Category: art Before Breakfast

I like to make stuff. Probably too much. I can sit at my tiny desk in the corner of Jack’s old room, oblivious to the workmen ripping our kitchen apart, wiener dogs napping on my feet, frittering away hours on an edit or a paragraph until Jenny pounds on the door and tells me I absolutely have to take a break or I will be crippled by sciatica. Sitting, she yells through the door crack, is the new smoking.

I’m not always efficient. I can piss away time looking for a new plugin for an app or watching YouTube how-to videos or reading a whole book which I just wanted to consult for a quote. But I like to think that all this meandering is filling my well and making sure that the lion that brings me great ideas will eventually yawn, stretch, see me with my head down and drop some inspiration in my lap. Usually works.

Over the last month and a half though I have felt distracted. Still about 80% productive, but distracted. We got married and that took up some time. We are doing our kitchen which requite a ridiculous number of decisions and visits to Home Depot. We are just about to launch a new kourse at SBS which takes a lot more work than you probably think it does. Shut Your Monkey is out and about. And I just got the cover proof for my next book which will be coming out before you know it.

But this number of balls in the air  is pretty normal for me. The only problem is that one of those balls is on fire (which sounds like an ad for Cruex).

It all began half way through my visit to Vietnam when I began to feel a tenderness in my ribs. I thought it came from leaning too hard against the edge of my desk but it persevered. Then, on one of the last days I was there, I woke up with a Braille-like rash splayed across my chest. We were having a sketchcrawl that morning and one of the sketchers was the school nurse. She looked at the rash and diagnosed it immediately: shingles. She got me some ointment at the pharmacy, and we went off to draw.

The next day the rash was worse and the ointment didn’t seem to being helping. To make things more interesting, I had to spend 24 hours at the back of a plane flying home to New York. I saw my NY doctor first thing the next day but he said it was too late to do much about it. The antiviral pill I should have taken when I got the first symptoms wouldn’t help at this point and I’d just have to ride it out.

It’s been a long ride. Tomorrow it’ll be five weeks since that day in Hanoi. I spent a few days in bed because if I am run down the symptoms are worse. My rash turned into blisters that eventually drained and left me without a few layers of skin and my nerves in a jangle. On my wedding day, my heart was full but my chest was sizzling. Each day it gets better but there have been a lot of days and there are probably a few score to go.

Shingles do lots of things. Sometimes they feel like someone has belted a bunch of Brillo pads to my chest. Other times they ache or tickle or go numb. I can have sensation in one place that moves to another. It’s totally unpredictable.  Basically they get on my nerves which are like a bunch of rogue electrical cables flailing and sending sparks through my rib cage. Oddly, when I just lay my hand on my skin, it reorients them and they simmer down, at least for a while.

I’ve had acupuncture, taken Vitamin B complex, rubbed on tubs of cocoa butter — but it seems that time is the best medicine. And I have to use my time wisely, not overdoing things, and being patient.  Of course, taking it easy isn’t me, but Jenny’s at the door. I gotta take a break.

I have refrained from sharing this with you for a while because I think there’s nothing more boring than talking about your health. But I did want you to know that I have lots of ideas for what I want to write about here, more than just ads for books and kourses — but for now, they’ll have to just keep simmering in the old brain pan.

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P.S. Happy BD, PL!