All my favorite authors had the flu

I've been riddled with flu for the past three days now. Lungs: Riddled with boiling black goo. Throat: Riddled with darts of pain. Upcoming paycheck: Riddled with absences.

So riddle me this: Where in the world did the following half-written narrative come from?

At some point in the past 72 hours, my poor brain reached up from beneath a sea of NyQuil, DayQuil, and whatever other self-medicating remedies were in my system at the time and tried to write a ridiculous short story. I have no recollection as to why, how, or when I started writing this. It was lingering in an unsaved tab in Notepad++ this morning when I woke up. It has no apparent message or meaning. In fact, it sounds like another cold open to a TV show I might watch, or maybe a Palahniuk novel I didn't read.

God, my medicated subconscious writes like the lofty bastard child of all transgressional fiction writers. You don't know self-loathing until you know how you write when you're delirious. I don't think it's bad. I just think it's the worst sort of cliche.

Usually, I would file this sort of thing under "finish later" and never think about it again. But since I have no idea where to take it from here, I present to you the half-written, unedited, misspelled scribble of an overly-medicated, sick individual. (To think I was considering going in to work yesterday!)


Light was easing through the cracks in my bedroom, gently rolling over the hardwood floor as dawn broke. The crisp, cool air of this Houston morning was like an unbiased conductor of sensory energy: Bird songs, warm coffee aroma, and a tickle of cool breeze all glided over my bed and landed, fruitlessly, on my empty pillow.

Because that's not where I was. I was face-deep in a sofa cushion that had not been washed for over five years, pinned down by a wicked hangover.

The smells of the sofa were stratified. If I pushed my head down lightly, I was privy to the smell of stale beer, Levis, and some girl's body wash from the night before. But if I gripped both ends of the cushion and really sank my schnoz into the stained brown cloth, something magical happened. I could see late 2003 like it was just yesterday.

Sniiiffff--- mmm, they just captured Saddam Hussein! And wait! Sniifffff-- yes! I smell John Kerry's presidential campaign taking off! Sniiff-- eww, wait, that smells like the first reported case of BSE in the United States. Sniff-- and I'm still a virgin?

Between the hangover and the sounds of construction outside, I probably kept my face burried in the couch for about two hours longer than I should have. But I wanted more sleep. Just a few more hours. A few more seconds. I finally gave up when the residence maid lazily knocked on the door to the basement and barged right in.

Her loud, frightened sigh prompted me to actually look up and survey the damage done to the basement during last night's round of careless debauchary. No pornography stuck to the wall with mustard on this perticular morning, but it looked like someone had carved about fifty crude dicks into the ceiling tiles with their long nails. I bite mine, so I'm in the clear. I guess I could be responsible for the pile of vomit next to the sofa, but I don't remember eating anything with peanuts in the past couple days. I'm most likely the one who scribbled "Queer for Beer" on the beer pong table with eyeshadow.

I pat my eyes for a second, half expecting to draw back eyeshadow and half expecting to draw back blood, too. Luckily, it's just eyeshadow this time.