This is only Day 4 of being sick and I’m tired of it. I want to be out playing golf, taking walks, going to the local winery – but instead I’m stuck inside with a virus sapping all my energy and causing multiple uncomfortable symptoms.

Then I think about how my Dad must have felt as his congestive heart failure took more and more of his abilities away over a couple of years, to the point where at the end he couldn’t walk or breathe. In that context my Day 4 doesn’t seem so bad. But I hate it anyway.

It’s actually difficult to focus on anything else. There’s a lot going on in the world – Biden team’s recent political victories, Trump’s ongoing legal problems and asshattery, border state governors using human beings as pawns in their political grandstanding, LOTS of new and interesting advances in science. But right now my attention span, my ability to focus on a single topic, is shot to hell. Every new thought soon leads back to “man, do I feel like shit”.

TV and books are about the only escape. In either medium, for a little while I can get out of my own head and dive into what my writer buddy Dave calls “the fictive dream”. That place where the story grabs your consciousness and holds onto it. That’s my escape lately.