Strange

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

First of all, judging by some panicked messages I got, you all got ENTIRELY the wrong idea. I’m not “seriously ill” and nowhere near the point I would consider ER. (Or Dan would consider ER, even.) I’m actually — still — not even sure it’s a “bug” at all and not “merely” auto-immune. Right now, what I have is EXTREME tiredness, some cough (but mostly sneezing) and probably (though I can’t find the thermometer) very mild fever. All of these, alas, are in the repertoire of my auto-immune. Much worse is in the repertoire of my auto-immune, in fact. I have reason to believe one of my doctors, for about ten years, diagnosed me with pneumonia when they were in fact severe auto-immune attacks. (When he retired, the next health care practitioner (actually a male NP) looked at me and said “Oh, it’s auto-immune” and gave me prednisone, which cleared it all right up like magic.)

This is not severe, though, except for my feeling like I’d like to sleep a lot, and like everything is a great deal of effort and also (the almost for sure mild fever) my tendency to get “lost” in the middle of doing something, and the truly weird dreams. (Also the too-hot too cold which alternated all night.)

Also, for those suspecting Wuflu, not only haven’t I lost my sense of smell and taste, but they seem HIDEOUSLY magnified. I put a few grains of pepper on dinner, and suddenly it’s too hot. A no-sugar lemonade mix I normally love suddenly tastes too “artificial” to endure. There is a weird smell in the hallway, undetected by everyone else, which is driving me BONKERS. Etc.

Also, the tests for Wuflu are PRC tests and massively unreliable. I’ll still have one, if I still have symptoms on Monday, simply because it’s courtesy not to join a meeting (on Friday) when I might be contagious.

Right now, I’m trying to get rid of whatever this is by boring it. By which I mean sleeping a lot, or at least lying down in the dark, with my eyes closed. Normally it works.

However I feel slightly cheated, since when I’m in this state my dreams tend to be wonderful fodder for stories. In fact I have an entire space opera earmarked to write from one of those dreams a few months ago.

Last night, otoh, I had a dream entirely in German. This worries me, because I no longer understand German well enough to translate it accurately. (No, I don’t know how I can dream in a language I can’t remember, but indeed I did.) As far as I can tell, one of those dreams kept telling me to “look in the kitchen.” And “It’s important to make cookies.” All of which achieved a magnified, horrific meaning in my dreams. I really don’t feel like making or eating cookies, except maybe meringue, and that’s the fault of one of you (you know very well who you are.)

Oh, yeah, I also had this amazingly detailed dream in which I scripted AND DREW a comic called “Lawdog Takes On The Sharks.” Some of you also probably know why.

It was rather charming. Lawdog was an old-West sheriff in a town populated by shifters who, most of the time, didn’t bother to get out of their animal forms. (Of note here, Lawdog’s Lady was a very cute white kitten, with black markings that gave the effect of a 20s short and sexy haircut, and she wore a dress with little hearts on it, and was the town’s school marm. So, my brain is weird.) The town is invaded by a gang of shifter-sharks, who can in fact breathe air and walk on their fins. (Yes, landsharks.) The cover, which I spent about half the night drawing and painting, was full color of a fox in a vest and gun belt squaring off against a shark standing on his tailfins.

Okay, fine, so I did dream stories, just probably not one I can use. I will confess I’m now wondering if I still have enough art skill left to in fact draw the comic.

Anyway, the reason this might be an autoimmune attack, is that I was trying to get Darkship Renegades out in time, and y’all remember what Amazon put me through last time, right?

It took me longer, because I realized that the front end still read as bizarrely stilted to me as I was afraid it was. So, that got re-written at least some. It still should have been two novels — if I were writing it now — but you know what? Having read it through and sent it out for a last minute typo hunt, it’s not bad at all. It’s not as good as I could make it now, but then again, what is?

However, it was a bunch of contretemps right up to the wire, including having to upload the manuscript for print version four times, before I realized there was no way, with Atticus, to have a page called acknowledgements without it being too long. (I couldn’t change the type for just one page.) So I have a page childishly called “thank you.”

And then, to crown it all, after I uploaded the book, I had absolute and total radio silence from Amazon. Being paranoid by nature, I sat here going “Are they not even going to reject it? Just ignore it.” And then, without even asking for proof of reversal (To be fair, the reversal letter I uploaded before had all the books in it) it just approved them. I’m now wondering if changing the first ten and enlarging the last ten pages did it. Perhaps their bot only checks those?

Anyway, I already feel better, which means I might have been making myself ill with worry about whether it would go through before the end of the month (I’m trying to have at least one book out — re-release or new — a month. Note that I will probably start having two, because I’m writing short novels for the months with re-releases. We’ll see. I’m coming up to speed s-l-o-w-ly, but still better than I was. And yes, it’s absolutely mental to get myself so nervous over Amazon approving the release that I make myself ill. Do you think I do it on purpose? I very much try to stay calm, but I think all I’ve achieved in almost sixty years is to tell myself I’m perfectly calm, while the freakout makes me ill.

At any rate, the whole thing seems to have gone through very easily, so I feel even dumber. I’m baffled, but relieved. It’s here, if you guys feel a need to get it. I’ll put it on the book promo, with my associate link later.

Now I need to finish revising bowl of red to send to betas. But not just now. There’s a nap calling my name. Also I’ve been desperately craving creamy soup and crusty bread. The soup is easy (I’ve bought cauliflower for thickening) but the crusty bread takes some effort, as I have to make it from einkorn, or it will mess up the autoimmune even more. I don’t know if I feel up to it/will feel up to it for a while. We’ll see after the nap.

Sorry for the long, surreal post. More coherent tomorrow for sure. At any rate, don’t worry. I’m fine, just really tired, and only wanting to eat things with barely any taste.

144 thoughts on “Strange”

    1. I’d read Sarah’s mind, not Cthulhu’s.

      I’d take a good while to recover from reading her mind and a good while recovering from what punishment she’d dish out for the crime of reading her mind.

      But I’d never recover from reading Cthulhu’s mind. 😉

      1. I suspect that reading Cthulhu’s mind would be, for me, exactly like “reading” a text in Sanskrit; I’d simply stare at it with a complete lack of understanding.

        1. Chuckle Chuckle

          I read a story, I think by Hal Clement, that had some naturally telepathic aliens scouting out Earth.

          They captured one human and learned to read that human’s thoughts, but it took several days to do so.

          The problem was that they discovered that no two humans “think” the same way.

          So learning to read one human’s thoughts didn’t mean that the aliens could read another human’s thoughts.

          Since their plans for Earth depended on quickly reading human minds, they released the captured human and left Earth.

          😈

          1. I love stories like that, where aliens arrive with invasion plans and either quickly realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, or even better, take stock of humans and decide they’d really rather not mess with those creatures.

            1. There’s one, I never found the original story but I read about, where aliens came to the Earth and people were expecting them to bring us peace and enlightenment. However, it turns out the aliens were warring among themselves to the point where they were driving themselves to extinction whereas we, as just one example, had just use nukes once in war and that in the very first conflict where they were available. We’d stopped.

              They wanted our help to learn to live together peacefully.

              1. I remember that one; IIRC the final comment by the alien showing the Earthman the devastation on the alien’s world was “Please show us how to do it so poorly”.

              2. That’s like hearing the Romanian students at the other table (in Transylvania, no less), marveling that the American Methodists, Catholics, Church of Christ and Baptists were all at the same table, having a nice chat with the Mormon instead of fighting.

                1. At this point, to be honest, anyone of any religious belief has more in common than with the left.
                  Which is why I found myself completely puzzled the other day at a thread by someone on our side that was “Ar ar, those stupid Catholics never read the Bible.” That might have been true in the 16th century, but let’s be honest, at that time MOST PEOPLE never read the Bible. Assuming we never saw a particular passage and have no explanation for it, actually got ME fighting.
                  One thing is saying “I think you’re wrong.” Another is saying “ar ar you’re so dumb.”
                  I’m willing to assume that the whole vexed matter of G-d and eternity has so many aspects, none of them fit for human minds. So, various religions and sects have a PORTION of the truth, and we have to trust and hope for the best. And I believe — hope — He will find a way for those of good will. BUT. Don’t call me stupid.

            2. Or. There is a lot of diversity on our planet. Not just among the humanity population. Imagine alien picking up a “more compliant” specimen species, more willing to be compliant as a test? Dog? Or even a cat (I mean “feed me”, it could happen …)? Then grab the human companion? How well would that go? I think, not well. Reminds me of a short story or joke about alien abduction where the abductee is forced to describe all the problematic types of life forms on planet earth. Starts out with Crocodiles, Sharks, then Bears, Tigers, Oh My, keeps going, eventually getting to skunks. Aliens now pretty worn down, ask “Is this all now?” Abductee says, “Oh. No. Pull up a seat. Just getting started.” 😉 No wonder we don’t have aliens walking around on our streets. Planet earth isn’t safe.

              1. “Earth is Space Australia.”
                …then the human tells them about Australia…
                …then the Australian mentions the stuff, as far as is known, in the oceans…

            3. I’ve read a lot of those, from Dickson’s “Danger: Human”(?) to one in which the aliens found a teenager’s cache of comics and read them as fact; Superman, etc. (Comment: “Creatures who were no less than Gods!”) They didn’t linger. And the van Vogt one in which the aliens resurrected a human and lived (for a short while) to regret it (“The door was locked.”).

              1. There was a story in Analog, a long time ago, in which a cooperative of different aliens came to rescue us from our sun going nova — only to find the Earth already evacuated. They searched, and found a vast fleet, millions of sublight ships headed for another star.

                They couldn’t intercept the fleet. Their FTL starships had no need to accelerate to extreme sublight speeds in normal space. Instead, they prepared to meet these incredibly determined ‘humans’ at their destination.

                One of the aliens expressed some concern about the potential of a race that could, and did, complete such a massive project. Another one joked, “Right, we only outnumber them a billion to one.”

                The last line of the story: “Twenty years later, it wasn’t so funny.”

                2. I remember that story, not from analog but a short story anthology (how I found authors to read when I was a teen). Darned if I can pull up an author name or a title from 45+ years ago. Its one of the secondary authors from the Silver (not Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury being the primary Silver age) but I can’t come up with something.

              2. There was one where humanity and been wiped out by encroaching ice, but had saved a sacred treasure which was found by aliens. When the aliens managed to run the film, it ended with, “That’s All, Folks!”

          2. I remember in ‘The Soft Weapon’ by Larry Niven, one human nearly drove a Kzinti telepath to a breakdown by concentrating on the memory of eating a carrot.

            “Chewing a root! I can’t take it! EEWWWW!!”

            2. Of course the real hero of that is a Pierson’s Puppeteer name Neussus breaking Chuft-Captains ribs. Soft weapon gets tweaked into a script for the animated Star Trek one of the better ones swapping Spock for Neussus

          3. There was Alan Dean Foster’s short story collection “With Friends Like These,” I think. One of the stories was about some aliens whose ancestors had locked Earth in an impenetrable shield millions of years ago because we were so dangerous. Their descendants were facing an impossible enemy and took the shield down so we could “help.”

            Another (and I can’t remember where or whyfor) was a story about aliens who locked some human specimens in an interstellar zoo. They told them they couldn’t escape, but the darn things kept escaping! Any intelligent being, told it couldn’t escape, would just accept it. Turns out that humans are psychologically immune to boundaries, as the aliens discovered after the humans stole a spaceship and headed for Earth.

  2. Now I’m wondering if not is possible to make carb free meringue cookies. They’re basically whipped egg whites, aren’t they?

    Woke up with stupid high blood sugar levels today for reasons I do not know. Taken most of the day for them to come back down from the stratosphere, and now I’m hungry. Sort of ended up skipping breakfast. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking cookies?

    Time for lunch, I guess.

      1. Habe you ever tried making Pavlova with that kind of Splenda? Some years ago, we were friends with an Australian exchange officer who was here with his family for two years. His wife made the most incredible Pavlova, but the amount of sugar kind of scared me off.

          1. Pavlova is a cake like confectionery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlova_(cake) ) essentially a giant slow baked disk of meringue. Outside is crunchy like traditional meringues inside is soft, marshmellowy if done right. It is usually decorated with fresh fruit. Never had one only seen them on Great British Bake Off.

  3. If normality is strange, can you really call it strange? [Very Big Crazy Grin]

            1. People will occasionally say to me, “oh, you’ve been a goth forever, your house must be so artistic and beautiful.” No, actually, my house looks like a library threw up on an Ikea showroom. One that’s still walled off from the public since it isn’t quite done.

  5. Just a quick note that I didn’t lose my senses of taste or smell when I had SARS-2 last week. From what I’ve read, the more exotic symptoms have largely disappeared from the more recent versions.

    However, as I’ve previously stated, the big hint that it wasn’t a normal mild flu was how long it lasted. That’s still unusual, and was what prompted me to get the nasal swab.

    1. Mark 1 (March 2020) WuFlu didn’t screw up my sense of smell; it was already lousy. For $SPOUSE, some things smelled different (and occasionally, what was tolerable became awful). She says some of it still is going on.

      (Impossible to “prove” it was COVID; tests were not available at all in the county circa March ’20, even to the two hospitalized with it, but the symptoms matched, and in my case I tested negative for the two types of flu. OTOH, the official narrative was that the virus didn’t make it to the county until April. Hmm.)

      1. The Official Narrative is a pack of lies. There were cases in the U.S. by October 2019, if not September, but Fauxi went on helping the communist Chinese cover up the outbreak until February 2020.
        ———————————
        A good Zombie Apocalypse novel is at least as believable as anything we’ve heard out of the ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ over the last three years.

        1. We had dry coughing Chinese students and professors in October 2019, before Halloween, and everybody was doing it in November and December 2019. The Narrative is bushwah.

          1. I was sick between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2019. Almost cancelled Christmas Eve dinner that I was suppose to prepare (would have had mom pick it up and sent over hubby and son). Ditto for Christmas Day dinner. But finally was well a few days before. I was sick 20 days. I haven’t been that sick in a few years. Had to be some new strain of something. Didn’t know what until later, obviously. Same symptoms this last January, when, while I never got the test, we did cancel Christmas day dinner because son tested positive for It. Then dad had It. Then I got the booster, and annual flu shot, and wham, I got sick (with It). The odds of Dec 2019 was not It, when Jan 2022 was It, is very, very, extremely, tiny.

            1. I wasn’t paying much attention to Oregon news, but I was in Medford a couple weeks earlier. Something was up, since the hotel’s cleaning service didn’t bother to do the daily clean, which they had done like clockwork the previous couple of years.

              I got the coof locally, not from Medford, and a week later Despicable Kate Brown did her version of Two Weeks to flatten the curve people’s will.

              Last I looked, they still want healthy people to mask up in health care settings, Because Science! (Makes mental note to check inventory of face diapers, just in case…)

              1. Eh? Don’t bother with your own face diaper. If required, the office you are attending will provide them. Or pharmacy. At least that has been our experience. Besides if you do not have the “approved” version, they give you one and expect you to wear that. I’ve just gotten so I get one, use it, then toss when done.

              2. I recently went and the flu shot (traditional vaccine, no mRNA nonsense) and asked “Do I still need a face-panty?” and was told that I did (they re-worded it) and such would be provided. BUT… when I got there, I wasn’t made to, told to, nor even offered one to wear. The gal administering the shot didn’t even tell me to hang around for 15 minutes like usual. I had mentioned my ONLY flu shot reaction was “Hey, what’s… oh, inject site bandage.” when showering later. And she was good. No bandage needed.

                1. One of the big pharma companies is saying they’re doing human tests on a mRNA flu vax. I guess they ran out of mice… With all the weirdness going on, I wonder if they’d decide that the independent clinic (which Local Regional Healthcare Complex tried and failed to shut down, because Competition Is AntiScience or something) should accidentally get a batch of the test stuff.

                  Yeah, it’s paranoid, but we’re in the Deplorable county, and the clinic was (AFAIK) the only one who insisted that people sign off on the warnings before he’d give them the not-Vax shot. The take rate for the kill-shot is moderately low in our county, and he’s going to be seen as one of the reasons why it’s low. Local Regional Healthcare Complex was pushing the shots hard, to the point where I had an argument with my doc (sadly, the lead for vaccine compliance and COVID response at the LRHC clinic). Amusingly, when I saw him in June after all the negative results were coming from the MSM, he didn’t say a word about the shots. I didn’t say a thing, but sure noticed.

                  Healthcare masks still are mandated by Oregon Health Authority. Despicable Kate loves her some masks, so it’s going to be a while before that mandate gets quashed.

                  d: I’ll give that a try. I’m now down to 8-12 weeks between blood tests for INR/Protime for my Warfarin, so I’m not as much a frequent flyer as in the past. (I got chided at the ER as I was released after treatment for the nose bleed from hell. Bloody clothing and a tampon of sorts shoved in a nostril should have given the random medical worker a clue, but nope. OTOH, not as many people are trying to insist my nose gets covered. I used to get that from a couple of medical places and a Staff Karen at Costco in Jan ’21. Sorry, I prefer to breathe.)

                  1. I saw an article suggesting 5he Republican is giving Brown some competition in the general election.

                    1. Only until the massive fraud in the middle of Election Night. By morning DKB will ‘win’ in a landslide. Anybody asking questions will be an ‘insurrectionist’.

                      Why not? They got away with it last time.
                      ———————————
                      Elections are far too important to be left up to a bunch of uncontrolled voters. The Party MUST exercise oversight and management to prevent mere voters from electing the wrong candidates!

                    2. Oregon has had vote-fraud by mail for years. Curiously, since then, R’s have had a very hard time getting state-wide election victories. We had a Republican Sec of State, but after he died in office, his reforms were undone by the D successors. (In OR, SoS becomes Governor if the office becomes vacant. Which is how Despicable Kate got it. IMHO, she’s more of a crook than the guy she kicked out.)

                      Not that the GOPe is worth much. Drazen isn’t awful, but she wasn’t my first choice. OTOH, Kate’s ticked off enough people, they might get caught if Westside decides to dump her.

                    3. Tina Kotek (D), Christine Drazan (R), and Betsy Johnson (I), have led the field in fundraising and media coverage. Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball wrote, “the state is hosting an unusual 3-way race among a trio of women who are all recent members of the state legislature. […] The race sets up an unusual situation where the winner may not need to crack even 40%.”

                      More running on the official ballot. But the above 3 are the only real contenders. People, even west side, are fed up with Brown.

                      https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_gubernatorial_election,_2022

                    4. Arggh, forgot that Kate’s not running again, though there’s no indication that Tina would be any less obnoxious. One gets tired of hearing westside deep blue urban ideas presented at Revealed Truth for the benefit of us deplorables.

                    5. no indication that Tina would be any less obnoxious

                      –
                      Or the (I). Which is why they seem to be splitting the (D) vote. Not that I’m not sure the (R) isn’t a RINO, so there is that.

        2. The first “official” cases hit around the beginning of January 2020. February 2020 is when the media reluctantly began reporting on them, and April when the MSFM and the pols decided it made a good excuse and the push began.

          I have a friend who was in Wuhan September of 2019, and he said they were already spraying the streets for something. Not normal, according to him. I think it interesting that the CCP reluctantly admitted to four cases of an unknown highly contagious viral “pneumonia” in the Uigier (sp?) areas in November, and then it disappeared.

          2. There’s been a comparison of the hospital parking lots in Wuhan between 2018 and 2019. IIRC, the noticeable increase in cars in the lots compared to the previous year started in August. So that’s generally believed to be when it started running wild.

  6. Re: the dreaming in a language you’ve mostly forgotten, I’ve written long, complex, AWESOME songs in dreams before. I mean they were metal as hell and beautiful. The thing is, music is a language I’ve only ever known incompletely. I play instruments and used to be really good at sight reading, but know zero about theory, and as much as I wish I could write songs, I can’t in reality. Closest I’ve come is making my own bass parts for songs my bandmates wrote. But when my unconscious mind is roaming unfettered, apparently it can produce fully formed songs arranged for instruments I can’t even play. I really wish I could hit “record” when that starts to happen.

    1. I speak conversational Latin in dreams, sometimes. Good Latin, too. Sigh.

      The knowledge is there in our heads, but fluency is about information retrieval as well as other factors. Dreams get into the memory banks in a different way than we access things in waking life.

      1. I only speak conversational Latin under morphine. Which is really weird since I REALLY suck at Latin.
        But when I had a bit too much morphine after delivering #1 son I had an urgent message for the doctor. And then found I was telling her a Tom and Jerry Cartoon in Latin….

        1. That sounds VERY interesting. Buddy and I in high school both took latin and used it as a “secret” language. It was HARD for native english speakers, declension does not come naturally to modern english speakers as the only vestige we have is the possessive (similar to genitive). And you really had to listen as endings really mattered and word order didn’t. We often wondered if spoken latin was more of a pidgin skipping some of the niceties and wandering more towards the romance languages.

          2. I suspect you’re right, and ordinary Latin speakers tended toward standardized subject-verb-object word order. Reading highfalutin Ciceronian literary Latin was probably like Americans trying to read James Joyce.

            1. Yeah my memory of Julius Caesar is similar. At least the version we had had punctuation (periods) rather than just large spaces.

  7. Memory is a time machine; Dreaming is overdrive.

    Go back to a time when you were fluent in German

    During the return trip collect collect the facets of a gem of a story

    Condense a spicy snack into a single instant of sensory overload

    They call her ‘Mother’ Nature for a reason; She will select genes that benefit the group
    by giving the individual a supercharger and Nitrous feed. –Drive On :!)

  8. Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, of course it’s Covid. You have at least two of the three thousand and seventy eight sure fire you got Covid you betcha symptoms. You’re tired, or your not, both are proof of Covid. You’re awake or you’re asleep, both are Covid symptoms.

    After all, last time I checked our, Alaska, hospitals were getting $36k from the feds for each patient that had covid rather than a cold, a hernia or a broken bone. I might be wrong, might have misremembered the $36k, it might have been $360k but it’s free government money, so what difference does a zero or four, or seven make?

    BTW: I have, on good authority, information suggesting that, by the year 2222 each and every passenger that was aboard the Diamond Princess will be deceased. Natural causes rather than Covid? I think not.

    1. Your level of cynicism might even exceed mine. Good for you! 🙂

      And BTW, you missed “Run over by a truck; definitely Covid”.

      2. & as reported in the news July 2020; “ORLANDO, Fla. (CBS12) — A man who died in a motorcycle crash was counted as a COVID-19 death in Florida, according to a new report from FOX 35 Orlando.”

        1. Yep; lots of those. Of course, when the hospital gets a financial incentive for each “Covid” case… 😦

          And for some strange reason the death toll from flu was way down. Only a coincidence, of course…

          1. If I remember correctly the total count of “flu” deaths for 2020 was around 600 in the US. Less than a blip. From the CDC: “Because many COVID-19-related deaths also have pneumonia, COVID-19 coded deaths were added to P&I to create the PIC (pneumonia, influenza, and/or COVID-19) classification. PIC includes all deaths with pneumonia, influenza, and/or COVID-19 listed on the death certificate.”

            I.e., they combined the numbers so no accurate data is available.

            1. Surely an oversight on their part! 😉
              And let’s not forget that sometime in ’21 or early ’22, the CDC quietly admitted that the Covid test couldn’t differentiate Covid from flu, not to mention that the number of iterations in the PCR could probably make anything they wanted show up; “We Can Expand It For You Wholesale!” (with apologies to Philip K. Dick…)

              1. Yep, they ran the tests through 40 iterations, which is enough to make a mango show a ‘positive’ test.

                Of course, that result was rejected by the Medical Authoriteez.

  9. When I had the vid last month the taste of salt was enhanced – everything tasted of to much salt. The antigen tests now in the drug stores are much better – still not great but better. Weird dreams here too.

  11. I remember that sinking feeling when I pulled up Chaos Manor and Jerry Pournelle said he was just back from a con and wasn’t feeling well. (My sinking feeling and worried imaginings included hospital time for him, so did not accurately reflect what did happen.)

    Anyway, probably part of why people were in freakout mode about you coming back unwell from FenCon. Hope you get to feeling better soon.

    1. Agreed, that was terrible, like a familiar star just disappearing out of the sky. Don’t want to see that again.

      1. I had an email from him inviting me to come to the con. He’d arrange for crash space. Just a little more than a week before. I couldn’t come. I was in France. If only I’d known.

        1. Then you might have caught it too, and you might have been dead also.

          Don’t try to second-guess these things. You couldn’t have known, and also you are invoking Gothic Romance Heroineitis.

  12. HMMM Madam Hostess this

    I put a few grains of pepper on dinner, and suddenly it’s too hot. A no-sugar lemonade mix I normally love suddenly tastes too “artificial” to endure. There is a weird smell in the hallway, undetected by everyone else, which is driving me BONKERS. Etc
    .
    Sounds vaguely like they side effects I experience during a Migraine. Basically its like some idiot reached in and turned the gain on all my senses up to 11. Light, Sound, Smell, Taste, even Touch become unfamiliar and or unpleasant. But of course that usually has a lovely raging headache to go with it although the senses going berzerk is usually a warning that the headache is imminent.

    I most distinctly want to have a talk with the Author some day about our bodies. Yes they are mysteriously and wondrously formed, but some days the wiring layout and function is just downright bizarre.

    1. THIS. Turns out migraines can feel like vertigo, sensitivity to taste/light/etc. It’s like your brain shorts out.

      1. I think of some Asimov story where a robot is a great artist, and then someone “corrects” things in ‘his’ positronic brain… and no more art. How much ‘genius’ is “The wires were crossed in…” ?

  13. Um, Cedar S. does the Lawdog comic art, and you do the story? Not that I’m hinting or anything. Really. sits up on hind legs and shows paws Not hinting, no crossed claws, really.

    1. I can see the sharks….this is worrisome. Some image from my misspent youth? (In some ways, I wish now I’d misspent more of it).

      1. I see them in the middle of the street, wearing twin guns in holsters with cowboy hats and red bandanas. (There are two of them).

        1. I saw a picture purporting to be of a shark swimming in the streets of Fort Myers Beach. Dorsal fin present…

          I suspect Ian’s going to leave some odd artifacts.

        2. I liked the photo of the reporters or such in a boat or canoe…. and some random person WALKING (wading) with water below knee-level in the background. Sums up the actual value of the Truth Coefficient in alleged news/reporting.

            1. Actually, no, I wouldn’t. Maybe others. But recall a heavy rain that flooded (fsvo…) the dead-end road and made a bit of a pond in a neighbor down-the-way’s yard. The response? The father decided he & son would canoe around the yard to pass the time for a while. I suspect there are some good memories there.

  15. No, I don’t know how I can dream in a language I can’t remember, but indeed I did.

    You may not have conscious access to it, but it’s still buried in your subconscious, which is the domain of dreams.

  17. Remembering that our brains send messenger RNA on sensory input to become memory RNA and sometimes to stimulate new neurons, it probably is not at all surprising that your intensified sensations might, through linking or unstacking, bring up old memory patterns. This happens to me when speaking to old friends after years apart, recalling entire groups of people i once associated with–in dreams; also happens sometimes revisiting old environments–despair not.

    1. Like so many things, you translate it directly. “Fiebertraum.” Or perhaps “Fieberphantasie.” Pronounced “FEE-ber tr-ow-m.”

  20. You can dream in a language you cannot speak because your brain is using memories, You heard the words at some point in your past and the dream app in your skull decided you needed some dialog in German, riffled through memory storage and dragged out some memories labeled “Conversation in German.”

    1. That’s probably what’s happening with me when those songs show up in my dreams. Given that I’ve spent so much of my life playing music and listening intensely to it, the components are found throughout the memory banks in great detail, so there’s a huge stockpile of musical parts and pieces that can be reassembled and “heard” as a new, fully formed song. If only I could do that while awake…

        1. The guy who runs “my” dreams is not me. I know this. First, his messing up my novel, while I was sleeping (typing while I was asleep). Second, he doesn’t know geography as well as I do.

          One of my hobbies is maps. When I meet someone from another country or state, I will draw a map of their country or state on a blank piece of paper. So the brain memory bank of maps is very complete, but the idiot who organizes “my” dreams puts bumps in state boundaries that are straight lines. I don’t know why he does this, but he does. He should have access to the same data.

          We share our brains with someone else. They show up in “our” dreams. Our minds are a cooperative mess, we just see it when we sleep.

          1. “We share our brains with someone else. They show up in “our” dreams. Our minds are a cooperative mess, we just see it when we sleep.”

            My dreams are of parallel worlds. Most are similar, many are strange, but only a handful are more clown-world than our current timeline. Add in a few reoccurring nightmares of Armageddon that feature a multinational fire-team of Christians vs evil pedophile Neocon control freaks. That’s too close to a possible reality.

  22. All I can say is that whenever Sarah writes about “crazy” feelings and issues, I look at myself in the mirror and think “I am not alone! I am not crazy!”

    1. Not necessarily. You could both be crazy. Hell, we could all be crazy. 😛
      ———————————
      “You don’t have to be crazy to work here — but it helps.”

  24. OT, but things are interesting in VA. Beach. Sitting in rv with 2 slide-outs in due to wind. Rv rocking pretty often as wInd gusts hit it. We have had some damage, but won’t know how much until tomorrow. OTOH, we have power.

  25. I know when my stress levels are getting really high because my creativity is getting into strange and dark corners of creation.

    Nothing Lovecraftian, mind you…but when your shoulder angel is going “it’s too early to write stories where a plague is the triggering event of the story,” your shoulder demon is going, “f(YAY!)k it, we’re going to have us a proper Plague, complete with the tragic CNN long-form article with the Sarah McLaughlin sad-puppy-in-snow music just to remind us how tragic it is,” and all you can say is “Shoulder Demon might have the right idea here,” you know it’s bad.

  26. I believe Cedar could illustrate your Law Dog dream quite well. If she does I will buy the original.

  27. As far as I can tell, one of those dreams kept telling me to “look in the kitchen.” And “It’s important to make cookies.” All of which achieved a magnified, horrific meaning in my dreams. I really don’t feel like making or eating cookies, except maybe meringue, and that’s the fault of one of you (you know very well who you are.)

    I love your imagination. My wife also has a horror of letting me loose to “cook something”. Something slightly less traumatic than accidently inviting 13 dwarves and a Wizard over to tea…

  28. I have to say, “Law Dog Takes on the Sharks” sounds like an absolutely epic 70s Saturday morning cartoon.

  31. My taste wasn’t deadened while I was sick sick and fevered, but afterwards. It’s been screwy since. Tasting fish while eating baked chicken. Two days when all I could smell, and taste, and wierdest of all FEEL was sesame seed oil. My mouth felt like I’d been gargling it.

    The brain is a strange device.

  32. The nappage continues I see.
    You do know sister, that you have people in your circle who could make that Lawdog comic a reality.
    I know that I’d love to read it.

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