Chapter 37: The Flu And Other Goodies

Feb. 10th, 2019

Hi everybody,

Things have been a little out of kilter here. When I offered to bring a note from my mental health care provider to my employer my schedule magically reverted to normal. Yay! It took a few days to get back into the groove and then the flu decided to come visit. My wife works with kids and one of my kids works fast food so it’s inevitable. I ended up with a stomach thing which made me feel like I was going to barf if I moved. That lasted about 24 hours then my voice started getting that I dare you to talk because I have a thousand razors waiting heaviness. I took a day off. I knew if I tried to work I’d blow my voice out and be down a few.

The flu and related rarely touch me at all, I was surprised to get that much. My wife and kids got hammered. I was up all night with my wife and missed work again. Lack of sleep is one of my Aphasia triggers. Pain wise I am still experiencing very little but I still have the other migraine symptoms and I don’t give a fuck! I am over the moon. To not be in agony and to have my mind working in the 70’s percentile usually and higher sometimes is awesome. I do want to start sweating again because it’s got into the 60’s once or twice and I had to be careful to not have the windows in the car rolled up if I was waiting in the parking lot.

Anxiety is weird. I had to hit the CBD today because even though I’ve had for me a pretty relaxing day. I’ve caught myself twitching and rocking for no reason I can point to other than someone is playing music in the house. It’s not even loud or a kind I don’t like. It just feels invasive. My rationale mind calls bullshit. They have just as much right to listen to music and such as I do. It would be different if they were blasting it but they’re not. It’s just my anxiety acting up. So pull out the CBD and toke your little ass off you over sensitive freak. A couple of tokes later, everything is right as rain.

As for my newest story, I am 5,759 words into the final version. I still have 11 of 19 scenes finish. The first draft of the same section written in screen play format which includes word such as INT. BLANK’S OFFICE - THURS. EVE runs to 4,298 words. The entire first draft manuscript comes to 13,082 words. I intentionally blocked out certain areas of the manuscript to be written during the final version as the writing style doesn’t mesh well with screen writing. I am estimating the final story will be somewhere between 16,000 - 21,000 words. That’s quite short for most authors on SOL but quite long for me as before my latest round of illness I strictly adhered to a word limit of 7,500 words. I guess my journey into madness and back has changed my writing style once again. I am grateful to be able to write. It is a privilege that I hope is never again taken from me.

Darian