Found in Nature; the Color Not Found
Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?
Please excuse my absence. Here’s a note from my doctor. It seems that, immediately after cruising through the hinterlands with Lunatic Fringe member Claude Reed, I seemed to come down with some sort of silly ailment that assaulted my nasal passages and upper respiratory system.
It was odd, really, because it hit about half of the way through our ride. I was cruising along comfortably behind Mr. Reed and enjoying the Route 20 curves, when a sneeze began welling up in the back of my nose, about midway between my eyes. Now, you don’t need to be Kevin Schwantz or Nicky Hayden to know that a sneeze in a full-face helmet can be a very, very tricky thing.
Heck, you don’t even need to know who Schwantz and Hayden are to know that.
Anyway, as I carefully relaxed my forhead using bizarre muscular fluctuations that wrinked my head up, twisted my nose around and ended up pulling my eyes nearly together as I fought to keep from sneezing, the urge went away. As soon as I quit the strange manipulations of my sinuses, however, the sneeze returned unannounced and resulted in ...
Let’s just say I had to lift my face shield to see where I was going.
The cold wind rushing at 60 mph into my helmet only made my nose run faster until it seemed as though it was running well ahead of the bike. As we continued, I felt my body temperature drop and those deep, shivering kind of chills creeping in. By noon the next day, I was toast. I went home, covered my bald head in a stocking cop, tossed on my winter jacket and crawled under two blankets to sleep for about four hours.
My sinuses subsided within 24 hours but then came the lung goo, which I will not even begin to describe, except to say that, as your lungs heal from a infection, your body creates many different and interesting hues and colors. Among them are the color that equates to the high visibility vests that the garbage truck folks—and some motorcycle safety instructors—wear on a daily basis.
And they said that color wasn’t available in nature. Or maybe they said it wasn’t natural, I can’t remember which.
Posted by Bryan McKenzie at 05:24 AM. Filed under: Lunatic Fringe •
