No, no, my droogs! I did not abandon you again! I did not! Rather, I was cruelly withheld from you, held in a prison not of my making!

(Who makes their own prison? Foolish people. Don't make your own prison, folks. Unless you're the Saw guy, in which case: totally make your own prison, because if you don't, those people will fucking run like crazy, and you won't be able to play with their bones like Tinkertoys after you pull their spines out. But you probably knew that.)

No, what happened was: I got fucking levelled by the flu. I mean, I got crushed. Here's a direct quote from the wife: "I've never seen you this sick." Here's another: "I guess I'll go to work again while you lie there, not making any money." And another: "Do you plan on wearing pants at all this week?"

Last Sunday it all began when I woke up and realized that someone--possibly the wife--had replaced all the bones in my body with magnesium rods. I hunched around the house in a misery, looking like Early Man, and marveled at certain phenomena such as feeling a ripping pain across my forehead when I moved my eyeballs to the side too quickly. I settled in my big-ass leather chair and prepared for a long week full of low moaning.

I had no idea what was in store for me. I called in sick on Monday, still feeling achey and horrible; the fever was starting to cycle up in intensity. This, of course led to Phase II: Chills. Chills are sort of fantastically schizophrenic in that even when you are certain that you are going to burst into flames, you can still be sitting there merrily shaking away and teeth a-chatter. When you combine this sort of thing with, say, diarrhea--though you might not have had anything to eat in 24 hours--it gets even better; for nothing pleases the terrified, vibrating buttocks like the cold kiss of plastic, and then you get to clatter around pathetically atop the toilet, sweating and shaking as your afflicted bowels feebly spit into the bowl in some sort of cheerless parody of defecation.

Then, if you're classy, you write about it on the internet!

I called in sick on Tuesday as well after a vivid night of fever dreams; in one, I was attempting to solve an intractable math problem (for me, that's something like a "How many red socks does Jerry have if he mends 3/5 of a red sock every eighth week, and shops at Threadbaresocks.com during Lent?" kind of thing), and then suddenly I was a member of the Roman senate and the senators were all screaming solutions at me.

Tuesday also brought The Cough. Thus far, I had avoided any kind of congestion or respiratory hijinks. That was all over. It has inspired a short poem, in fact.

O cough! Rage o'th' lungs!
Wake the wife!
Shake the rafters!
I beseech thee--
Bring up no phlegm at all.

Thanks, lungs!
You fuckers.

The thing about being sick and being a smoker is, you don't get to choose to just be one or the other for a while. You get to be both. And so, try as one might to wait as long as possible, there you find yourself, wrapped up in a knit blanket, standing outside, shivering with the chills--exacerbated by the fact that you're outside--and grimly trying to manage a few pitiable puffs in between wracking, gut-ripping coughs. It's pretty much the most pathetic thing you can imagine.

I had made the decision before the awful vapors that I describe, but having the sickness cemented it for me: I have gone out and got a prescription for Chantix. Chantix is some new hot-shit drug that is a smoking cessation aid; I got it from my dentist, who is nothing if not enthused about having to chisel the fucking garbage off my teeth so much. He might also be interested in my not dying, but I don't know him that well to claim that. I started this stuff a week ago.

It has interesting side effects! A lot of them are gastrointestinal, so I'm still getting some prime nervy moments in the bathroom, such as last night, when I suddenly and quite unexpectedly vomited up an entire bowl of soup. So I still get to experience these peristaltic cataclysms without having to be sick! Chantix also has a host of neurological side effects that are possible: "vivid dreaming" is one, and if I can survive being screamed at by Roman senators about story problems, I guess I can handle that. Some of the more serious ones now being reported are things like "suicidal ideation," which frankly? Not that surprising. "I'm going to fucking kill myself if I don't have a cigarette in five seconds" is hardly a new thought for the dedicated smoker.

So I'm feeling a lot better. I'm looking forward to Chantix and not smoking to make me feel worse. Somewhere in the middle I expect to find normal. Right?