The I’m Glad It Ain’t 1918 Influenza Blues

splicetoday.com — Last week I was laid low, clobbered, by a combination of influenza, bronchitis and a mystery third infection, and in the early morning before receiving medical attention, I spent three hours flopping in bed, alternating between chills and a fever that was around 104 degrees. Slipping in and out of a hallucinatory haze, I’d no idea what time it was, except that it was still dark outside and the birds hadn’t begun their celestial dawn harmonizing. I’m meandering, but tough toenails: these are my hallucinations and you can simply stay or go. Oh, forgot: the first time I’d had such a weird series of dreams due to illness (that I can recall) was when I was but five years old, tossing and turning in bed one night, clad in green cowboy pajamas, and I remember standing knee-deep in sand at Brown’s Beach in Huntington, unable to swallow for the excruciating pain. Along came Jesus, dressed in traditional flowing garb, with the hippie-length hair (and since this was 1960, there was no jazz about J.C. being black, female or trans-gendered), and he touched my forehead, stuck two fingers down my mouth and removed a splinter the size of an immense oak tree. Good thing I was a youngster at the time; otherwise I could’ve delivered sermons about the devilish flu from a pulpit. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a vivid or dramatic hallucination—not even during my teen years under the influence of mellow mescaline or Mr. Natural squares of chemical mischief—and it does make the sequence (described below) from last week seem a bit tepid by comparison. Mar 21, 2011 View in Crawl 4