well, here it is again: sick. But I figured out something this morning, sitting on the new canyon-view porch, watching the bees go about their business in the tree-tops: this illness has been exacerbated by the onset of my seasonal allergies. A lightning-bolt revelation, I assure you. But as I now sit in my bed, ingesting different medicinals for each affliction, I must confess my own shortcomings. This combination has me beat, today– I have called in sick.

Certain of my aquaintances have remarked, over the course of my life, on the frequency with which I get ill. I usually deny it, try and cite the many days of health; my robust, bearish stature; my adroitness at the deployment of chi, from my esoteric kung-fu training; my attitude towards life, and the power of positive thinking in general. I am not sure people are convinced; even I, alas, am not…

You see, I have gotten sick, often, most my life. I find it rather irreconcilable with the image I have forged of myself since puberty, but a lack of reconciliation is merely a chasm in life– it doesn’t go away because you cannot fathom it. And so it haunts me, like a childish, whispering shadow of yesteryear; a pale, asthmatic child who used to fall asleep to the sound of his own lungs, wheezing in an alveoli chorus.

I do not know why my constitution ebbs behind my otherwise potent and enthusiastic participation in life– I only know that if someone is sick around me, I will get sick too. It might have something to do with faulty piping– the ear canals, the sinus cavities, the ear-nose-throat traffic interchange… a failing that used to be corrected every year or so with the surgical implanting of extra “tubes” in my ears, to aid in drainage. And perhaps it is not the fault of my constitution, but rather the brackish, bacterial cess-pool of my head where liquid stagnates and microscopic life-forms thrive. Who can tell?

Anyway, though– it does make resonant something a mentor of mine said just recently– that of all the times in history, the best in which to live is right now. I try to imagine what I would have been capable of in battle, were I, say, a Norseman in the early Middle Ages: allergies and illness, with little medicine to calm the symptoms, would have probably meant an early grave (can you imagine the sneeze that would wrack my body, render me confused for a moment before being run through by the blade of mine enemy?); at the very least I would have been ostracized as something less than a man, incapable of my duties.

So I am thankful for the small measures: that I have Thera-Flu, Claritin; and a job that allows me to email them and say “Will you put up a sign? I won’t be coming in today”.

And now, as whatever profundity I had hoped to impart slips from my fuzzy, medicated fingers, I bid you a good day– as for me, I go to nap, to rest my flagging constitution and drain the mucous dam in my head.