To be perfectly honest, I can’t think of a single recommended use for a virus, either the computer kind or the kind I have right now that floored me for the past five days. The computer kind damages expensive hardware and ruins expensive software, and serves no purpose I can fathom beyond usefulness in acts of evil. And I do not recommend getting sick with a virus. Every viral illness I have gotten over the past two decades has been, for me being a diabetic, potentially fatal.
But the book that Raggedy Clown and Baby Clown are displaying here in a vain attempt at marketing was written during a continuing siege of virally-induced bronchitis… Six times in four years. Writing benefitted from lost work time and extended usage of sick days from my teaching job. Some of my most creative work has happened because of bizarre dreams dreamed while having a fever.
Idiotically I leaped out of bed with a feverish inspiration in the middle of a mostly sleepless night to write down a song, as if I had any business trying to be a songwriter. I had listened earlier in the evening to a compilation of sad songs on YouTube obtained by typing the words “sad songs of the 80’s” into the search box. I listened to a totally gawd-awful mess of weepers because in the book I am now writing, Sing Sad Songs, the main character Francois sings almost exclusively only sad songs. That listening session must have caused just enough brain damage to make me think I could somehow compose a worthy sad song of my own to horrify readers with as an original song written by the character in the book. Clever idea. Impossible to carry out with my croaking toad-like musical abilities. I can probably polish up the poetry to an acceptably awful level, but the tune half-heard in my dream is now completely lost and inapplicable.
So, on the whole, I would have to say I have been decidedly unwell. But, overall, it has not proved to be a barrier to my creative work. It has really only served to make the strange little imaginary realm I live in a little bit stranger.
This is, of course, not a medical dissertation, or any sort of health and wellness advice that I am not qualified to give. But it would be ironic if lots of people suddenly re-posted this essay and it ended up going viral like my post on visiting a nudist park did.
The worst experience I got from this summer’s food delivery came at the hands of a fellow school teacher. I had to deliver faculty lunch to an elementary school in the last week of summer school classes. It was a large lunch with two bags of burgers and a tray loaded with drinks in flimsy cardboard cups. It was a short drive from the restaurant to the school. But when I got there, it was a school with many entrances and kids playing on two different sides of the building. I went to the door I thought the Uber navigator was directing me to. I knocked. When I got no answer, I called the lady who ordered everything. I told her I was at the west door. She told me that I had to find the main door on the south side of the building. So I managed to juggle the two sacks and the easily spillable drinks to three different doors on the south side, all locked. I called again and was told I must have the wrong building, so I went to the school building across the street and found an office building with only kindergarten and daycare kids present. I called again.
More Powerful Than a Potassium-Rich Banana
It is a time when we need a hero to step forward. Of course, we are always in need of heroes. There is so much in our little lives that depends on the strong among us to shield us from the darkness that fills the universe. And heroes come in many forms. There was a time when I needed a hero to step forward and deliver me from evil in the Emergency Room in Pearsall Texas. I was there because I was suffering from a severe lack of potassium in my bloodstream. You don’t realize how important balanced potassium in the bloodstream is until you don’t have it. The shakes, the pain, the fog interfering with my cognitive functioning would all have overwhelmed me permanently if the banana doctor had not run a potassium-rich IV directly into a vein in my arm and then proscribed bananas and apples in my diet when he let me go home without an expensive hospital stay. I never learned his name, hence the epithet of “banana doctor”, but he was a hero to me when I needed one.
I think the real point here is, though, that we are forever needing heroes to step up. More than once, as a school teacher, it was me who was called on to step up and do the hero job. Talking on the phone late on a Saturday night to a suffering, suicidal teen, getting between two middle school girls and a leering stranger on a field trip in San Antonio, facing down a berserk child with real metal ninja throwing stars in a school hallway and getting him to run away rather than pursuing his target… gawd, looking back, I should’ve been scared out of my wits. Don’t tell my mother that those things really happened.
And maybe that is the only place we should really be looking for heroes, inside ourselves. Believe me, there is no Superman or Wolverine in the real world outside of the one in your own heart. And that one will step up and answer the call if you sincerely need him… or her. Take it from a guy once known in high school as “Superchicken”. Now there’s an inspiring superhero name!
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