It's only been a week since I resolved my inverted sleeping patterns - I was sleeping all day and awake all night, much to the annoyance of my wife, and not exactly thrilling myself, either. Now, I'm awake at 3 AM, wide awake, and frustrated as the dickens, but maybe I have an excuse this time: it's the ague.

I know it's not really the ague. I've a semi-productive cough, a runny nose, headache, a feeling of fatigue, pleurisy, and pain in every joint of my body, especially those of my rib cage, arms, shoulder, and neck. All those are consistent with ague - except that I have no fever, and since my mucus is clear, my sputum is white, I figure there is no infection.

Em, my late first wife, used to get pneumonia four or five times a year, but not infectious pneumonia, lupus pneumonia. Pneumonia is when your lungs fill with fluid, regardless of cause, and she wasn't infected, she was suffering from an inflammatory pneumonia. And maybe I have inflammatory pneumonia, but they've done enough tests over enough years to convince me that I don't have lupus. Mostly my symptoms are due to allergies.

Blame The Rain. Blame Canada

I think it's all this spring rain. Blame the rain. Or blame Canada. I don't really care. I'm miserable enough to be grouchy, not miserable enough to stay in bed, which is a dangerous place to be. I don't know that Blondie and I have the best marriage ever, but we're pretty good friends, and I don't want to screw that up. Finding someone to warm the bed is pretty easy, even if you're an old fart of a gimp like me. Friends, however, true friends, are hard to find - and when you're without a friend, life lacks salt.

So I need to put great effort into not screwing up my relationship with Blondie while I'm feeling like this. People are like pressure cookers; if the regular venting mechanism stops working, there's likely to be an explosion. So if I'm more of a curmudgeon than usual, I hope you'll understand why.

@DigitalShawn tweeted to me "The new stadium is pretty nice, and you can't beat a nice spring time baseball game :)". The way I'm feeling, I could beat anything, even a nice spring day, if only I had a club big enough. He's from the wrong Lancaster, no not Lancaster, California, the other wrong Lancaster, the one in Ohio. He was "Thinking of going to the Columbus Clippers season opener" and I tweeted back that the last time I went to a Clippers game, I had a really nice time, but Derek Jeter was playing, so it's been a few years. Maybe 16 years.

They've Replaced Cooper Stadium?

They've replaced Cooper Stadium? It seemed to be in very good condition back then. Wikipedia is an excellent source of incorrect information, but it doesn't seem controversial to assert that Cooper Stadium was originally built in 1931 but renovated in 1977. The last Clippers game in Cooper Stadium had a sellout crowd of about 16,700 and their new stadium, Huntington Park, has a capacity of only 10,000.

I suppose that if the amenities are right, you could sell a few more tickets, but if the baseball is right, amenities don't really play much of a role. You want a good view of the field, instead of being stuck behind a post, but I don't remember many posts at Cooper Stadium. You don't want a tacky floor, where someone spilled a syrupy Coke, but sheesh, building a new stadium won't solve that problem. And Franklinton is pretty easy to drive to.

It sounds like someone is suffering from Edifice Complex. If your team is doing poorly, you think a new stadium would take people's attention away from that problem. If your team is doing well, you think you deserve a new stadium. And really, a good AAA team is nice to have, but going to a minor league baseball game has as much to do with baseball, as going to a drive-in movie has to do with the movie. It's a social event, much more than a sporting event.

It's A Circannual Rhythm

I was originally speaking of inverted sleep and feeling poorly. Blondie says that for the last decade, I've experienced inverted sleep in late March. I hadn't noticed. What I had noticed was that when Blondie kidnapped me and brought me to Pennsylvania, I stopped getting really sick - not this malaise of ague, but an acute upper respiratory infection, colored snot and everything - the first week of March. I'd been doing that since the late 1950s, and possibly even longer, but I wasn't paying attention. If you're getting sick at the start of March Madness every year, that sounds like a curse.

I'm highly aware that environment leads to illness. It might be that my inverted sleep has something to do with the milder winters here in Lancaster. When I was young, and moved away from home for the first time, I did it right: it was five hour drive at breakneck speeds. The speed limit was 60 back then, and 70 on the interstates, and at night, when I usually traveled, I typically went 10-15 miles over the speed limit. (At night, cops are more inclined to ignore speeders who seem to be in control of their vehicle, so they can concentrate on the more dangerous drunk drivers, who invariably drive well under the speed limit.)

I was managing a new business, and I was grossly undercompensated, which meant I had to scrounge for el-cheapo housing. I found a one-room basement apartment which had a toilet in a closet so small that I couldn't close the door when I was sitting on it - my knees stuck out too far. They put three dinky apartments in the basement, and I realized, after I signed the lease, that there was a window too small for a five-year-old to crawl through, and the only door led around three sides of the furnace before reaching the outside door. If the furnace had ever exploded, I'd have been toast.

Strep Throat Blues

I was only there a month when I came down with a bad case of strep throat. I'm sure the stress had something to do with it. I was so weak, I could barely get out of bed. I thought I was going to die, worried that I might not, and I wondered how long my corpse would rot in the basement before someone discovered it.

Eventually, I recovered. And my wretched apartment wasn't that big a problem as I was only ever in there to sleep. I worked very long hours, and tried to find things to do outside the home in my free time. That wasn't too easy; it was a fairly small city, and mostly people hung out with their buddies from high school. I did, however, manage to accost strange women - not just unfamiliar to me, but strange women - in the mall, and ask them out.

I don't know if it was my taste in accostable women, or if it was the city, but I ended up going with them to religious events. Maybe that was something they taught in the high school - if you're accosted by a strange man, vet him by asking him to a church event.

Samantha One

Samantha invited me to a church post-high-school youth event. It was a fundamentalist church of some sort; I'd never heard of snake-handling before then. You know the joke about the guy stuck in that situation, don't you? He looks around, then leans over and asks the girl, "Where's the rear exit?" She tells him there is none. He leans over again, and says, "Where would you like one?"

A second Samantha was a Roman Catholic. Stand up, sit down, kneel, stand up, sit down, stand up, sing, put some money in the basket, put your left foot out, put your left foot in, put your left foot out and shake it all about. I later went to a Catholic university, but this was all new to me at the time. She leaned over to me and asked me if my fly was undone. "Whatever you say," I replied. I unzipped, then grasped her right hand in my left hand, and inserted it in my fly. She reacted with a jolt, and dug her elbow in my ribs. "Hey, you were the one that told me to unzip my fly!"

Samantha Three

Samantha Three - and no, I don't know why every single female in the city seemed to be named Samantha; I'd rarely run into women of that name elsewhere - asked me if I liked music. Sure, I said. We have a lot of music in our church, she said, and we don't have an organ. We have a piano, but mostly, we have a small band with guitars and drums. Sounded nifty. They also had folding chairs instead of pews, and they were really uncomfortable folding chairs, but that really didn't matter, because we spent most of the time on our feet, on a painted concrete floor. The band was fairly swinging, and they projected the words onto a screen with a slide projector, and everybody was not only singing along to the music, but they were dancing, too.

I may be gimp now, but I dance better as a gimp than I did back then. And I'd overslept, and I hadn't taken the time to eat any breakfast. My stomach was growling, and my blood sugar was dropping, and I was feeling faint anyhow, and I sure wasn't used to all this dancing. My ankles were warning me that my skull was soon to become intimately familiar with my toes. It was at the 90 minute mark, when the preacher still hadn't begun his sermon, that I leaned over and asked Samantha Three how long these things usually run.

Two Hours, She Said

"Two hours," she said. "That's why I asked if you like music. Today, we've got a guest band instead of our regular band, and we're having a three hour service." Only half way through, and I was about to collapse. If only a long-winded preacher would take over, so we could sit, and I might possibly recover. "How long will it be until the sermon?" Sam told me that there wasn't ever a sermon at the Sunday morning service; their pastor saved that for Sunday evening services, so the Sunday morning service could be pure celebration and worship of God's gift to us of music.

"I'm sorry," I said, and I escaped the sanctuary, with a hundred pairs of eyeballs staring at me. I'm sure they were thinking, "Poor Sam. Only thing worse than getting stood up for a date is someone bailing in the middle of a date." And when I got outside, it hit me. My car was at her place. I hadn't driven to the church and met her there. She had me meet her at her house, and then she drove me to the church. I saw a phone booth about a half mile away. I could call for a taxi. On the other hand, I couldn't walk a half mile, not in my present condition. I sat on the ground, leaning against the church, for twenty minutes, to rest up, and then I started walking for the phone booth.

Operator, I Have A Bad Connection

The phone wasn't just broken - someone had torn the handpiece entirely off the end of the wire and taken it. I sat down again, almost in tears. I could see a sign, about a mile down the road, of a restaurant. I sat for a long time, then I gathered up myself, and started plodding down the road. I was almost there when Sam pulled up in her little car. "Hop in!" she ordered. When you're sufficiently beaten down, you don't have much resistance.

When we got to her place, she insisted that I come in. "I cooked dinner. You must be starving." When you're sufficiently beaten down, you don't have much resistance. I went in, and she pulled dinner out of the oven. "I'm sorry," she said, "but it is so hot in here." She reached back, unzipped her dress, and pulled it over her head, and was wearing just a see-through bra and panties. She donned a full apron which, if anything, made her breasts look even more enticing. "Would you set the table?" she asked, pointing to the cabinet with dishes and glasses, and the silverware drawer.

Trading Apologies

"I'm sorry," she said, "I should have given you more warning." I apologized, saying that I wasn't used to standing on a concrete floor, and I was wearing thin banlon dress socks instead of the thick cotton socks I normally wore, and my blood sugar was low from missing breakfast. What I was there for, I said, I really enjoyed, and when I was sitting outside, I could still hear it. If I had worn thick socks and ate beforehand, I wouldn't have embarrassed her like that. But I was having a hard time talking to her face. And it was still hot and steamy in that kitchen, but from the looks of things, you'd have thought she was cold.

I'd have eaten pig slop, I was so hungry, but Sam was a good cook. We'd had little chance to talk while at church, and in the car, I was too embarrassed to say much, and over dinner, my mouth was too full to talk. Sam was strange, but not in a bad way; I really wanted to talk to her, and learn more about her, but as soon as we started carrying our dishes to the sink, she announced that she had to get dressed for something or other, and it was time for me to leave.

Operator, I Have A Bad Connection

I tried calling her, but I got an "out of service" message. I drove over a couple of times, but she wasn't home. I left a message each time on her door. I dressed up for church and arrived the following Sunday 20 minutes before the time she set for our original date, but she wasn't home. I didn't know exactly where the church was that we had gone to; it was 20 miles away, and none of the churches in the newspaper or the Yellow Pages sounded familiar.

I can't say there wasn't a fascination with her breasts, but mostly, I wanted someone I could talk to, and Sam was the most talkworthy woman I'd met since I moved to Wisconsin. I think she could have been a friend, if only I'd been able to maintain the connection. When we're young, we're too quick to break connections. When we're older, we realize that true friends are what makes life worth living.

After eight months, I had the business going fairly well; it was already in the black, and I was tired of it. Starting businesses is challenging and fun. Once they're going, though, I find it routine and boring. I wasn't having any fun at work, wasn't having any fun after hours, and I decided there was no reason to remain in Wisconsin. I gave notice, and found a new business in Indianapolis that was in need of rescue.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
ague - blood sugar - Columbus Clippers - Cooper Stadium - drive-in movies - Edifice Complex - friendship - inverted sleep - pews - phone booth - pleurisy - pneumonia - Roman Catholic - snake-handling - speed limit - sticky floors - strep throat - upper respiratory failure - Wisconsin