Shit

(Disambiguation) for "Shit", the interjection to last night's performance by the Mets, see Roy.

In case anybody was wondering, I spent my time, between Thursday, 12:30 AM and Saturday, roughly 54 hours later, either prostrate, or in the bathroom, or in transit between the two. Regular readers will know I'm too fastidious for a blow-by-blow (or chunk-by-chunk) recap, but suffice it to say there's a rather mean-spirited virus out there with a hatred (if I may anthropomorphize) of anthropomorphs, and really, who can blame it? Plus the damned digestive terrorist had struck me, like Proust's misapprehending invalid (I made it through page 2!), just as the little hand began agonizing its way back down to dawn, and I was left with no one to fuss over me, the choice of a guest-room bed too short and sheet-less or a couch too narrow and home to a fourteen-pound cat named Stinky but nicknamed Gandhi for no small mastery of passive-resistance technique for my pathetic attempts at sweat-drenched sleep, and a downstairs toilet whose antique flapper arrangement had chosen just this week to begin entangling itself in the jerry-rigged clip I'd lovingly fashioned, causing it to refuse to shut off roughly one flush in two, causing me to get back up off the couch and jiggle the goddam thing, only to return to find the cat had resumed his chess Grandmaster occupation of the middle, at which point it didn't matter since I was urgently required in the bathroom again. I believe I can say that before this demonic mutant perversion of that Life that everyone seems so crazy about was satiated not a single molecule of anything resembling nourishment remained in my GI tract, and I believe that toward the end of this opening sixteen-hour segment of the ordeal I was actually wicking moisture from the air just so I could throw it up.

This was followed by about twenty hours of sleep interrupted every couple hours or so for a selection from the surgery diet menu in a bid to stay hydrated, during which I kept dreaming the same dream (nothing meaningful, just something about software facial recognition and the Pythagorean theorem). Every time I closed my eyes the same thing started up again. Before long I would have swapped it even for more puking.

Anyhow, eventually I started feeling somewhat human, and I got some solid food (omelet with tarragon and parsley from the garden and some very old asiago pressato from the back of the fridge) last night, and the fever broke for good, and the road to recovery looked straight, downhill, and festooned with bluebells until about 4 this AM when, after a couple minutes of fitful tossing my wife got up and ran to the bathroom...