheating I woke up to a series of non-aesthetically-pleasing physical events, the details of which I will not relate here, but suffice to say I staggered to my home office around 7:45 in the morning to announce to my Monday-Wednesday-Friday class that today’s scheduled English 1101 was not happening. I also wrote to the receptionist in the English Department office to request that she put a sign on the classroom door to that effect, in case any unfortunate students didn’t recieve the announcement and stumbled to their only Friday class only to find that they could have slept off Thursday night’s presumed partying comfortably.
There are no plus-sides to being sick except this one: I felt like a hero, a true statue-worthy hero, for every single task I accomplished. Look at me checking all necessary professional boxes before 8am, even though my class is at 11, in this state. I knew I was only doing what was required, because the moment I had taken care of these remote-errands, I went back to sleep, waking up at 11am, the start of class.
I’d also had ambitions to conduct today’s planned class discussion on a digital message board, a feat which could not be accomplished this morning while my brain was simultaneously underwater and clawing at itself. But! After I woke up and drank copious glasses of water and made a mug of Earl Grey tea, I did indeed make this discussion possible. And after that! I took a shower! I did the dishes! In states of optimal wellness I rarely feel half as accomplished as the people in my immediate social networks, but on a day like this, having completed all of the above, I feel worthy of a Nobel Prize for rising to challenges and fearlessly conquering hardship.
I’ve been morbidly amusing myself all day by wondering if I have any enemies that might manipulate forces beyond us to make me feel this way as commupance for something. Everything is more bearable when put in the framework of a fable-of-sorts. But it’s been a long time since I’ve had an active falling-out with anyone. All squabbles of the past year-or-so have been bizarre passive-aggressive affairs, the likes of which would hardly warrent a wish for my undoing.
Anyway, should this adversary exist, the joke is on them, because we happened to have some homemade chicken soup in the fridge, and now I’m drinking Throat Coat, and as sick days go this one hasn’t left much to be desired. I’d been looking forward to my class today and excited about getting in a third workout this week, but best laid plans etc. Several of my students have been out sick, dutifully supplying their documentation. I feel drunk with power knowing that I’m not required to provide documentation.
As it happens, I did order a round of COVID tests as soon as we were allowed to — and I still can’t quite wrap my slightly-dizzy head around the fact that we had to be made allowed to — so they’re there, and the only reason I haven’t tested myself this time around is because I know it usually takes a couple days of symptoms for the correct results to make themselves known. I wish I could run down to Urgent Care from where I live, the way I did from our apartment in San Francisco last time I was diagnosed (and, it’s impossible to deny, also the last time I felt anything like I feel now.)
There’s a whole discourse on Writing Illness that I’m always inclined to be skeptical about. I’ve written enough on my own childhood surgery to be all out of brainspace for details of everlasting scars, and generally physical ailments don’t, to my mind, make for invigorating reading material unless I’m paranoid-ly looking for information about symptoms or, more sensibly, hunting for information about treatment.
But I’m now willing to wonder if there’s something to be said for writing from the depths of a fever dream: not with the expectation that such chronicles are necessarily insightful, but that they can act as a sort of physical and mental collage, with thoughts and sensations arising in such unpredictible forms that the result is a possible art form.
Or maybe writing anything, when you can’t do a whole lot else, is simply a way to connect. To make sure that, faraway as the realm of action and achievement seems, the world is not turning without you.
