The Medicine Isn't Working

I've got a cold and hay fever and the flu and everything, and I'm sorta wavering in and out, between bouts of crystal clarity and a hot fog that's hard to breathe through, the leaves began to fall from the trees and they sound overly loud, crackling like wood-chips when they hit the ground, the hummingbirds (there's two of them) chase each other around my head a few times, for a moment, and I know I'm a real life picture of a dizzy cartoon character with birds flying around my head, but it doesn't even occur to me to laugh, and so they land (I've never seen a hummingbird land before) and we stare at each other and I can see how small they really are, they're just tiny little birds the size of your thumb.

I think about how cello and violin music is really good, the serious stuff, like the stuff they had in Arcanum, that was all class, man, that's style, that's what you should use in a game, it isn't just classical music that makes something timeless, its that cello and violin stuff.

But I don't really know anything about classical music, I'm like a guy that has never seen star wars or something, when it comes to classical music, I mean, I love Beethoven and I can talk some shit about Mozart and Grieg and a few other ones, if I got cornered, but that's like saying the Beatles were a good band or something, y'know, I couldn't name that music I like from those airplane commercials or anything, that stuff I always think of as Turn of the Century Music, looking forward to some science fictional future full of awesome inventions (which we have, but we lost the music that was supposed to go along with it, on the way, somehow).

I don't know what kind of music the cello and violin stuff I like is, there's probably a name for it, but I've never talked with anybody about classical music, I've never met anybody that knew as much as I do about it, in real life, and I don't feel like I know anything about it, so its just like some strange and beautiful ocean out there that I believe in but have no proof of.

I'm smart enough to know that if you do a Peter-and-the-Wolf type thing, where you tie a character to a theme, then you need to make sure their theme can evolve along with them, or you'll be stuck with static characters that never seem to change or grow, non-dynamic characters.

That's not always a bad thing, sometimes people want characters that are always the same, its comforting, in a way, like your favorite ratty-old t-shirt, the t-shirt that's so worn out that its become almost filmy and ghostlike in places, its pattern is staying the same but its growing fainter, this is how it exits the stage, by fading away right before our eyes, insteada making sharp turns and stomping about, there's something to think about there, but I can't think of the words to take me down those alleyways, at the moment, the thoughts escape me, weighed down by the flu, or whatever it is that I got, I can't follow the things that stay the same and fade away.

I know that its because I'm trying to figure out how sick I am all the time that my senses seem sharper than normal, I'm paying more attention to how they work than I normally would, now that I don't trust them completely.

Normally I just go around squinting at everything all the time, hardly noticing anything, ignoring everything on the sidelines, like the birds and the way that the leaves sound when they hit the ground, that's why its surprising me, its like I've never bothered to listen to them before, never noticed how strange they are.

So in a way, this is like a cool little vacation, a strange little trip, and the way my nose is all raw from our skirmishes with the box of kleenex, the way that my eyes are hot and weary and my head is heavy with fog, the way my thoughts are a like a bunch of logs half rolling and half sliding down the stairs, leaving a trail of black and dirty smudges and bark, well, that is a small price to pay for this temporarily heightened sensory state, right?