the skeleton and the fat man

when i am sick i often feel as though i have a fever when i don't. this has always caused problems for me as there is very little that i can describe to a doctor regarding my symptoms other than "feelings" (and starting to talk about "a feeling" is a good way to get ushered out of the doctors office very promptly). just yesterday i stayed home from work sick because i recognised that the deams i was having just before i woke up shivering and covered in sweat were "feverish". i dreampt that i was sick and wandering about the columbia freshman dorms in a dizzy and disroiented state. all around me were gangs of rude a bustling freshmen and i couldn't even stand up straight and when they bumped into me my head throbbed. i was supposed to meet steve and nate under the 125th st bridge but they didn't show and i was too fucked up to look for them very hard.

after making myself breakfast and drinking coffe to stave off the headache i felt a wave of a strange dizzyness creeping up on me. i thought that it must be over soon and that the fever was breaking. it wasn't just dizzyness but also extreme disorientation: my perceptions and my conciousness felt altered. i felt as though the room i was looking at was somehow different from the room that is my living room normally, that my body was different from the one i normally inhabit, that my personality was that of a stranger.

as i was walking back from the bathroom i thought, i won't be surprised to find myself suddenly on the floor right now.

i lay down and was sweating, could feel tears leaking from one of my eyes. then it was over. then it started again only worse. this time i went to bed and had the old physical hallucination that i remember from sicknesses in my early childhood: i keep imagining a clawed skeleton and a fat, rounded figure. these two images sickened me. they are my feeling of my skeleton inside my flesh--especially in my hands where the skin is so much closer to the bone, they feel like horrible claws weighing heavily against the bedsheets. elsewhere, where my limbs are thicker, they feel like get fat bulbous masses. this was accompanied by a perceeved shortness of breath, increased heart rate, and a feeling of panic. i thought that maybe i was having a stroke, i guess if i want to be taken seriously i should just call the whole thing a panic attack.

i also remember from the sickness of my childhood i was in this insane state again and couldn't stand to be around my father because i knew that he was the one who had stolen the blocks that we were going to use to build the great pyramid. in another instance i threw a fit because i thought that frog and toad from "frog and toad" were going out in toad's automobile and I knew that they were going to have an accident and that someone was going to die.