| Plague, Pestilence, and Evolution

I still like Rudy's fever induced delusions of feeling himself actually evolving into a new form of life, but I thought I would add my past 3 nights experiences to the mix. I have not slept for more than 1.5 hours at a time for the past 5 nights due to my own sickness, Wylie and Leslie being sick, and Heather staying at the house (lucky!) Without further adieu:

Night one: Probably my first night that my fever was really bad so I slept on the couch. I was not only sleeping for myself, but for every short session of sleep I could manage, I would also be converting the couch pillows into to cardboard boxes that were then grouped together into shipping "suites" and would then be used by the Obama Administration to continue to stay in office. If I did not do my part, then Bush could actually win the election mid-term, and a large portion of that failure would be on my shoulders. So, I performed my duty admirably, and woke up every 45 minutes or so to make sure I kept those "suites" coming. Also, I could not simply fall back asleep, I needed to 'earn' the boxes and had to totally rearrange my position, pillow and blanket configurations, otherwise the conversions to cardboard would not be efficient and quality enough for a good contribution to the cause.

Eventually I figured out what was going on, and that my brain was getting the better of me. The only solution was to actually sleep sitting up because as soon as I laid down, even like a 45 degree angle, I slipped right back into Obama Box Country.

Night Two: I had played two games of Small World with Heather right before trying to sleep this night, so of course I had Small World dreams. Essentially, there was another game, much like Small World, but different enough, that I was being challenged to both play, explain the rules, and put away the pieces correctly, which is no small feat because the box insert was one of the most complex pieces of plastic engineering I had ever seen.

In a nutshell, all attempts at sleep were taken over by visions of how I could figure out the rules by comparing them to the SW rules, how they were the same, different, derivative, etc. When I thought I had something figured out, I would attempt to play the game against the invisible non-corporeal opponent that was simply the game itself, when I would fail a compartment in the complex plastic insert would pop out and cause me to wake up with either snot running down my face, or have a coughing fit, or a sinus headache.

This went on of course all night long, until I figured out the rules and became dominant over my opponent, explained them perfectly, and naturally shrunk down to the size of a playing piece so I could explore the architecture of the insert better. Once I was ready to put those pieces away I was awoken by Wylie and it was morning. Alas, I never triumphed over the game while inside my delusion.

Day three: This one is a bit harder to summarize, but I'll do my best. I woke up coughing for some reason but only like one or two coughs, so I tried to go back to sleep. Then I woke up with another two coughs and my eye sort of hurt, so I rubbed it and it was mildly glued shut with eye goop which the DS game I was just playing stuck in there. Wait - had I been playing the DS or sleeping? I got up, checked my eye in the mirror and it was full of little white goop bits, the soft little sleep bits you get in the corner of your eye, but this time they were ON my eyeball and then there was a string of them under my lower lid. I fished them all out with my finger and went back to bed. As I was laying there I realized I was PRETTY sure I had NOT been playing a DS game when my eye started hurting, so I tried a test. I would lie on my back and see if any videogame related stuff happened.

Lo and behold, a HUD sort of popped up. Not a blatant HUD, but a theoretical one that was in my consciousness. The HUD was tracking stats for what I was doing, direction, actions, hit points, etc. I started to get pretty upset with the fact that Nintendo had found a way to take over my brain without my consent. My eye really hurt so I of course decided to wake up every hour and monitor my eye.

At my next hourly wakeup, I checked my eye it was full of goop again. I fished it all out and noticed a long string of the stuff under my lower lid again. Strange. I went back to the couch and figured out that there was something in my eye that my body was trying to reject, but what was it?

My next hourly checkup yielded goop, but less this time. It suddenly became clear - someone, or something, had put in a hair sized nano-machine that activated and connected itself to my ocular nerve and brain stem to monitor and relay all my activities to Nintendo or "The Aliens". They would harvest all my data and use it to either sell more games, or take over the world, depending on who put it there. How could I combat such insidiousness? The only thing I could think of would be to manufacture bad data for them to consume, possibly breaking their plans by being so inconsistent in my thought patterns they would think the nano-machine architecture was broken, scratch the project, and I would do my part to save humanity from either domination or perfectly designed and consumable games.

This basically let to a night of absolute insanity. I don't know how I survived, but essentially I just kept a string of gibberish running through my head at all times that I could and made up stories that never happened to me and changed the layout of my house, names of people, etc. to really confuse the nano-machine.

Needless to say, this did not leave me with a very relaxing, rejuvenating, healthful sleep. I feel like shit today, as I have for the past 5 days. And when I woke up, me left eye was fused shut with goop and my right has mega-crusties all over it.

WTF is wrong with me?