If one is going to be sick I highly recommend having a fever.
A fever keeps you warm, it gently blends reality and hallucinations into a fabric that can keep you amused for hours; best of all, it’s is a wormhole in time that transports you from “before” to “after” without having to bother with all the intervening daily annoyances of life.
That pretty much describes my last week: I remember meeting some new people, a guest arriving, a gathering with way too much green involved, seemingly endless series of dreams having to do with banking software, and of course the usual giant Martian spiders and man-eating porpoises.
I’ve come to realize that by carefully reviewing these memories I can usually filter out the real ones from hallucinations. For example, I’m pretty sure the meeting with new people was real because I remember it either occurring in my office or a cathedral in Argentina–since I have found a new icon that I didn’t have before it is a safe bet that I actually met these people, and based on my health I’m pretty sure that he occurred here.
The next memory is a little harder, it has something to do with a redheaded toy soldier on a horse–since I have not stepped into anything untoward, I’m guessing this might be a hallucination, or at best tangentially connected to a real occurrence.
The next one is a no-brainer: in it, I am dressed up in green like a giant leprechaun, my house is filled with a strange mix of people including the usual suspects, a bunch of people with a Japanese connection including at least one Uruguayo who works in Japan (???), and even some people who knew St. Kitts and Nevis (one of my former residences) intimately. I also remember lots of green food, most of which I never got to try–I specifically remember sushi rolls and I was never able to reach: damn. Obviously, this was the central hallucination for the entire week, because snippets of it kept repeating almost daily.
These repeating themes were interspersed with the ongoing nightmare about banking software. The red headed toy soldier on the horse also kept blinking in and out. (Most of the time it was to fight off the giant Martian spiders and the man-eating porpoises.) Now that I think of it, there was also a really disturbing nightmare about trying to buy a car here–I will have to recount that another time, I don’t have nearly enough strength to tackle it today.
For someone who never touched drugs, even in the 70s when they were really popular, I must have had my share of hallucinogens last week…
Hi David
Sorry to hear you are sick. Hope you don’t have the dengue fever that I have been reading about.I have read that it is in BA and Salto and all over Paraguay. Although 1 case in Salto and 1 case in Montevideo I was thinking about coming down in a few days for a couple of weeks. I kind of wanted to travel all around the country visiting the northern towns. What is your opinion? Get well soon.
>>Nothing so mundane as Dengue–this is from my 6 year battle with a Staph infection that I may finally be winning. As to Dengue, it seems pretty limited, check out http://www.uruguaydailynews.com/2007/03/23/mosquito-invader/ on our sister website…
The Southron
Left by suomiamerican on March 24th, 2007
I had feared exactly that your long absence from posting was due to illness. Sorry to hear that I was correct. But glad to hear that you seem to be doing better.
>>Thank you! The good news is that most of the pain these days is coming from the healing process–regrowing the skin and flesh eaten by the Staph infection. The bad news is that it strill hurts like fire.
The Southron
Left by futurexpat on March 25th, 2007
Konnichiwa Davito-san!
Greetings from the land of the rising sun! Sorry to hear you haven’t been doing that well. My friends and I had a great time at your place for St. Patrick’s, met lots of interesting people and drank that funny looking beer…
We flew out the next day to Japan and after several inconveniences made it here in one piece (cause of the summer time change in Uruguay, our tickets where marked one hour later than the actual time at the day of the flight, luckily Carrasco airport is not that big… while flying from NY to Tokyo, a passenger had to be sent to a hospital and we ended up landing in Edmond, Canada for about 1 hour… missed connection in Tokyo… etc), it took us a total of about 48 hs from the time we left Mvd. to our arrival in our house in Kobe.
By the way, we have a blog you might like to check out http://croguay.blogspot.com it’s mostly about ourselves and very family oriented but there are a couple of good pics from time to time.
Hope to keep in touch with you guys and I wish you the best of lucks into becoming the uruguayos you want to be. I fully support your work and found the book to be very accurate so I’ll be forwarding it to my friends.
If anyone ever stops by in Japan, drop us a note!
Natasa & Gaston
Left by gpetroce on March 25th, 2007