I went out of town for work and came back with a horrible chest cold. Or maybe the plague. I don’t know, this was New York. Even their advertising campaigns announce that “anything is possible in New York,” so maybe it’s possible to catch a disease that wiped out millions some five hundred years ago.

Head colds are really annoying because they give you all the same phlegmy symptoms as other colds, but there are so many more ways to treat them including just knocking yourself unconscious until it’s all over. Chest colds are tricky: you still have to be breathing to make it through and the last thing you want to do when you have a chest cold is breath.

I’ve been falling back on a remedy as old as the hills (insert random Southern colloquialism here): whiskey. No, not straight from the bottle, this isn’t 1928.

My dear friend Trace (shoutout!) told me about a good remedy for when you still have to be able to go to work and drive your car and stuff like that, so I’ve been falling back on that during the hours of the day when I still need to know how to tie my shoes or reach them without falling over. But once I get home from work and change into a fluffy bathrobe despite the Sahara temperatures outside, I grab up the whiskey bottle like a man drinking formaldehyde during Prohibition.

The copious amounts of whiskey will either kill any germ in my system or just make me not care when the germs finally organize a union and take over the place. I’m good either way. I just hate that I’m getting this much alcohol into my body and there is not a beach umbrella or cabana boy in sight. If I’m going to drink this much, I really should be having a much better time and I probably should come out of it more tanned than I am, instead of this kind of off-green color.

Just wake me when it’s over…