Sick & tired of being sick & tired...

I somehow managed, starting Friday afternoon with some unusually vociferous sneezing, to acquire a new cold directly on top of the last remnants of the cold I had in Nawlins. The good news is that I seem to have skipped the whole "general malaise/no energy/fever" period and jumped right into the snotty symptoms. The bad news is, whereas the Nawlins bug was almost exclusively sinusy, this one includes a persistent cough. Fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck.( some more or less dreadful weekend reminiscences here )

Sonnet d'une autre semaine: My Deadly Sin

I have been cogitating rather more industriously than usual on the state of my anger, pursuant to some advice/food for thought bistet recently offered. I've reached no great conclusions but it has fortified my resolve to combat what bistet calls "instant-psycho-anger"—in essence, the stuff of road rage; the stuff that leads me to wish thousands of summer D.C. tourists dead when they impede my daily commute; that makes me swear colorfully at, and hang up on, the incompetent representatives of various businesses, e.g., that take my money every month but can't be bothered to provide any service; that most recently had me exhorting an LJ user/non-friend (who, hare-brained though he may be, certainly didn't deserve it) to "Die screaming." (In half-hearted self-defense, I had only been awake about 4 minutes at the time.)

After four decades on the planet, I still have not learned to call, with any reliability, that age-old sub-routine for self-defusing: Counting to 10.

This may or may not be helpful, but it certainly seems illustrative of a sort of lifelong penchant for anger as my own personal sin of the Seven Deadlies. This is the first sonnet I ever wrote, a good 25 years ago, and I wrote it in my head while mowing the lawn at the property on Mays Landing Road in Folsom, New Jersey, where I grew up. Only two or three words have been edited since I originally composed it.

A wise man said that all the world's a stage.
Then every one of us must actor be,
Laughing but for the sake of harmony
And holding back our hatred and our rage
Within our hearts, like tigers in a cage,
While showing all the world tranquility;
Yet this is but a great hypocrisy
In which we all, to some extent, engage.
A tiger can be caged and thus controlled,
But prison walls infuriate the beast,
Till he, if loosed, will kill all those around.
Likewise, a man's emotions, if not told
Will grow until the storm cannot be ceased:
Then pain and rue and sorrow will abound.