Cold Medicine Induced Hallucinations

I think I may have spelled "hallucinations" incorrectly.
Huh. Blogger says nope. Well all right then.

I've been a miserable coughing shell of an actual human for the past three weeks or so, with a cold or allergies or a malicious and truly disgusting phlegm alien taking up unwelcome residence in my lungs. I'm tired. I'm on every cold drug known to man and and an allergy deterrent...and I'm still sucking cough drops like mad (none of which does me any good). This is not a plea for pity: this is an explanation for the possibly-drug-induced weirdness lately.

Blogger says I've had over 25,000 views in the last month, and yesterday for the first time ever I had over 1000. Because Blogger's stat tracker doesn't count traffic to the other pages of the blog, and 99% of the more-than-50 views are on my "about me" page and not on an actual post, I suspect it's a bot. Still, I did a double take today, having been too tired or sick to even look here in the past week. This could be cough-drop drunkenness, after all.

I flew to Houston to meet The Bloggess on her book tour at midnight on Thursday and home at 6am on Saturday because I'm fucking insane cheap and had limited PTO, but I didn't want to miss it. I'm sorry to all the people on the plane who might have thought I was sicker than I am (I coughed hard enough to break some capillaries in my cheeks, so I looked like I had the measles, which is SUPER ATTRACTIVE you guys...I DO NOT have the measles or anything else worse than a cold and allergies, and my cold was already in the non-communicable stage).

Friday night my super awesome friend Jodie and I sat in a very warm (90 degree) back parking lot in a mini-mall, next to a dumpster, behind a medium-sized metal chicken and various curler-headed red dress wearing fans. If you aren't a Bloggess fan that entire run-on sentence made absolutely no sense to you, and for that I'm sorry (not that it didn't make sense...I'm a sorry you aren't a Bloggess fan, because you're missing some serious excellence). I'm not kidding, I thought the chair might collapse under me. The crowd gave Jenny Lawson a standing ovation when she crawled out of the dumpster walked onstage. It was awesome. Her reading was awesome. And I finished my copy of Furiously Happy in two evenings. It's that good. Go get it. And if you meet her, don't be a dick and make her cry like I did (by accident!! When she found out I flew from MN to TX for the signing she teared up, and I said "Oh god, don't cry! I CAN'T BE THE ONE WHO MADE THE BLOGGESS CRY!").

Seriously...all those metal chickens angry with me? No, thank you.

Colds turn me into an 80 year old: I'm utterly wiped out by 6pm. In the last three weeks I think the only reason I saw darkness at all was because it's fall and the damn sun is disappearing. It's pathetic. All that sleep gives me ample opportunity for all the most horrific dreams to replay in cinematic glory in my brain.

I've been eaten by sharks twice (Ok...in all fairness that one may be my own fault. I HAVE been looking into doing a great white shark dive off the coast of San Francisco...but that's another post).

My eyeballs have been taken by spiders as web decorations. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, BRAIN??

The dogs have died in front of me in such varied and horrifying detail I wake up shaking and crying, and I break all the rules and bring Thor up on the bed (even though his panting shakes the whole fucking thing and makes me think of those creepy vibrating beds in movies and D minus hotels) just so I can be sure he's breathing.

I've fallen off cliffs into a black abyss with no bottom six times. I know this one sounds the least terrifying. It is not. This is the one that sticks with me for hours after I wake up, and on the really fun versions I'm joined by some sort of people-are-tasty-snacks type cave creature.

I think it was just my body's way of forcing me into preparations for October's Halloween extravaganza, but seriously...I'm so damn tired. 

Also, the spider eyeball thing was just over the top. Really.