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thick olive green ærosol
Friday, January 6 2006
I had to drive all the way down to Gardner today for a housecall that I should have cancelled due to illness. I was feeling bad, but not in a way I couldn't mask. I'm sure the client thought I seemed very mellow and soft spoken, but he probably just thought that was my nature.
On the way back north through New Paltz I stopped at the Taco Shack for a couple burritos (one for me and one for Gretchen), since the Taco Shack makes the best burritos in the entire region. Waiting for my order in the grimy dining room, I felt terrible. The worst feeling was my bowells were being desperately tested from the inside for a weak spot. (I use the passive voice out of a sense of propriety that I shall soon abandon.) It may surprise you to learn that I had any appetite at all given my condition, but I'd eaten nothing at all today and I was famished. It was only my lower intestines that felt like they were plucking themselves from a coil of concertina wire.
As I sat there with my back against the wall, another customer came in and as the door opened I felt the wall flex outward a half inch or so. Evidently a fan inside the restaurant was continually depressurizing the place, filling the outdoors with a smellscape of San Francisco's Mission District.
Later when I saw Gretchen, she told me that all the people who'd been at the New Years Eve party in Silver Spring were now suffering from lower intestinal distress. Everyone, that is, except her, the lone vegetarian. Perhaps, she suggested, something had been wrong with the fish. Mind you, Gretchen is also sick, but it's a completely different illness, some sort of head cold with symptoms like coughing, sore throat, and massive production of mucous.
The news of the widespread intestinal illness contributed greatly to domestic tranquility in our household. Now, at last, there was confirmation that my symptoms matched those of other sick people exposed to the same vectors. It seemed less likely that either I was feigning illness (as a way to flake out on caring for Gretchen) or that my symptoms were purely psychosomatic.
My symptoms were a little extreme to be of the strictly psychosomatic sort. They manifested most dramatically as diarrhea explosif. I'd sit on the can and instead of a normal plunkety-plunk there'd be thick olive green ærosol acting much like pyroclastic flow. It would emerge with such force that it would pressurize the "atmosphere" in the semi-confined space above the toilet water. This had the unpleasant effect of forcing the ærosol into any cracks available as it sought an escape path to a region having a lower pressure. Generally I'd have to perform some sort of cleanup operation afterwards. Foul little droplets would have managed to find their way to all sorts of places beyond the confines of the toilet itself.
In good news today, the telephone started working again. Its DSL functionality, however, was still absent.
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