Photo by Douglas Jordan, M.A.

This post is being brought to you today by…the flu.

Hit hard on Tuesday, tried to rally on Wednesday, and now it’s Thursday and I’ve withdrawn from everything, the DayQuil and the cough drops and the Elderberry soothing syrup, and am just riding this out like a chariot in flames through the Coliseum.

In short, I can’t be responsible for anything I write.

Visions are coming…

My fingers turn into pipe cleaners and I go door-to-door to clean people’s pipes ten at a time but everyone’s just had their pipes cleaned a few days ago sorry no thank you but the taxidermist’s son still invites me in saying please help him to reattach the eyes on the walnut then twists my hands into barbed wire and I chase him into the parlor and fall through a trap

door

and land inside a room filled with my childhood toys and they all come to life and perform my favorite play “The Simpleton’s Hamstring” and to their faces after the performance I offer nothing but effusive praise but in my review for Entertainment Weekly I give them a C-minus and thus am stricken with terrible guilt which manifests as me pushing an ox in a wheelbarrow too small for an ox but yet I truck the whole enterprise  through a rent-a-car parking lot looking for the ox’s wallet when the asphalt

gives way

and I fall through the earth until I’m home again and my wife is here hello there what? forcing my mouth open and shoving DayQuil and cough drops and Elderberry soothing syrup down my throat and shutting down the computer and whisking me off to bed

but

one pipe cleaner finger is still stuck to the mouse and still listens to my command and moves the arrow to hover over the blue Publish tab…