Sick!

So whether it is COVID or not it doesn't matter. I am in no rush to confirm with a test, because tests can be misleading, so I'm just acting as if it *is* COVID, because - as of 4:30 AM last night, beyond any denial or debate, I seem to have gotten sick. 

Whether it is a cold or COVID, I cannot say - it feels just like a mild cold, at this point. It's the first cold, the first illness (cancer notwithstanding) that I've had since late 2019: all the hand washing, mask wearing, social distancing wasn't for nothing. I've actually kind of forgotten what being sick feels like.  

But something's caught me, now. I woke up too hot, with shivers, in a way that made me suspect I might have had a mild fever during the night. I have a swollen, sore feeling in my throat, a small amount of congestion in my sinuses, and a general weak, foggy feeling, combined with a blinky bleariness in the eyes. It really could just be a cold - but it's definitely something. I made Erika breakfast, saw her off to work, and went back to sweat in the bed from about 9 to 11:30. I feel no better, but also do not feel much worse.

It's rather startling to me how many people I know have gotten sick the last few months - Facebook friends, musicians, etc. For the first year of the pandemic, I remember frequent Facebook memes, presumably generated by conspiracy theorists, asking people to report if they actually knew anyone who had COVID - the implication being that the disease wasn't real. Zander Schloss, in my interview with him on Stereo Embers, talks about people chanting in Florida that COVID isn't real, which show was the one he figures he caught his own case at (only Greg Hetson of the band seems not to have had it yet). While I'm *not* given to conspiracy theory, and didn't ever toy with the idea that maybe it was all fake - I did kind of understand where people saying such things were coming from, because through the period of maximum panic about COVID, it seemed very far removed from my peers and I. Barely anyone had it.  

By contrast, now, there is barely even mention of COVID on the news, compared to the start of the pandemic; it's all high gas prices, murder, and occasional war-in-the-Ukraine. There's no indication that I've heard of returning to lockdowns or mask mandates or so so forth - maybe I'm just not paying attention to the right places, but the prevailing wisdom seems to be to return to normal as best we can - essentially to pretend that it's all over. Are the numbers good, bad, etc? I don't know. ER's are presumably as crowded as ever; no idea how the ICUs are. But I don't even glower at the maskless on the bus or at the mall, these days, because - though I myself do still wear a mask in indoors public spaces, just to be courteous to others, in case I have the disease and don't know it - there is no rule requiring people to mask up, or do anything else. Some of the old dears who guard the door at thrift stores I go to still insist everyone who come in use hand sanitizer, reflecting a two-year-old model of how COVID spreads, via fomites - but presumably it gives them some feeling of comfort and control; who can begrudge them? Oddly enough, the same stores are no longer requiring people to wear masks - not that they necessarily help to stop the spread of COVID, either. (I have had friends declaim conclusively that they don't, but they still make intuitive sense to me, so...).  

Anyhow, how curious, then, the inverse of the above is true: back when there was maximal public concern, almost no one I knew had COVID, but now in the face of minimal public panic and regulation, suddenly half the people I know on Facebook are posting photos of negative test results.  

Ah, well. "So it goes," I guess Kurt Vonnegut would say. I'm going to have a coffee and settle into a  novel - reading Shaun Hutson's somewhat twisted killer fetus thriller Spawn. I have tons of unfinished writing projects to keep me occupied, too, have my books and my poetry (and movies) to protect me. I'll weather COVID (or this cold, or whatever it is that's found me) as an illness-within-an-illness, as a smaller thing I will get through in the face of a larger picture of recovering from cancer surgery. Hope I can keep my wife from catching it, whatever I've got. 

My next two pieces to get published will be a twofold Doug & the Slugs-related interview with documentarian Teresa Alfeld, one part of which will appear here, one part of which will appear... elsewhere. I will break the news when it's online. 

Now it's back to Shaun Hutson and the twisted entertainment of Spawn. Weird to me that, as a devotee of horror, I had never heard of him before this year - the book was an accidental thrift store find, one of three early novels - which fetch big prices on Abebooks in these editions - that stumbled across at a church thrift store in Burnaby. Later, I might also look at the film adaptation of his early novel Slugs, which I see is on Tubi - and which I also scored at said thrift store, along with its sequel, Breeding Ground.

Who can complain, when there's quality entertainment to be had?