I’m sick, I tell you — sick, sick, sick!

Even back when I was doing drugs and drinking heavily, I rarely contracted acute illnesses.  My second wife once oberved acidly that I had so much alcohol in my system, no germ could survive there.  Now that I don’t have that “benefit,” I still hardly ever get acutely ill, which is good, since my chronic stuff–mainly the ME/CFIS–sometimes renders me nearly immobile with pain and disability.  Anyway, I am down with something now–my sweety eloquently calls it “the Alaskan crud.”

Wednesday, I was flat on my back on the bed, idly watching the ceiling move, and I was struck by how much the experience resembled being loaded.

I had the sense of pressure in the head, the muscle aches and pain, the visual distortions, and the sense of unreality  that come with doing bad acid laced with strychnine.  I was coughing, and had the sore throat of the chronic  pot-smoker. The feeling of lethergy was akin to being on downs.  And for a bonus, the chills and fever was pretty much like being in withdrawal.

Then I thought “Holy crap–I used to go out of my way to feel like this. What was I thinking?”

Wahoo!  My clock figured out what day it is!

Although I have strong Luddite tendencies, I do appreciate technology that works for me, makes life easier, more convenient.  The automatic tranny and anti-lock brakes and cruise control on my car, for instance.  Arthur C. Clarke observed that sufficently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and I live surrounded by magic.  Heck, I am still in awe of transistors, fer crissake, and they are about as old as  I am.  They’re semi-conductors, right?  So what’s that all about?  I mean, stuff either conducts electricity–gold for instance–or it does not — like glass.  So what is this semi stuff?  Amazing.  But I digress.

This is all about my fancy-schmancy atomic clock thingie.  You know, one of those things that sets itself to the cesium clock at Fort Collins, Colorado, which gains or loses  like a nanosecond every eon or so. I was thrilled to get one–new in the box–for $2 at  a Lions Club rummage sale last summer.  The thing is about the size of a 15-inch LD TV, shows the time in huge numbers I can read five feet away.  It even tells the phase of the moon, AND indoor and outdoor temps, which is kind of a biggie living in Alaska.  Here’s the rub.  That radio signal is so far away that reception is sporadic.  I usually have to wait weeks for it to pick up the signal, or do some arcane ritual–sacrifice a Christian baby or something–to persuade it to do so.  But wait, there’s more.

It has an outdoor sensor the size of a Mars bar that sits up in the eaves on my porch, faithfully transmitting a little radio wave or something that tells the indoor unit how cold it is outside.  Now here’s where it gets really weird.  When the battery in the outdoor unit goes bad, you hqve to also replace the batteries in the indoor unit.  This makes absolutely no sense to me, just more high-tech voodoo.  The cold weather kills batteries pretty fast, so I recently had to replace both sets. That meant I had to reset the indoor clock, which brings me to the final rub.  And with all this rubbing, I expect a genie to appear any moment.  Anyway. . . .

To reset the clock, you need at least three hands and a set of eyes like an iguana or something, that can split images and/or swivel, because the thing has two buttons–one marked with a plus sugn; the other marked “SET.”  (For all I know, this is a reference to  the Egyptian god, which  would make a certain amount  of sense.)  The intructions are in the book.  So you need one hand to hold the book, one hand to hold the clock, and one hand to push the buttons.  At the same time, you have  to simultaneously watch the buttons (to make sure you are pushing the right ones–there are two more, don’t ask), watch  the face of the clock to keep track of what’s happening, and keep reading  the instruction book.  You can probably guess–at least in very general terms–what happened when I tried to reset the sucker.

I got the time and the time zone set, then stuff started blinking on and off, and I ended up re-setting the time zone.  tried again, same thing  happened.  Ater seventeen tries, I wason the verge of taking the confounded  thing outside and smashing it to bits with a low-tech rock, but I controlled myself, simmered down, and decided to live with the fact that all I needed was the more or less right time and the temp.  Never mind that the clock thinkis that it is the middle of next week and has no clue as to what the real phaseof the moon is.  It was close enough.

Ever since then, right around midnight Colorado time, I have been peering hopefully at the face of the clock, hoping to see the little satellite dish icon that tells me that the clock is getting the signal from Fort Collins.  No dice.

This morning, I was thrilled and delighted to see that the icon was there, and the clock had finally figured out that today is today.

I am at peace.  Life is good.