Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Ugh. Woe is me who has somehow contracted a disease. Quite how, I’m unsure. I suspect it might have something to do with the horrible heat of Saturday that left me eating my dinner outside while Josh and Damian attempted to construct a barbecue pit out of about three pieces of concrete and the barbecue that was literally picked up off the side of the road last year, the pit being necessary because the legs had rusted off at some point in the last 8 months. It worked surprisingly well.

You have to wonder what the people next door thought we were doing as it looked increasingly likely we’d start a major fire, but then these are the same people who drove us to the brink of insanity on Saturday morning with eastern-european inspirational rock played so loud I couldn’t hear the radio in my own room, and then who now have placed, in their garden, a severed fish head suspended in a wire cage, so maybe the threat of fire didn’t bother them much at all.

I could sense ilness coming on last night when I began sneezing more than one would usually deem normal, and then from the moment I woke up this morning with a sore throat it’s been one horrible minute to the next. Using the James Hunt chart of symptomatics, we can assume:

Day 1: More sneezing that normal, sinuses fine.
Day 2: Moderate sneezing, sore throat that feels not unlike my neck has been cheese-grated
Day 3: Sinuses bunged up, sore throat vanishes mysteriously.
Day 4: Sinuses pouding, sore throat returns, sneezes until nose bleeds. Day off work necessary to prevent stupid mistakes due to inability to focus on screen or concentrate for five minutes.
Day 5 onwards: Decreasing amounts of snot expelled throughout the day.

That’s usually the order of events. Or rather, it has been since I first noticed that every cold seems to affect me in the same way. I’m looking forward the the throat-soreness being gone tomorrow.

None of this really matters to my beloved reading public, though, I don’t expect sympathy (you bastards) - if you’re reading this, just breathe deeply and appreciate the lack of pain while you can.

This morning, through the sore throated haze, I managed to tie up the loose end of the book Ian lent me, Simpsons-writer John Schwarzwelder’s “The Time Machine Did It.” It has to be said, the jokes are quite funny but he can’t write prose for shit. It’s fucking terrible to read, which is a pity because the ideas are great and plot comes together nicely at the end, it’s sort of a bumbling detective sci-fi comedy in the Dirk Gently framework, he just doesn’t have Douglas Adams’ sense of timing or linguistic prowess. Still, now I can get back to reading A Scanner Darkly, an altogether more impressive piece of work.