Daily Jam - Forever

This column was originally published in 2018 in those lovely days before Covid-19.

I used to never get sick.

Oh sure, I'd catch a little bug every now and then, but usually only once every couple of years, and I'd always recover quickly, some 24-48 hours later the last remnants of cold or flu or whatever just fading away. I didn’t miss school. I didn’t miss work. Hell, when I was smoking, I didn’t even stop doing that, switching over to Menthols like a good little idiot who thought he’d live forever.

But now?

Now I catch something every single year, often more than once. I get laid out. I get miserable. And I hate the world and everything in it. I’m sick right now to be honest with you, battling what started as a mild flu a month ago and then turned into a walking pneumonia. Medication. Antibiotics. Z-Packs. Cough drops. Mucinex. Inhalers. I’m a walking medicine cabinet. And all I do is cough. You can hear my chest rattling, the mucous and phlegm just refusing to let go. There’s so much nasty shit in there. I’m exhausted. Fatigued. A walking husk of a former person. It seems like it’s lasted an eternity, like it’s never going to end, like it will always just be. And I am just so fucking tired of coughing. I’d do anything to make it stop. These last five years have seen me get ill more often than the 20 years prior. What happened?

Oh yeah. I had kids.

Whatever my kids pick up and bring home, whether it be from school, or daycare, or a friend’s house, or just from being five and two finds its way right into my bloodstream, my nasal cavity, my throat and lungs. And it nests there. To top that off, we took the boys to Disney World in October, so let’s go ahead and add all of the germs and bacteria that the tens of thousands of people there sent us home with into the equation. There’s also the airplanes and airports to contend with. Basically circumstance created a perfect storm of disease for me to wander into, and I did it.

I’ll be here forever. So I'm going to listen to “Forever.” From The Charlatans’ (that’s The Charlatans UK for us here in the States) 1999 record Us and Us Only, first single and album opener “Forever” has just the right amount of organ groove to at least correct and comfort my mental state even as my body slides away into oblivion.

Cough.