Night Vision

Happier times, Curt Kobain...

I am just finishing a 36 hour stint in bed, my guest the entire time was gut wrenching pain. Despite my inability to cover a Nirvana song with reasonable success, as it turns out, Kurt and I have something in common after all, chronic stomach pain. Except for an attempt to get to my office this morning, I have been lying in my bed for what seems like an eternity. The heat of my laptop burning my loins day and night. I was delirious, I had thoughts, I had visions.

Lying there, I began to wonder. If I died, how long would it take until someone found me? Cobain lay in his garage attic in Seattle for days, until the cable man found him, and he was an international rock star. I lay in bed for almost 2 days straight, the phone rang once. It was a telephone survey call. I wanted to talk, I guess, keeping my new friend on the phone with queries as to the weather in his part of town. I envisioned my corpse rotting, unnoticed for weeks on end. The other tenants finally getting the landlord to do something about the stink from down the hall. A coroners gurney wheeling my covered body out the front entrance. The locals chatting idly as they watch the horror, "Such a nice mannered boy, must have been drugs," the stories would mutate into something fantastic. And then, finally, a new family, viewing my recently emptied home with scrutiny.

They say in times of intense physical trauma, or mental stress, that you can have visions. I've seen it in cliche, inappropriate representations of first peoples culture in the movies. You starve yourself in the bush or something like that for a few days, and get visited by your spirit animal, and you figure it all out. I don't know if it's true or not, but I was visited by a hamster. Fitting. It was at the edge of my bed, it was digging, franticly digging into the mattress. It stopped for a second, it looked at me, whiskers twitching, sniffing the air as insanely as it was digging only a moment earlier. Then it went back to ripping a hole in the mattress, where it crawled inside and never came out. I awoke a few hours later, without realizing I had fallen asleep. The mattress was fine, no holes.

The cramps are just starting to subside now, a day and a half after the whole mess started. I think I'll go get a Big Mac, maybe play some guitar. I am alive, if anyone was wondering.