Speaking of the elderly, I now have an all too clear understanding of what Grandma’s everywhere mean when they say they have “caught a chill”. I used to laugh when hearing this seemingly benign phrase mumbled through old chapped lips. Now, I worry. A chill is no joke! I caught my first chill a few weeks after landing and it knocked me into another dimension. Completely broken, bent over and made that cold’s bitch, most of that particular day was spent feeling as though the Borg from Star Trek was attempting to assimilate me. Sitting there in my mother in laws house, alone, in pain, with withdrawal like symptoms that would make the late Kurt Cobain blush, was not a picture of pretty. Having no crayons to color in my fever drawings, and with nothing else to do, a rudimentary list was compiled of Things That I Would Rather Do Then Sit In My Mother-In-Laws House Sick Alone 1) play tag on the autobahn blind folded in a fog, 2)play golf during a severe thunderstorm warning while simultaneously flying a kite,3) go mall shopping with my wife. As I pondered my top 3, a dread began to fill my bones. At the same time, Vincent Price’s recital of The Raven poem began to play on continuous loop in my mind interlaced with a fierce dance beat. The fever had come. Now usually, I love a good fever. The sweating. The shaking. The visuals. It’s like eating mushrooms at a club except you never have to leave your couch. The scary thing about THIS fever was that it made me feel old. I’m talking 80 years old, man diaper on, IV drip steady, Seabond subscribing old.
My body began to stall like a Chevy volt. Buddy began to smell death in the air. He climbed up 
One good thing has come out of all this disease and depravity; With every sniffle, cough and shudder, a deep connection with the Native American’s has developed. Let me explain. Here they were living in utopia, one with nature, wearing loin clothes every day (love those), having drum circles and painting each other’s bodies different colors. Basically, what Greatful Dead and Phish fans have payed handsomely to do for decades. That is, until my forefathers, the Europeans showed up on their shores. With their incurable ailments, and bad fashion, they burst that bubble. Like a fat man in an airplane seat, it wasn’t a pretty sight in the America’s after 1609. White was right, Indian was wrong. Empathy for the systematic destruction of their way of life in that age of innocence is now my new mantra. When sick in bed, these war painted spirits appear to me, jolting me in the ribs like an old lady’s cane. After peeing myself, I always apology to these feathered chiefs for the invasion of their lands by my arrogant forefathers. There greedy hands planted colorful flags in a soil they knew nothing about. The chief always seems to appreciate my sincerity, and has never once raised his massive war axe in anger. Praise god!
Waking up drooling, and incoherent with fever madness, I allow these spirits to take control of me like Whoopi Goldberg in 1990’s Ghost staring the late great Patrick Swayze. Doing the rain dance stark naked in the middle of the night too my wife’s wide eyed amusement is my way of saying thanks. I think we in this modern pill popping world of treating symptoms, have lost the true definition of what health really is. We have a lot to learn from the peoples of the past, like my very own Chief Scares -The-Crap-Out-of-Me. Or maybe, this entire blog is simply the Nyquil talking and my impromptu performance is the barbiturates effect on my brain. Regardless, I’m going to keep fever dancing, talking to the imaginary chief and waking up my neighbors in the middle of the night.
