Divine influenza

I am a miserable sack of mucous and achiness and grumpiness. A few days ago I caught a flu. Not sure if it’s the flu. Y’know, the one that’s all the rage and that everyone was talking about… but it’s definitely a flu. So you’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little out of it.

I suppose it’s kind of awesome, this sickness thing; I’m walking around sluggishly in a daze and hoping people take pity on me. It’s like I’m living in downtown Vancouver, except without all the heroin addiction and stabbing. When you’re sick, if you’re lucky enough to be in a relationship, your better half will fawn over you and make you soup, rent some movies, bundle you up and maybe give you a reach-around (or if they really love you, they might bump it up to a rusty trombone).

I guess being sick is also like being old: people feed you, help you dress and change your diapers every now and then. They also don’t listen to what you say and secretly hate you and can’t wait for you to die so you’ll stop complaining and they’ll get all your stuff. I, for one, can’t wait to get old. It’s like having a licence to be a full-time crazy person, and no one gives you shit. For instance, take one guy in his mid-30s, dress him in a rubber trench coat with a boot on his head, have him lurk around public washrooms and just see how fast people call the perv police on him. Then, take the same guy when he’s 70, dressed the same and doing the same thing and suddenly people just laugh it off: “Oh that’s just the crazy ol’ neighbourhood kook, Raf, hanging around the Eaton Centre bathrooms again, being a silly-willy.” That’ll be the day.

I suppose the only problem with being old is that, as an Asian man, while we live long, we don’t exactly seem to age gracefully. Maybe I’m wrong, but when I think of “old Asian dude,” the image that pops into my head is that guy who had all the mogwais in the beginning of that Gremlins movie. So what do I have to look forward too? Having a scraggly white mane and a mole with more long scraggly hairs coming out of it. Great. All I need is an opium addiction and speak in foreboding riddles and I’m all set.

Speaking of addiction, another reason I don’t mind being sick is because I feel less guilty about my substance abuse problem. No, I’m not talking about the butterscotch enemas, because I can quit those whenever I want, okay?! I’m talking about my love for the sweet syrupy warmth of NeoCitran. That shit is liquid gold. It tastes like God squeezed the prostate of a unicorn and sprinkled it with lemon dreams and angel queefs. In fact, I’ve spent so much time sippin’ on the Citran that, much in the same way southern crunk music was birthed out of a regional affinity for cough syrup, I once felt like I was on the forefront of a new musical genre based on the effects of NeoCitran. It had a kind of a groggy laid-back feel that makes you all tingly when you curl up in the foetal position in bed. But, truth be told, I once recorded it and listened back and it just sounded like a guy crying while playing bongos.

But being sick has many downsides, obviously, but more so with the flu. There’s the intense sweatiness that feels like you’re about to go through airport security with a throbbing erection. Then there’s the achiness that feels as though you’ve been hit harder than Gary Coleman’s career. And then, of course there’s the projectile barfing that makes you feel like those melting Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, only in reverse. The worst part is, I got inoculated against the flu a couple of weeks ago. I got a pointy-ass needle shoved into my body and had to go without my wanking arm for three whole days, and for what? I still got sick, I still was bedridden and I still painted my toilet a hideous rainbow of spaghetti carbonara.

So in the end, I suppose that what I’m getting at here is… what am I getting at? Shit, I have no clue. I’m just going to go for another cup of NeoCitran and try not to keep my head from nodding off into the keyboard while I lapse into a dream where I’m an Aztec warrior trying to develop inventive ways of keeping the reptile race from colonizing my butthole.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA