Delirium

Let's see if I can explain this phenomenon better than... well, than I'm going to.

Despite the fact that the 2012-13 winter has been the most pestilential period in recent memory, I've made it through relatively unscathed. Until yesterday, that is. I go to bed Monday feeling fit as a fiddle and ready for love, and then I wake up Tuesday morning with the feeling that somebody snuck into my bedroom while I was asleep, stuck a bike pump in my mouth, and went at it until my head felt like it was trying to contain the relative volume of the state of Kansas.

I felt kinda miserable.

Now, after about three hours of that semi-vampiric existence that passes for "sleep" while you're sick, I find myself awake and tapping away at the keys, attempting to describe what happens to my brain when physical discomfort meets tempestuous restlessness. For one thing, my vocabulary apparently expands automatically. For another, my brain starts to interpret everything as a puzzle.

It's a bizarre feeling. If you could somehow interview my sick, sleeping self, on some nights you wold discover that I had become convinced that the cure to my illness could only be found by twisting my poor, mucus-laden body into the correct Tetris shapes at the appropriate moments during the night. It'd be a bizarre experience, watching a wretched invalid writhe between the sheets, coughing and wheezing and wondering why he can't turn himself into that straight piece that he so desperately needs.

Last night's ordeal (and I say "last night" with great sadness, as it is now a quarter to ungodly in the morning) manifested itself a little differently. Somehow, all the different parts of my body had convinced themselves that they had become afflicted with some manner of vile curse that could only be expelled by what I assume was some grotesque ritual sacrifice. Meanwhile, the last remaining rational part of my consciousness, manifested in my imagination as My Little Pony's Twilight Sparkle, attempted vainly to convince the superstitious and cowardly lot of my being that what I felt was, in fact, no curse, but a rare illness that could only be cured by solving a rather intricate logic grid puzzle.

Well, now that I've shared my current misfortune, I'm off to try to get back to sleep. Hopefully, this bizarre obsession with puzzles has been exorcised from my body for the night so I can get some real rest. More likely, though, the minute I close my eyes, I'll start trying to figure out how to place eight queens on a chessboard so that none are able to kill any of the others in a single move.