dangerousmeta!, the original new mexican miscellany, offering eclectic linkage since 1999.

I get single-minded.

When there’s an awful job to be accomplished, I put on a set of mental blinders, and career onward to get the job finished.  This was a mistake on Saturday, when I went out to clear the remainder of the driveway.  I got half done, and began to slow my breakneck pace ... allowing the sweat to cool my body, catching a chill, and bringing on a miserable cold.  When you own layers, use them! Stupid of me.

So now I’m sitting here in bed, a magnificent feverish mucous-manufacturing machine.  Probably delerious, too, which makes weblogging more fun. 

I haven’t been near ‘net news for a while, so some things stick up like sore thumbs.  Bush’s intent to increase troops in Baghdad, we get three stories of Homeland Security-style ‘fear’: Port Miami, Gas in Manhattan (it is across from NJ’s tank farms, after all), and dead birds in downtown Austin (people used to poison pigeons all the time in big cities without having town shut down). Interesting timing. “Remember, we need to fight them ‘over there’” will probably be drudged up again.  Did the word go out to scare the electorate again, or is this merely a slow news week, requiring some sensational nothing-stories?  The media could dredge up a ‘bubonic plague’ story here in NM virtually every week of summer, with the statement, “It’s likely not bioterrorism; authorities have neither confirmed or denied.” I hear William Randolph Hearst yelling for a headline, with lots of insinuating adjectives.  As the characters say in “V for Vendetta” ... “Bollocks.”

[Later: What did I tell you?]

I can’t get my entire body comfortable.  My trunk is hot, my feet and hands cold.  Cover them up, I sweat to death.  I’ve been told by my wife that I am nothing so much as “House”; unshaven, grumpy, goggle-eyed, hoarse deep voice.  Perhaps not a coincidence that he is also a Princeton character, albeit fictional.

We have odd creatures in our back yard, after this snowstorm.  The canales (wooden gutters from the roof) have formed icicles and ice dams, which, during the day, melt and fall to the ground.  They build up into the most miraculous forms ... such as only a huge snowstorm can supply.  Under one, there is the shape of a giant frog-faced lizard. The other had a 5’ sombrero, which devolves during the day into a torus.  The light on the lizard is particularly good in the evening; if I have a chance, I’ll pop a photo. The ice that builds up is substantial and heavy, I’m fervently hoping the flagstone in the courtyard has not been damaged.

Blow a pint.  Still green.  That’s good.

I keep picking up books, reading a chapter, putting them down.  Switching books because one author’s voice is boring after a short period of time.  DVDs get cloying. Music is dull.

An unresponsive stupor, sitting staring at patterns on the wall, seems the most entertaining. The texture of the curtains fascinates; perhaps my visual acuity is heightened.

Ugh.  Cooling cycle again.  Under the covers.

Why in the hell am I typing?  I’m bored.  I haven’t been sick enough to be stuck in bed for at least a few years.

While I was gone, I see Karl tagged me to tell you five things about myself that you didn’t know.  Here goes:

1. I’m a cross-dressing Liverpudlian transvestite.

2. I windsurf in the Passaic, and I smell like the 8th level of Dante’s Inferno.

3. My big toes sport little handlebar mustaches.

4. There is a 40-ton statue of Ronald Reagan in my bathroom, complete with offerings of Berty Botts Every Flavor Beans.

5. I ferment puddle water from the Bosque into a tasty libation.

Did I fool you? Probably not. Wonderful where the fevered mind takes you. Okay, I’ll try again.

1. My high school nickname was “Prune,” gifted to me because “your eyes crinkle when you smile.” Not very auspicious, in the dating years.  Suffice it to say: Girls, 100, Prune, 0.

2. I’m beginning to disdain post-link-and-comment weblogging. My ‘need’ to microsurgerize the news, or read such postings, is gone.  Long form is still attractive, however.

3. I actually enjoy shovelling snow.  Moreso than weblogging, at the moment.

4. I once helped support a presentation in the Gulf & Western Building to Simon & Schuster and Paramount, and the client forced myself, my producer and my tech into a broom closet, complete with no lights and stinky mops, for the duration of the presentation.  S&S wanted to come off as technologically capable, and didn’t want Sumner Redstone and the rest to see we were doing the work.  I’ve been stuck in some bizarre situations, but that took the cake.  That I put up with that kind of treatment, might surprise some.

5. I have a quilt that my great-grandmother made, in the backwoods of Tennessee.  It is one of my most treasured possessions.  And warmest.

Heating cycle. Uncover.  I’m going to take a nap.  Back with you later, perhaps.

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