Sick

I never get sick. 

Even though my sister offered to poach me an egg that morning, I ate cottage cheese for breakfast. An hour later I drove to the best taqueria on Sunset. I normally order three tacos: two carnitas and one al pastor but the carne asada looked particular interesting today, so I opted for four tacos. I talked to my friend about his Kickstarter project while we ate a dozen tortilla chips and disappointingly mild salsa. The tacos arrived and for the first time in over a week I consumed meat. 

We have four factors that could have solely or in tandem contributed to my eventual sickness. The first culprit was the cottage cheese. There is no way around it, cottage cheese is disgusting. Curds of white cheese in a sea of yogurty semi-liquid. It looks like someone bleached their own vomit. My mom likes to eat it with cereal and fruit as a substitute for milk. Apparently it is healthy for you. 

Eating three tacos instead of four is a classic example of overeating. The type of scenario that sends Roman nobleman to the vomitorium, and then sends me to Wikipedia to discover that this is a common misconception, a vomitorium is actually an architectural feature of an amphitheater. Notwithstanding I ate too much.

Another contributor might have been my overindulgence in recently fried tortilla chips and a collection of salsas that were muy sabroso but lacked the picante that I’ve come to enjoy. Had it been spicier, I would have eaten less. But as I soon discovered the salsa’s relative mildness was beneficial to my esophagus on its return visit to my mouth. 

Binging on meat after several days of relative vegetarianism has in the past resulted in nausea. When I was in the fifth grade I dabbled in not eating meat for two weeks around the time of the Northridge earthquake. My father catered his birthday party from a delicious bbq joint, so I threw out the salad and ate beef ribs, that night I threw up the beef ribs. I suspect a rich meal after so many bland ones makes you barf. It could have also been earthquake nerves. 

After lunch I went to get a non-reggaeton haircut at the Echo Park barbershop that was the setting for this year’s YouTube video about me getting a reggaeton haircut. Casanova’s #2 provides satisfactory haircuts for $6 cada lunes a miercoles. She buzzed my hair and beard in a way that makes me look like Popeye’s adversary. This is still the best deal in town, because by Friday my hair will look okay, and I will still have an additional $14 in my wallet, which wouldn’t be there if I had gone to Rudy’s. 

I walked out of the barbershop thirstier than I’d ever been after a haircut. Lunch had dehydrated me, and I needed bottled water from the grocery store. By the time I reached my car, I wished that I had bought more than one bottle. The drive to Orange County was uneventful except that I unexpectedly missed the 405 and had to detour through the least scenic part of Pacific Coast Highway. I cruised passed burger stands and Wienerschnitzels, then crossed a bridge through miles of industrial warehouses and rail-yards at the Port of Los Angeles. 

I was back on the 405 for a few minutes, when I started to feel tired. The type of tired you feel at 2:30. If I worked in an office I’d pound one of those energy-drinks advertised on Hulu but since I was going back to my bedroom I felt like I should just take a nap. As I started to merge onto the 73 in Fountain Valley or Costa Mesa I burped up some bile. That’s gross right? Well it happened, and I thought “hmm this doesn’t happen very often--If I end up puking I’m totally blaming cottage cheese, and never eating that sucker again.” 

I landed my car in the parking lot, brought the rice cooker upstairs that my mom bought us for Hannukah, and laid down on the couch. Motionless. I didn’t fall asleep, but somehow my dreams were WILD. WILD stands for a wake-initiated lucid dreams. I watched my friends with cat whisker makeup talk about a spaghetti restaurant they worked at along the highway that connects Studio City to the Pacific Palisades. It was a toll road, so obviously I would never have heard about it before. 

I woke up when my girlfriend came home. I was happy to see her. She told me about her trip to the bay area. I was oscillating in and out of consciousness. She thought that I was mad at her, but later realized it was because my haircut made me look like a tough guy. Tough guys get sick too. 

I read a geography coffee table book and learned that Arizona’s oft-forgotten nickname is The Valentine State, because it was entered the union on February 14th, 1912. I knew that learning random facts about geography was simply delaying the inevitable. So I walked into the bathroom and entered ‘child’s pose’ on the floor next to the toilet. I thought of those tacos that I’d eaten earlier, and even though they weren’t inherently gross, it was a source of my discomfort. I thought about all those tortilla chips and mild salsa, and how disgusting cottage cheese really is, no matter how heart-healthy the doctor claims it to be. I started to gag, and then I coughed, and then it all came out. The chips, the salsa, the meat, the cottage cheese. After several rounds of coughing and screaming, I’d evacuated everything that made me feel sick. The bland chiles didn’t cause my throat didn’t burn, my mouth just tasted like onions. Vomiting isn’t as painful or disgusting as I’d imagined it would be. 

I let go of all that nastiness, and felt better.

I recorded myself in a lucid state, while my girlfriend was buying me Pepto Bismol at the pharmacy. Then I fell asleep for twelve hours.

/// im hungry but i dont want to eat / my hunger is longer than my feet / i walk around stadium away and get back on the freeway / back down the road im in chinatown / on sunset / i find my restaurant thats what made me sick / i ate an apple got a haircut took the 110 instead of 710 / there wasnt traffic on either / i got off on the 1 and i drove through santa pedro / san pedro / saint peter / saint pedros cathedral / cathedral san pietro / my feel t are cold i wish i could get up /  turn on the heat and make my cold feet warmer / i’m dreaming of the elephants stuck in the tarpits on wilshire blvd / who wouldn’t be?