Kid's teacher came to work with COVID. Took out about 60% of two classrooms. Kid came down with it Thursday, is mostly doing better now. I started feeling like shit Saturday, tested positive Sunday morning, have been feeling super not-great ever since.

This is the first time I've tested positive for COVID. Of course, so have half the families in 3rd and 4th grade so that's nice.

not gonna lie. Considering how badly it fucked me up the first time I'm a little terrified. I feel worse this time around. I had good days and bad days last time over the course of maybe a month. This time? "I have successfully taken a shower, now it's time for a nap." I would say my body devoted about 36 hours Sunday and Monday to fever dreams. Sense of smell went away this morning. My ability to regulate my temperature is slowly coming back, at least. With any luck, three years of evolution have taught those shitty little critters what to do with a human body; this time around it's a bad fuckin' flu rather than "your head is going to explode from earaches."

But fuck, man. The delta between "bikes 30 miles a day" and "walks 6 miles a day, can't really run anymore" is a pretty fuckin' shitty place to be when you're already at "walks six miles a day, can't really run anymore."

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My wife pointed out that childhood trauma is really shitty for your immune system so it's not surprising that I get sick easily, considering I spent 18 years in fight-or-flight. And maybe it's because shapella went through with no drama? And my staking adventure unwound with no drama at all but a great deal of profit? And the fact that if I were still talking to my parents they'd still call me a criminal rather than congratulating me? It made me wonder what the origin of my recurring childhood nightmare of being set on fire by my mother was.

'cuz she used to encourage me to play with matches.

And idolized her brother for "burning down a barn" that he didn't actually burn down.

And she fuckin' luvvvvvvvvvvs fires.

And although my aunt doesn't have much credibility either, the fact that the cousins all agree "your mom put the heater under her sister's covers and turned it on" has more credibility now than my mother's version of the story ("I woke up to smoke because my three-year-old sister solved her cold feet by getting out of bed, picking up the portable heater and stuffing it under her covers").

There's an 18-month period leading up to about my 2nd birthday where (1) my dad decided he couldn't leave me alone with my mother (2) they moved in with friends because she couldn't be left alone (3) he wanted to leave her but figured I'd die but for some reason nobody talked about committing her again. I'd ask him what the fuck was going on but he'd lie.

Maybe when I'm feeling better I'll ask his sister. But I probably won't. There was a lot of family drama about when exactly the spelling of our last name changed. I have seen census records, where she's fucking seven years old, with the whole fucking family spelling their name differently. Fuckers all changed the spelling of their last name in the '50s and fucking forgot or something. Unreliable narrators, the lot of them.

I should be dead nine different ways, across four geneologies, as well as poor, as well as crazy, as well as a criminal. Instead I'm a millionaire with a beautiful wife and an awesome kid. It would be so fuckin' typical if a goddamn Chinese gain-of-function experiment took that all away from me.