Darkness knows itself by name

[sovay]

I don't have COVID-19. But I had to get up at sleepless o'clock to be tested and it rendered the rest of the day effectively useless for anything beyond telecommunicating with the follow-up doctor in the afternoon, who did not at that time have my test results but was pretty sure from my symptoms and my accounting of the last month that I just had a respiratory crud. Then I had an asthma attack in the evening from our new upstairs neighbors' weed smoke drifting down the stairwell into my office—which really makes me feel safe about our pandemic air quality—and there is now a faint smell of burning electronics in our apartment, even though all of our computers appear to be safe. It was not the motor of the box fan which I had to prop in my office window in order to get the smoke out into the falling snow. I desperately want to be doing something with my brain, but I think what I may need to do with it is go to sleep.

Comments

[sovay]

I find it rank, and I write as an abuser of tobacco. And probable hypocrite.

Heh. I can't breathe around cigarette smoke, either, but I have counterproductively nostalgic reactions to the smell of a few brands, because for much of my childhood my grandmother smoked Benson & Hedges and sometimes Kents. When it was possible to catch drifts of strangers' smoke and not immediately worry about catching anything else with them, every now and then I would walk through a cloud and for a second she would be there.