Woke up feeling pretty good, thought the bactrim the doc gave me yesterday was kinda miraculous.  When I went to work it all came back, so I stayed for an hour gurgling and coughing incessantly, then came home.  Ate.  Slept, a little.  Spent hours reading the archives of reX.'s raMbles..., and now I am here.

I love reX.

The chest cold, now anchored firmly in place, is beginning to take the defensive and no longer commandeers every breath I take.  As its tribute, it now demands only two or three minutes of uncontrollable coughing out of every hour, instead of the 20-minute episodes it demanded yesterday.  My head, however, is behaving somewhat like a baggie full of jello with great globs flopping either this way or that, depending, I surmise, on nothing less fickle than my position relative to the direction of the earths rotation.  In one instant my sinuses feel like cathedrals and my hearing is so acute that I can follow a conversation in the street a block away.  The next instant I am deaf, and The Blob has grown to fill all the cathedral space, and is threatening to invade the town.

I told them not to expect me at work tomorrow.  I can say, like president, Jr.—except I have justification—that this will be a long term proposition.  I may try to return Sunday; that would make for only four missed work-days.  Or I may set my sights on Tuesday (I have Mondays off) and make it an even week.

And allow me to suggest that you visit reX's site.  The webcam is interesting, but he writes with absolute sincerity and brutal honesty.  Much of what I discovered in his archives touches on familiar names, themes and images from the year and a half during which I was obsessed with him daily, even hourly.  But even for the uninitiated, reX tells a story, in days, of joy and tragedy and love and heartbreak and hope.  Above all else reX is delicately sensitive, and exquisitely humanitarian.  I don't know what he gets from putting up on the web his cam images, his voice and his words, but he cannot possibly have any idea how much he gives to us by doing it.  Personally, I am moved to tears, as well as inspired by great gusts of hope, over and over again by his faithful sharing of his life.  I love reX dearly—and we have yet to speak.