Good morning, campers! Hope you’re looking forward to a better day than I am. For me, this is day four of the Martian Death Flu. Four days of not being able to breathe through my nose. Whenever I try, it sounds like I’m blowing bubbles through a straw in a glass filled to the top with gin, and wow, do I wish I could suck one of those down right now. But I can’t, because I have to retain the eye-hand coordination needed to blow my nose every five minutes or I’ll drown. I swear, if I can’t breathe normally through my nose by sundown today, I’m gonna jump off a bridge. That’s a joke, y’all. I am not thinking of harming myself. And it’s not like there are any bridges in the Madison area high enough to do me in, so what I’d have to do is throw myself in front of a train or bus. But I won’t. I’ll just sit here all day, gasping for air, because life always finds a way, or some uplifting bullshit like that.

I don’t have the flu, by the way. Just a head cold, but nobody ever got as much sympathy for having a head cold as they did for having the flu. Head colds are something akin to “the sniffles” suffered by old ladies who daintily blow their noses into flimsy monogrammed hankies for a day or two before shaking it off and resuming normal life. There is nothing dainty about the way I have to deal with whatever bug I’ve got. Sometimes after blowing my nose, I have to get a mop. And the flu kills. I’ve definitely come close to death a couple of times with this bug, waking up half-suffocating in the middle of the night. But no, this isn’t the flu. There’s no nausea, no chills, no cold sweats in the middle of the night, just a nose so stuffed-up that the only way air can get through it is by lining up one molecule at a time. But I’m gonna call it “Martian Death Flu” anyway (tip of the hat to Dave Barry for that one).

So it’s one more day of binge-watching Daredevil and Peaky Blinders. Gotta finish the series before sundown if I’m gonna jump off that bridge.