Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Aujourd'hui 07:20

An Ash Wednesday story

To wake up on Ash Wednesday morning with the world’s worst headache is unexceptional. It’s something of a badge, really. Two days in this heat bouncing around Port of Spain or San Fernando or wherever you play mas in the manner of people on a never-ending trampoline. There’s a more than good chance there’s a hangover in the mix. Hello, headaches of the nation. I have been grossly cheated. I feel like anyone who has placed second in any competition: first prize was just there, almost in my grasp. Except I was not wronged because I’m a poor executor of palancing down the road. The injustice of my headache is I did nothing at all fun and yet here I am enduring this punishment. Having a cold or flu is fairly low on the list of terrible things that can happen to you (Carnival or not) and yet – invariably – when you have one it really does feel like life can’t get much worse. I can think of little beyond the great wretchedness that blossoms in my sinus cavity right now. I also feel no one is taking my suffering seriously. In so many ways this Carnival was like a dream. Not delightful fantasy nor nightmare from the pit of hell, but because everything went past me in an untouchable haze of pseudoephedrine. And joy of joys, I got to share it all with the Cats’ Father for he too was laid low. Oh, and at least one cat was ill. I say at least one because when you have as many as we do it can be a real pain to try to figure out who is throwing up because of fireworks and who is doing it because they are revolted because someone else did. Cats don’t do sickness. Still, to look at everything on the surface, you’d think we were Carnivaling to the max. The house looks like a J’Ouvert band passed through and the Cats’ Father and I are covered in so many cuts we look like we rolled in the Savannah, just off stage, where all the broken glass tends to gather for their annual convention. We have not taken up dueling. There has not been a domestic disturbance of the call-the-police variety. We have cream walls and white bed linens. The Marmalade Menace (he’s still a minor, I can’t use his real name) has been fighting an infection for 16 days now. At each administering of his oral antibiotics he flails and kicks. This holds true whether I’m lying on top of him or not. He is not a small cat. With his mighty orange paws he swipes. The result is that everything is covered in peach splotches and human blood. Twice things went so awry that I ended up taking more of the dose than he. There’s only so much laundry two people and a temperamental washing machine can do. I’m starting to think the meds match the tiles. Of our cuts and more serious lacerations, we compare them, clean them, and collapse until the next round. I’ve seen a newspaper or two since the dreadful cough showed up and feel like my home-world is a sort of comic-relief sideshow – a strange parody of what’s out there. Has it been an exceptionally violent Carnival or are we more trigger sensitive? When you have a reasonable feeling of safety, it’s easy to joke with your friends about surviving Carnival. This year, if I had any laughter in me, it would be the nervous sort you can develop when you actually have survived something more than bad. People are dying in front of audiences. There have always been people who did the killing and those who were killed. But the recording and subsequent sharing of murder videos has not always been part of our world. This is a whole new level of coldness, unrealness. This is not the greatest show on earth. I have a cold. Funny things happen in the head when you have a really awful one. Some things get wobbly or blurry. This year a cold was a really convenient thing to have. I was at home. I had fuzzy-brain. The sense that part of the season was a blood bath has not fully landed. But it will. I will want to know what these videos are for. Are they helping the police in any way? Have we become so twisted that these are just more things we look at and move on? And then there will be no time for cat stories. Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition. The post An Ash Wednesday story appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.