Doing the Nasty

My wife and I haven't been sleeping together.

For the past few nights, I've slept on the couch or in my office, curled up under an old blanket or with some random pillow that just doesn't feel right. At the moment, my relationship with the wife is such that if I see her, I walk in the other direction. If she dares enter a room with me, she knows she'll get nothing more than a finger pointed in the other direction. I barely have to speak to her anymore. She knows to get the hell away from me. And, try as she may, she can't bring herself to speak to me either.

Strep throat will do that to you.

I don't think I'm breaking any martial vows by telling you my wife's tolerance for pain is equivalent to a three year-old who knows doting adults are watching. She'd rather suffer years of water boarding than stub her toe. Of course, she is also the only member of this family to drop a seven pound weight out of her crotch, so I can't say too much. However, if I were going to say too much, I might say that she handles the pain of strep throat...well, I guess about like anybody else handles the pain of strep throat. I, for one, can't remember ever having been afflicted with the illness. My mom, ever the champion of the Mother Class, insists I did have strep as a kid and likely handled it pretty badly. She also tells me that it feels like someone took a heavy grade sandpaper and snaked out your esophagus. My wife just says it hurts worse than any sore throat she's ever had.

Yesterday her doctor, in spite of a "false negative" strep test, diagnosed my wife with a "nasty throat" and sent her home with some antibiotics. Where normally I might be a bit intrigued by the concept of a spousal nasty throat, in this case, I was willing the believe that the doctor--again, in spite of a negative test--was likely right. And even if she wasn't right, I still wasn't going to go anywhere near my wife.

Now, in normal cases, I'd be a real fucking hero about all of this. If it meant I had to lick said "nasty throat" to prove my love for my wife, I'd do it. I have a fairly decent immune system and only get sick once or twice a year. This time though, I can't afford to take any chances. I'm getting ready to go on an eleven day international trip, during which I figure to be working 16 hours a day or so and traveling on every mode of uncomfortable transport you can imagine (aside: there should be a law that coach must be described as "coach" and not "tourist class" or some other "class." Coach is coach and it means it will suck, no matter how you look at it).

Before the "nasty" diagnosis, I was avoiding close contact and deep high-school-style kissing with my wife. Now, she gets me in thirty-second shots (that's enough snickering from the peanut gallery). That is, I pop into the bedroom to bring her water or broth and noodle soup. She takes it, rasps something that sounds like "I love you" or "I wish you were dead" and crawls back under the covers. And me? Well, I'm Mr. Mom for a while. See, my kid's pain tolerance is better than my wife's, but he's still only two. And with me getting ready to hit the road, the wife can't really afford to give the kid Nasty Throat.

And so now, as the kid naps and I pound through my work-work, I realize I'm unshowered, unshaven, and generally disgusting. I've slept about 12 hours out of the last 72. I actually feel okay so far. However, if this continues for much longer, I'm going to have to see about finding some home remedy for the Nasty.

More on the upcoming trip to come. The kid is stirring and I need to wash myself.

The Swiss Cheese Incident

I've been cooking with swiss cheese a lot recently. You know, a little cordon bleu, a little casserole, a little this and that. Cheese fetishes run in cylces, I think, and recently I've been feeling a little Swiss.

Saturday was one of those days when nobody should've been messing with a big block of swiss. Up late the night before, I was cooking for 25 people, suffering a work crisis that threatened to (and did) last for 36 hours, and helping my neighbor move five years of living into a 18-wheeled moving truck. There was no time for messing around with any kind of cheese, let alone one as haphazard as swiss. And yet I was. For lack of better sense, I was grating an entire block of swiss for a monster cordon bleu-y pasta salad I was whipping up to go with the grilled fare. In the end, I got a little carried away and grated the whole damned block. Work was pinging me on the IM machine, the moving truck guy was idling in the cul-de-sac, and the wife was giving me a look that said, "I love you, but if you don't put down the damned cheese, I'm going to put it in a hole you don't even know you have."

I had too much grated cheese.

My keen eye noted this as I filled up a bowl with enough pasta salad to feed 60 people (that eye wasn't so keen) and started cleaning up my work area.

"Something is wrong with the garbage disposal," the wife said.

This, as I have noted before, is my wife's verbal cue that something isn't working for her. Nine times out of ten, whatever it is works just fine. This time though, she was spot on.

Something was wrong with the garbage disposal. Flipping the switch produced a sound a lot like you get when you...ah yes, jam up some sort of motor. It was a strained "I'm about to burn out like a motherfucker" sound.

And this was a bad time for such a thing to happen. I had scraps of just about everything I'd been cutting that morning. Egg shells littered the countertop. Not to mention all the cheese.

Wait, where is all the fucking cheese?

Well, it's in the garbage disposal, of course.

Now, I don't fault the wife for putting about two cups of shredded swiss in the disposal. I would've and have done the same thing. However, this timing was especially bad.

After two minutes of using the old Garbage Disposal Reboot trick, I finally just shoved my hand in the small hole and felt for the problem Sure enough, the whole of the blades was gummed up with melted swiss cheese. It was a decidedly non-neutral situation.

Eventually, with the help of a spoon, my wife's smaller hands, and a lot of hot water, we got the thing running again. The crisis, however swiss, was over.

Later, after the work debacle, the move, the BBQ, and a few too many beers, I got to wondering about the swiss cheese. A simple sentence kept running through my brain:

You eat that stuff.

Now, given, I rarely eat two cups of cheese at a time, so my chances of gumming up the works to the same degree are slim. With that acknowledgement, I also don't have sharp blades spinning at several thousand RPMs in my gut.

Methinks it may be time to switch cheese for a while. It just might be time for something in the way of a Stracchino or Teleme.

Monsters under my mucus

I'm not sick. I'm not. I mean, yeah, I have some issues I should be dealing with, but who doesn't? At least I'm not sick. In fact, I've been fortunate this cold and flu season. Four days of wishing I was dead (in Las Vegas and Cincinnati, no less) was all I had to endure. It was a bad-ass illness, to be sure. For me, though, it was up and down relatively fast.

Relatively, you say? Well, yeah. Most people I've met have been dealing with it for a long, long time.

Right now, I'm sitting in the dark. I mean dark-dark. No lights, no TV, no radio LED display. If not for the light of this computer screen (and the ever-so bright light of my achey-breaky heart), I couldn't see anything. And maybe it is the dark that has me a little paranoid, but I'm thinking there has been a little something odd about this season's colds and flus.

Now, it's a given...I get around, govn'ah. I meet all kinds of people in all kinds of places. And, yeah, many of those places are not the cleanest of joints. Regardless, I've not known many people who have not suffered some dread disease this year. And most of them have described it as a lingering death march from the local drug store, to bed, to work, back to the drug store, to the doctor, and eventually to a priest for last rites...you know, just in case.

Now, maybe it's just that my fortunate life has led me to be acquainted with people all over America. Maybe I'm just a little more exposed the maladies of the country at large. Maybe it's just that I'm sitting in the dark at 2:30am. But, this year seems a little odd to me. It seems to me that more people are getting sick this year, they are getting sicker, and they are staying sick longer.

I remember one paranoid night in my garage about 12 years ago when I was talking to a med student friend of mine. He laid out the case for how our overuse of antibiotics was eventually going to make us terminally vulnerable to germs and bugs. I'm not saying that's what we're dealing with here, but I've seen more otherwise healthy people bedridden this year than I've ever seen in my life.

I got rather lucky. While my early December bout with the bug made me wish I dead for 48 hours, I recovered rather quickly. Many other folks have not fared as well.

So, I ask you, delicate reader, am I just being paranoid because of insomnia, darkness, evil spirits, and the ghost of Christmas past? Or do you think something is going on here? Because, I'm not one to go looking for monsters under the bed, but if they start knocking in the middle of the night, I'm at least going to take a peak and make sure they aren't sharpening their fangs for me.

Alive

Indeed, I think I am, but not so much that I'm ready to bet the farm on it.

For those who don't know, I'm just back from a trip to Las Vegas. And by "just back," I mean that I got home 24 hours ago. The balance of the time has been spent in a coughing, sneezing, shivering fit that I assume can only be rivaled by the pre-death throes of someone afflicted with some government-sponsored monkey disease.

I've just recently found the strength to crawl out of bed. It's been more than 24 hours since I've eaten. During that time, I've sipped two glasses of water. Funny thing, I spent four straight days with my brother, a freakin' doctor, and I get this sick within 12 hours of sending him on his way.

Hopefully I'll have more to offer later. For now, yes, I'm alive. I have a monkey-disease, but I'm alive.

Secrets

There was only one other guy there. He was unkempt. His shirt hung untucked over his gut. The mop on his head hadn't been cut in some time and it was obvious he'd combed it in a way to hide an ever-receding hairline. We looked at each other, but said nothing. There hung in the air an unspoken unease with how we were handling this particular ugly necessity. We were both there to satisfy something that was embarassing. If we actually went through with it, we both knew it would give us a certain amount of pleasure. We also knew that if we did it, we wouldn't want anyone else to know.

I didn't nod at him and he didn't nod at me as we looked at our choices.

***

I turn 33 years old today. As I said to a friend the other day, birthdays have reached a point at which they are no longer exciting, but neither are they all that depressing. Thirty-three, I've come to accept, is not all that old. Sure, my life has changed a lot in the last decade. Sure, I look and feel older than I once did. But, when it comes down to it, barring bus accident or an unfortunate run-in with a billiards gambler and a pool cue, I stand a chance of living for a good long while if I can take care of myself.

"Condolences," my friend said.

***

I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was looking. The other guy left me alone. I knew I'd been standing too close to him. If someone had done the same thing to me in that situation, I would've left, too. I was sure there was some protocol for these situations, but I'd never been there before. I didn't know. At that point, I just wanted to make sure I didn't see anyone I knew.

I feel dirty, I thought.

The wife had sent me out to pick up a few things for our only child and I ended up considering something that, if I actually went through with it, I would never tell my spouse about.

A man's needs change, the rationalizing part of my psyche assured me. It's okay. What happens here, stays here.

***

I saw Tracey over the summer. She's as tall as me and is humble about how beautiful she is. No one who has ever met her, least of all me, can deny that she is one of the most striking and approachable people you will ever meet.

I hadn't seen her in a long time. We'd parted ways under good terms many years before. This summer, she came into town for a mutual friend's funeral. Many of the mourners retired to a bar after the service. Though I knew we were in a crowd, I had to say something to her. After an hour, I walked through the crowd and waited for her to finish a conversation. Finally, she turned to me with a small smile and pulled me into a warm embrace.

The last time I saw her, she had dressed and done her hair differently. In the years that had passed, she'd worked in the big city. Now, she was startlingly cosmopolitan. She told me she was going to work for a boutique PR firm in the city.

I looked different, as well. Five years before, my hair was longer and made-for-TV. I had no facial hair and I weighed 15-20 pounds more.

"You look good," she said. She reached out and fingered beard on my chin. "I love how you're not doing anything with the gray."

***

Vanity is a bitch.

What's weird about it is, back when I was regularly in the hunt, I paid litle attention to my appearance. My hair grew to my shoulders, my weight was directly proportional to the amount I was drinking (a lot), and I would go days without making the acquaintance of a razor. Even when I was still working in television (the time of my life when appearance was pretty important), I didn't take exceptional care of myself. I could've looked better than I did.

Since the kid was born, I've found msyelf inordinately concerned with how I look. Though a wedding ring is welded to my finger and I rarely go to bars where women hang out, I spend a lot more time in front of mirrors. I trim, scrub, and preen. I found a fancy, bald man who knows how to cut my hair and does it with precision (if a little too much time and proximity).

It's all a little sad.

***

This is sad, I admitted to myself. I shouldn't be doing this.

Now alone, I could satisfy this male necessity. It would cost more than I expected, but if I paid in cash, my wife would never know. Ever since Tracey had returned to the city, I couldn't think of anything else. My wife couldn't help. As much as I loved her, she was powerless.

You know, spoke my reasonable side, she'll know. She'll either smell it on you. Or she'll find some sort of CSI-trace-transfer scientific bullshit. She'll know.

I couldn't argue. Chances are, even if no one saw me, even if I paid in cash, even if I was able to be sneaky around my wife, she would figure it out.

Alone, I was forced to make a decision. I wouldn't likely have this chance again any time soon.

I can't believe this, said my rational brain.

And then everything went silent.

***

Later that night, I sat on the couch next to my wife. She looked at me adoringly, like she loved me and would love me regardless.

I broke.

"I have a confession to make," I said.

The look on her face was one of controlled worry. She's put up with a lot in our ten years together. She knows I have a tendency to flirt with the deep end. However, I've never given her any reason to believe I would go where I'd been in the past 24 hours.

"Okay..." she said.

"I spent a little time in the Just For Men aisle at the grocery store today."

My visison was clouded with relief. I'd said it. Now it was out there and I couldn't take it back.

But, the look on her face was more than I could bear and I looked away.

***

In the end, I couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to buy Grecian Formula, Just For Men, or any of the other products on the shelf. It wasn't just the embarassment that went along with it. It was the fact that, if I had actually gone ahead with it, I would've be admitting that I'm actually concerned about not only getting old, but looking old.

Some people might suggest that even walking into the aisle is a tacit admission of defeat.

Me? I'm just proud of myself for walking away with what little pride I have left still intact.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to exfoliate.