Anno domini 2009 found your humble correspondent with a very nasty sinus infection that very neary slipped into pneumonia. I am somewhat better now, but it's unusual that all the antihistamines, decongestants, steroids, and antibiotics I've taken the past couple of weeks haven't killed the infection. I've bombed this sucker with every medication I can get ahold of, yet it persists.
I don't know how it slipped my mind, but every year my neighbors on both sides employ enough fireworks on New Years Eve to blow up a hypothetical bunker near, say, the Khyber Pass (note to Presidents Bush and Obama--contact my neighbors to follow up; they're solid patriotic Americans). I was bitchy about the pyrotechnics the other night--I felt like crap and, I'll admit, I've never seen the appeal in blasting off explosives to celebrate the opportunity to pretend that I'm going to make major changes to behaviors rooted deeply in my subconscious mind in order to avoid the consequences of those behaviors or to simply hope that I don't get dragged down by the crushing defeats we all suffer in everyday living and by my own character flaws (and there are some, though I don't care to get into that in a New Years blog)--as my plan was to bring A home on New Years Day, requiring an 8-hour round trip in the car. DW did manage to convince me that putting up with occasional fireworks show is a) a small price to pay for having good neighbors and b) a provision of the implicitly agreed upon Social Compact under which the citizens of the United States coexist one with another. Social Compact notwithstanding, I managed to accidentally set off my car alarm four times between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m. on January 1; however, those accidental alarms were kept brief enough to provide plausible deniability in case of an accusation that I was violating the fireworks provision of the Social Compact. 
We usually take A a new ballcap when we visit him or bring him home. This time I took him one that I purchased at Walgreens. He chose to wear a New York Yankees hat on our outings in Slidell, so what do I know?
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
--Revelations 6:7-8.
So A and I go to Walmart on the evening of New Years Day. It's colder than I expected, and my t-shirt isn't providing sufficient warmth given my head cold. A has his jacket, but I have nothing in the car. I take A into the menswear department and grab the cheapest hoodie I can find in the brief amount of time A will tolerate being inside the retail area of the store. It's got the word word "destruction" emblazoned above a tattoo-like image of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Hilarious, and a perfect match for how physically crummy I was feeling at the moment.
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