Sicker'n Hell

I have been laid low with this evil two-part disease floating around Denver. First you get what seems like a cold for a week, then just as you think you're recovering, it goes into your lungs and you're down for the count. It has been going back and forth across my dept. at work for half a year now, making it sound like a TB ward. My daughter's school is half-emptied at the moment - which is significant if you consider the fact that many of the two-income households view elementary school as day care and dump their kid there regardless of how they feel unless the school nurse puts her foot down.

As if to make up for it, my dreams have been vivid and more bizarre than the court of public opinion these days, what with the poor woman and her feeding tube and Wacko Jacko's pedophile circus (you just watch, if he escapes, he'll move to Sri Lanka with that other famous pedophile, Arthur C. Clarke of sci-fii fame). The press doesn't know which way to point its collective pecker.

Also, I usually take times like this to read a difficult or dull old classic because nothing fosters stick-to-it-ivness like the inability to get up and do something else. This time I'm tackling Dracula. I've already tackled the other two big monster classics: Frankenstein and Moby Dick (though Moby Dick is hardly just a monster story, which is true of the other two, too, come too think of it; and btw, Jaws is a direct rip-off homage to Moby Dick, borrowing the plot and most of the major characters). I'm 3/4 of the way through, and it will be my least favorite of the three as the middle section was really rough hoeing. Once the first newly minted vampire is dispatched, that being Miss Lucy, there's a good 20 pages of "what shall we do next?" until someone asks Van Helsing what to do, and he says, "Kill Dracula now, of course," to which they collectively slap their foreheads to indicate "of course" and go after him, then things pick up again. The beauty (or the drag if you're not so inclined to enjoy it) is these novels take huge side-trips into philosophy about the thing they are battling. In Frankenstein, the most eloquent philosophizing is done by the monster itself (which never gets a name, btw).

My eldest daughter has the same ick I do, so we've been consuming way too much TV. She's again taken a huge interest in the classic Star Treks that I have on DVD. Nothing warms my heart more than to see my daughter embracing the classics. We got the movies from the library, but she wasn't as taken with them, and it's obvious as to why. Though some of the movies are great, they never really captured the tone and pacing of the original series. I think back in the day the joy of having Star Trek back in movie form was so thrilling that we tended to overlook how superior the original series was. You can never go home again, it seems.

Hopefully, when I post again, I won't be a solid brick of snot.