Hoo-dawg. I sure wish I could say that I’ve spent the past several days doing feats of rare talent and cunning, but I’ve mostly been screaming incoherently at my computer and watching the ‘Star Wars’ trilogy. (For the record, I think Mark Hamill may have been badly miscast. He has his moments, but for the most part he’s just a misproportioned troll with an irritating voice and a bad haircut. Or maybe I’m having a bad day, since I’ve seen the trilogy at least four times and never found fault with him before.) Oh yeah, and I spent most of this afternoon with glue between my fingers and newsprint under my nails, making a pinata. Not just any pinata, but one for the darling of the family and the apple of everyone’s eye, my brother’s best friend, who’s turning 18 this Saturday. Thus, Al and I thought it appropriate to fashion a pair of papier-mache breasts which the birthday boy can whack with a decorated stick to spill out condoms, fake money, and Hershey’s Kisses (and you can guess which ones were mine, Al’s, and our mother’s ideas). By thumping my head against a wall till it left a bowl-shaped dent, I was able to recall my eighteenth birthday, which involved exactly the following: two dozen roses, a one-seventeenth sized replica of a Volkswagen Beetle, standing in line to buy about six textbooks, a refund from the first movie theater we went to, two free drinks, and a headache. Oh, and a slathering crush on the guy I am now seeing. Hmm. Guess it wasn’t a total wash after all.

My train of thought has derailed completely from pigs to ducks. Now here’s a question that I’m sure has occurred to every sane person in the Northern hemisphere: where are Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s parents? Come on. They spend every cartoon traipsing around with either Uncle Donald or Uncle Scrooge, having adventures with snow forts, giant squid, treasure hunts, etc, etc. So, what, their parents just abdicated the responsibility of raising their children in favour of leaving them with their uncles? I don’t even think I need to look up the statistics for sexual molestation of children by close relatives. There is definitely something wrong with Disney. Either that, or there is definitely something wrong with me.

There may be an entirely new problem in the works, folks. A Vietnamese family friend gave us some excellent spring rolls, to which my father did the following: stir-fried for about ten seconds, just till they turned brown, and then threw into the toaster oven for a further five minutes. They were great, but - and I think I will have to quote my brother on this one - “Are they supposed to be this, uh, pink?” It is my scientific conclusion that five minutes and ten seconds of cooking time aren’t quite enough to render frozen spring rolls safe to eat. Oh, but you don’t have to take my word for it (ah, Reading Rainbow, your glory days all too brief). Here I feel inclined to quote from Arno Karlen’s ‘Man and Microbes: Disease and Plagues in History and Modern Times.’

“In 1619, the Unicorn sailed in search of the Northwest Passage, the fabled water route across North America between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The crew might have been forgotten, like many others who tried and failed, had it not been for their peculiar end. Sixty-one of the sixty-four crewmen suffered an agonizing death in Canada’s frozen Hudson Bay in 1620; most were buried in unmarked graves near Churchill, in Manitoba. Historians long repeated the guess that they had died of scurvy. That disease, caused by severe vitamin C deficiency, killed countless seamen until the late eighteenth century, so the guess seemed plausible.

“In the 1970s, Canadian historical writer Delbert Young became suspicious of the diagnosis. He learned from the memoir of the Unicorn’s captain that the crew became sick after eating raw polar bear meat (not for lack of fire, but because Europeans considered raw bear meat a delicacy). Infected bear meat, Young knew, had recently been identified as the killer of Swedish explorers who in 1897 had tried to reach the North Pole by balloon; decades later, their frozen supplies were discovered, studied by a Danish physician, E.A. Tryde, and found to contain Trichinella parasites.

“Today we think of potentially deadly trichinosis as caused by contaminated, undercooked pork. Once widespread in the United States, it became uncommon and then returned in the 1970s, mostly among Southeast Asian refugees who ate pork raw or lightly cooked. Trichinella, though, is not only a pork parasite. The worm and its cysts infect such carnivorous mammals as bears, foxes, and walruses, especially in cold climates.”

So now it’s a toss-up as to whether I’ll die of trichinosis from those lovely undercooked spring rolls, or from suffocating to death because the flu virus has induced my body to fill my lungs with fluid. Hooray.

Well, hoo-hah. Another day, another facet of this vicious little weapon of a flu. Frankly, I thought I hadn’t woken up this morning at all - I thought I’d died overnight, somehow made it to Heaven, and everything would turn out all right in the end. Then I made the mistake of lazily turning over and, in doing so, accidentally poking a foot outside my quilts, which promptly froze solid; and a moment after that I realized that I wasn’t, in fact, hearing the angels singing; it was a Philip Glass concerto playing on CBC to wake me up. For the record, I like Philip Glass quite a lot. Viral diseases, not so much. Human bodies are such idiotically capricious things. I wish I were a floating blob of ectoplasm instead. I mean, come on. When was the last time anyone heard of a spirit-being catching the flu?

Twenty minutes ago I discovered that my mother has a problem with my usual friendly greeting of ‘Hi ho!’ I mean it in the kindly, Muppets-newsguy, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves type of sense. She, on the other hand, thinks I’m saying something more like “Hello, prostitute!” Sigh. Another commonly-used slang word has just become anathema in our house. My brother and I are no longer allowed to say any of the following: fricking, freaking, frigging, bugger, dick, and ho. I can’t wait till I move out.

So I wake up this morning with what appears to be one of those tequila cactuses (cacti?) wedged in my throat. Yessir, it turns out my cold didn’t go into remission, it just beat a temporary retreat to get supplies for another attack. Or something. Now my throat is too sore for me to swallow so much as a sip of water, AND it’s snowing, AND I still have things to do today. I swear some malevolent spirit is just pissing down the back of my neck…

Anyway… in the absence of this actually “working,” and also in the absence of my pal Y2K who is normally on-line at this time of night and who fixes everything that drives me crazy about computers, I am just going to post whatever I feel like and assume that it’s showing up somewhere on-line. S’like, what the hell. In other news, in case I ever forget where I stole the name of this blog from, it’s from ‘Time’s Arrow’ by Martin Amis - my literary God.