Sunday 12/11/22
Not what I intended in these pages for tonight, but I think I am getting sick. I cannot afford to be sick in the literal sense. I've been in the bad habit of sitting around in wet clothing after my workouts. Today I stayed outside after running 3000 stairs and kept doing push-ups (200 today and yesterday, and also ran 3000 stairs yesterday). Then I get back and I don't use the heat because I try to save money and I sit at the desk and I work before I shower. This is unwise and I will break the habit. I especially can't be getting pneumonia.
When I feel like I am getting sick I have a course of action that usually works for me and which I attribute as a main reason why I don't get sick--by which I really mean, sick enough to stop-- that much. (Really just a couple times this century.) First I drink lots of water. I pound water. I pound lemon water. I become a walking cove. I also ingest massive quantities of Vitamin C staring with about ten 1000 mg Vitamin C pills. I call this scurvy-in-reverse. My methods may be atypical, but they seem to work for me. I've been doing them since college, and now I don't drink, of course, and I think that also helps. Not that I don't drink when I start to feel sick--that I don't drink at all. The body and immune system and one's powers of recuperation are strong, I believe. I don't know this with airtight scientific knowledge. It's just what I believe or believe for me.
I have a high tolerance for feeling bad--I always want to die, and it is my work and quest that are all that keep me going, and my refusal to let these people win--in other ways. When one form of pain is constant--and the form that comes with this being my life is total--others blend in. You deal with them and don't let them slow you.
But I will be drinking a lot tonight. I get after it--we're talking like two gallons.
I've been concerned that the Government Center stairs are too easy for me, so today I upped the pace because I thought it was important to be out of breath. Whenever I feel like slowing down, or not heading out to the stairs, or not wanting to write yet another work, I think of these evil people. That's all I have to do.
Tomorrow I should do this Roberto Clemente op-ed, finish the essay on Children of the Stones for And the Skin Was Gone, and get back to my Christmas story.
I am warm to the touch but I don't like to take my temperature. Just like I never took a COVID test. It's mental. I don't like to give in or defer. I believe the mind has considerable influence over the body. It's the mentality of the Zulu warrior. I took my temperature with the pneumonia in 2016, but that got rather hairy, with the two hospital visits and the sheer agony throughout my body and the 106 degree fever.
But even still, during that horrible sickness I gave myself a deadline for when I would be back, and I reached it. I barely reached it, but reach it I did. Two weeks, said I. And then on the morning of the fourteenth day, a much weakened C-Dawg was back out and about. Within another week, he was on his way back to doing his stair routine. A number of people told me I'd be sick for a long time, unable to do anything, and the effects would stay wth me for years, and maybe the rest of my life. I remember being much annoyed by this. As I've written many times, I detest a defeatist attitude.
Today also marks 2345 days, or 335 weeks, without a drink.
Listened to Frank Sinatra's Christmas recordings, then read Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White at Starbucks while drinking green tea, and fittingly the first snow of the season began falling just after it got dark. I spent some time just watching it come down, swirl, settle.
Mystery in White is one of my very favorite books, one I read every year, like To Walk the Night. Interestingly, they were both published in 1937.
The cover below of the first edition of the American version--which I would like to acquire a copy of someday--is misleading. Four people, not five go to the house together. At first. Others arrive, but not in a group of five. Also, it's snowing and daytime when the group of four does arrive--snowing so much that one of their number almost walks head first into the door of the house. I do quite like this cover, though and I've thought highly of every book I've read by Farjeon.
