Thursday, February 4, 2010

The heaviest toll exacted by the flu, I realized in a Sudafed-induced haze yesterday, isn’t the phlegm or the sniffling or the scratchy throat. It’s the way the bug slowly herds your thoughts onto one track, limiting your focus to whatever task is at hand. Gone is the ability to think in parallel–devising a solution to a work issue while you’re cooking, for example, or picturing the opening lines of an e-mail as you pump gas–and in its place is the slow plod of thinking in single file. It’s about completing one task, then the next, then the one after that, until you reach the promised land of another pill. Fortunately for us, my brain is queued with two items right now: to cram three paragraphs into Blogger, then embrace a few hours of oblivion.

Since we’re talking about thinking, if that makes any sense, I may as well update you on my quest for mental acuity. The executive summary: I’ve been feeling markedly slower recently, and in an effort to fix this I’ve prescribed for myself a regimen of sleeping more, writing regularly, playing chess, and eating better. I figured I’d maintain a record here–patchwork, of course–to track whether these measures will even work.

Obviously I’m still writing, but it’s not enough, since I was doing so when the wrinkles in my brain began to unravel. Still, I’d like to propose the written word is at least slowing my descent into the mire, and I’m not particularly eager to discover what would happen if I did otherwise. Sleep, too, has been welcome but ineffective. I’ve been punching in seven to eight hours each night, a veritable turnaround in the span of a week, and aside from being slightly more alert I’m not feeling the difference. Food is next on the docket, I guess. No fries ingested this week, thankfully, but I haven’t exactly let up on the refined sugars either. Food it is, then, because the prospect of having chess–chess, for fuck’s sake!–lined up for the weekend is simply mortifying, even for me. There are anti-social depths to which even I would dare not sink.