Month: February 2025

And so, on the tenth day, I decided to go to the Emergency Room. It wasn’t just that I was bored of being sick by day 10 — although, please know, I very much was, especially given that what had seemed a slow-but-sure march toward general health got utterly derailed by a weekend relapse — but that, by the tenth day of being sick, I was feeling as if the whole “taking it easy in bed, having liquids and hoping for the best” thing wasn’t really paying dividends. At least if I went to the ER, I figured, they’d flush my system with IV fluids and probably give me some antibiotics, and that would do something.

Funny story: I got no IV fluids, nor did I get any antibiotics. I did, however, get told that because I hadn’t gone to see them within the first 48 hours of my infection, they couldn’t really do much for me, and the best I could really do would be to take it easy in bed, have some liquids, and hope for the best. The irony.

Of course, this being the US healthcare system, it’s not like this ~5 hour adventure left me with nothing; I patiently await the bill for however many hundreds (thousands?) of dollars it cost for me to sit in a room for hours and get ignored by other people doing far more important things for people in far more distress than me.

That last bit isn’t entirely sarcasm; one of the good things about going to the ER was the context that, in the grand scheme of things, I was pretty well off. There was a woman who was in such pain in the waiting room that she couldn’t stop talking to herself, just saying please please please fuck oh fuck please make it stop fuck over and over and scaring a bunch of kids in the process. (Not all kids were scared; one, with the self-righteousness of someone who’s never been told no in an appropriately scary way, declared loudly, “That woman is too loud and she should stop talking because it makes me upset and she’s cursing.”) An old couple cuddled each other the entire time they waited, both looking so afraid of the world I legitimately couldn’t tell which was actually waiting for their appointment.

As I left the ER, my hopes for anything close to a speedier finish to the sickness dashed, someone passing in the corridor grabbed me by the arm, saying, “Your eyes are glassy and very bloodshot, do you know you’re going in the wrong direction for the emergency room?” Lord save us from well-meaning good samaritans whose simple faith in modern healthcare is as strong as mine.

One of the few high points of being sick and somewhat delirious for awhile was that I had unusually vivid dreams, and such unbroken sleep that it was as if I’d wake up immediately after something had happened that I needed to remember. That’s how I can remember, for example, a dream where I met Gus as a newborn puppy again, for example, and then he was sitting there next to the way he was the last time I saw him, in some strange moment where I got to say goodbye to the him he was at the end, as well as at the beginning. (It was somewhat fulfilling given that I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye in real life; it also didn’t feel like it was an end, in some way that I can’t put my finger on, however.)

There was another dream that I woke up from, repeatedly, and then managed to slip back inside almost immediately over and over again across the course of a few hours, and it’s something that’s stuck with me ever since. The initial set up was somewhat science-fiction-ish, or comic-booky: a parallel Earth had been discovered and, somehow (who needs details?!?), destroyed. All of its inhabitants, however, had come over to our Earth, so suddenly everyone was living beside an alternate version of themselves.

What the dream was actually about, however, was that it had been decided that the world couldn’t support twice the population and so that parallel population were to be killed off in, again, some ill-defined manner. That didn’t mean that I was dreaming about some crazy adventure where people were fighting for survival, though; instead, I was there just very aware that entire cultures were going to disappear as a result — songs, stories, and more that were just outside of our understanding and experience that would suddenly not be there because an entire world of people was going to stop existing.

I’d wake up, and think to myself groggily that I didn’t know where this was coming from and I needed to just sleep deeper and move past such thoughts, and then I’d be back on this overpopulated world, where I was all too aware that so many people’s work and dreams and art were going to disappear, forever.

And then, I got very sick.

I mean, I got the flu, but I got a bad case of the flu — bad enough that I was basically delirious for a day or so, with a fever spiking the entire time, and my brain refusing to finish thoughts that it started because it was so much easier to get distracted by cartoon elephants which I objectively knew were not inside my brain, but it certainly seemed like it at the time. (Honestly, I wish I was joking; I am not.)

It was one of those things that, when you’re right in the middle of the worst of it, you just kind of take it because, really, what’s the alternative? I remember small parts from the worst day, whether it was the pride I took in calling out sick almost as soon as I woke up because I was already feeling out of it — given that I could barely manage a full work day when I did return, days later, it was a good call, but that kind of maybe I should make the smart choice for myself and not just assume I can handle anything if I try hard enough thinking does not come naturally; I felt as if I’d leveled up in self-care terms — or not being entirely sure if I was awake or asleep at one point, but knowing with supreme conviction that if I moved even an inch, I would be pounced upon by any one of a number of animals who were surrounding me on the bed at that moment, as if they could somehow keep me from getting worse. Who knows, maybe they did.

Just two days earlier, I’d been talking to a friend about how bad everything had been in the past few weeks to that point, leading up to the death of Gus after more than 16 years. “At least it can’t get worse,” I joked, and then immediately wished I could take it back, because even by saying that, I felt as if I was inviting some future calamity I could not foresee. Lying in bed, sweating and incoherent and wondering if the next cough would bring up phlegm or make me shit myself, the closest thing I came to thinking clearly was telling myself, see? This is why you should never tempt fate.

It’s difficult to overstate how ultimately surreal my recent work trip felt, by the middle of it. I had received the news that Gus had died, and I was not there for it; I was also staying at a hotel in the middle of nowhere — literally, the only thing within walking distance was the office I was visiting every day, and those two things were separated by a highway — and it had been snowing so that even simply being outside for a few minutes felt treacherously cold. I was working too hard by far (generally starting somewhere around 7am and then working through 8:30, at which point I went into the office until around 5, and then back to the hotel to work until 11 or so), which I knew at the time but also didn’t see an alternative to, and hyper-aware of how lonely and sad I was feeling at every single moment, yet also finding no way to change that for any considerable length of time. It was, as I told someone a couple days after coming home, a week that felt like there wasn’t actually any upside, just different flavors of things going wrong.

(That’s a melodramatic way of looking at things, and also one that’s obviously untrue to some degree, but also a reasonable summation of what it felt like at the time.)

Adding to the feeling that all of this was somehow beyond reality was the small detail that the hotel I was staying in was covered in cutesy affirmations that felt entirely, hilariously, at odds with my mental state throughout the entire stay. Written on the wall above my bed was the slogan “Sleep well, dream big,” for example; “Going UP?” written beside the button for the elevator. There as one point where I was climbing the stairs to my room on the day I’d gotten the news about Gus where I saw that the stairs said, “Don’t think of them as stairs, they’re little hurdles for you to overcome,” and I read that and thought, fuck right off.

There was one point where I read the “dream big” just before turning off the light for the night, knowing my sleep schedule was wrecked and I’d have a fitful few hours failing to sleep, and I had the sense that I had accidentally slipped out of the real world and into a very poorly made American indie movie that saw itself as social satire from 20 years ago. In many ways, that feels like the best way of telling you all how bad it felt — that Zach Braff could have wandered into the scene at any moment, and that would have made sense on some level.

I know, I know; we’re getting here late this month. (Sorry.) There are fewer movies on the list this month than had been the case for the months prior, for a good reason; I spent a chunk of this month catching up on a lot of the TV I’d missed in 2024 because I was concentrating so much on movies! The temptation to start a separate list of TV shows watched and binged this month was great, but there’s only so many lists I can do without succumbing totally to my anal attitude. However, briefly: The Righteous Gemstones and The Bear proved to be every bit as entertaining as I’d hoped, and newcomers Severance season 2 and The Pitt were everything I’d wanted them to be — and that’s not touching on reality shows like The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (still the best) and Love Island Australia and Love Island All Stars. But, wait. You came here for the movies, right…?

If the first month of the year is meant to set the tone for everything that follows, it’s safe to say that I’m lowkey in fear of what 2025 is going to end up becoming.

January proved to be a barrage of work things, exhaustion, and various other difficulties that left me in a daze more evenings than not, feeling overwhelmed and beaten up by the world. There were a couple of weeks in particular where I legitimately lost track of what day it was, purely because so many things happened on particular days that I honestly thought I was a day or two later in the week, because how else could it all have fit? The worst part of the month was, almost certainly, when I found out that my 16-year-old dog Gus was sick, and I waited a day for test results while assuming the worst.

(Weird time-traveling note; I originally wrote this at the end of January when we didn’t know what Gus’s long term prognosis was; he of course died last week. It was surreal to realize I’d have to come back and edit this.)

Add to all of these things that were directly impacting my life, what was happening nationally as we got the return of a President who seems hellbent on destroying everything good and decent in the world. Those initial days after Trump was sworn back into office felt cartoonish in the degree to which he was issuing orders that were so destructive and selfish; it was at once scary and in some strange way almost funny because what the fuck is happening. (To be clear: I know it’s not actually funny, but the volume and cruelty was so surreal as to provoke the terrified laughter response.)

At some point during the month I was talking to someone about work things and our failure to properly plan out what 2025 was going to look like by the end of the month. “January doesn’t count,” they argued, “it’s like a practice month to get ready for the rest of the year. February is where everything begins.” Maybe we can take that attitude into the real world, and hope that things are going to get better. The alternative is too sobering a concept to consider, right now.

In retrospect, it’s almost creepy that I spent the day after Gus left the last time feeling as if I was mourning him.

I shared custody of him with my ex-wife, and he’d spend anywhere between a month and six weeks to two months with me, and then the same with her, and it was this unusual but comfortable rhythm for everyone involved. We’d communicate about what was happening with him if anything unusual happened, but otherwise, it was just what we did: he’d be with me for awhile, and then he’d be gone for awhile. Except that, the last time he went away, I found myself weighed down by his absence to a degree that just felt more heavy, more inescapable, than ever before.

I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I was very upset by it; I even said to a couple of people that it felt as if I was getting a preview of what it was going to be like when he was dead, because I was just so aware that he wasn’t there. It felt as if his ghost was haunting me, but even saying that now feels melodramatic; saying it at a time when he was still alive felt even more so.

There was nothing happening at the time that should have left me thinking about his mortality other than his age; he didn’t seem sick in the slightest, and was in fact still running around and jumping up for attention and through excitement when he was with me the last time I saw him. Nonetheless, the day after he left, it felt like he was dead and I was saying goodbye. Little did I know that, a couple weeks later, I’d get a text that he was suddenly sick in a way that felt bad, or that two weeks later again, he’d be gone.