In sickness and in stealth.

There’s a good chance the Papa Ghostface album I’ve been working on would be finished by now if not for this one thing: I got hit with a stupid cold/sinus infection. Again. It must be about the tenth time it’s happened in the history of this blog just as I’ve been gearing up to finish something.

I thought the ridiculously clingy cold I got at the beginning of the year — one of the worst I’ve ever had — would satisfy the Germ Gods and they’d leave me alone for at least a year or two. I guess I was wrong about that. I almost never get sick twice in the same orbital cycle. 2018 must be my lucky year.

It’s the same thing every time. One day I wake up with a raw throat no amount of water will soothe. That’s the tipoff. I know the next day I wake up I’m going to feel like hot garbage. I always hope the garbage won’t move up into my head so I can at least work on mixing things even if I can’t sing for a while. That hope is always in vain.

This time there were a few new wrinkles. A good chunk of my vocal range disappeared for a while. I’m used to sounding like a bullfrog for a few days when the cold first comes on, but once that passes I usually have access to just about my full normal range, no matter how congested I am or how much I’m coughing. I’ve written a lot of songs over the years when I’ve been sick and made rough recordings to preserve vocal melodies and the like. That wasn’t happening this time. For a while there I sounded like someone who was paying the price for spending the better part of a day screaming at a protest without a megaphone.

It was a little disconcerting. I’m not used to my voice being just about gone and not knowing when it’s going to come back.

To my great relief, it was a temporary thing, and now my voice is back to its old spry self. But I’m past the two week mark now, and still coughing. I don’t know if my immune system has decided to start slacking off, or if whatever bugs have been floating around over the last year or so have been stronger than usual, or what. I’m just frustrated to have lost a good chunk of recording time.

Even my ears haven’t behaved the way they normally do. Instead of everything getting muffled for a while in both ears, only the left one was affected by the congestion. It wasn’t even that awful. Things were just off enough to make listening to anything on headphones more maddening than enjoyable, because the stereo balance was never quite right.

I seem to have turned the corner at last. The cough is finally starting to lose some of its authority, and the other day I contorted my jaw in a strange way while brushing my teeth and the normal range of hearing in my left ear returned in an instant. At least I can get back to work on mixing songs that need some work in that department, even if any amount of serious singing is still probably a recipe for a coughing fit.

I know I’m lucky in the grand scheme of things. Aside from the occasional stupid cold like this that takes its sweet time going away, I have no health issues to speak of. A lot of people have it much worse. It’s just a pain in the ass when you’re this close to finishing something and some bug comes along and says, “Nope. This is as far as you go for now. Have fun waking up tomorrow with the pain from your throat radiating into your ears with such force that you feel like your head is a demonic furnace. Enjoy being a baritone for a while.”

I always mean to take advantage of the downtime when I’m sick by getting back into a good reading rhythm, unplugging the laptop and digging into some of the books I’ve got piled up around here. In January I set a goal on Goodreads for how many books I wanted to read this year. I’m twenty-five books behind schedule right now.

I made no progress at all on that front. But I did gorge myself on Cyanide & Happiness animated shorts. So it wasn’t a total loss.

I also discovered my new favourite comedian: Joe Pera.

I have no idea if his deliberate way of speaking is his actual voice or just a persona he puts on. It doesn’t matter. At a time when most comedians feel a need to scream at you about their sex lives or some narrow-minded take on the politics of relationships, Joe whispers soft truths and gently skewed observations. It’s the sort of stuff you chuckle about under your breath instead of busting a gut over. I like profanity and insanity as much as the next person, but it’s kind of wonderful to come across someone whose brand of comedy is so…wholesome.

Current favourite blues song:

Current favourite non-blues song:

I’ll try to put up an out-take from the PG album or some such thing sometime soon. Gotta get things back on track, even if I’m still coughing and cantankerous.