It's Saturday and it still hasn't left me. This past week has been hell. Starting Friday (1998-06-05) of the week before, my health just took a nose dive into the depths of suffering - severe enough to make my life miserable, but not severe enough to afford me the benefits of bountiful sympathy and human compassion from all the people around me. OK, so it doesn't look like I'm about to die just yet, but the quality of my life has been downgraded to something approaching the experience of a festering gelatinous blob that is only mildly aware of its conscious existence.
Symptoms include: fatigue that finds me struggling to write this, sweating that leaves me feeling like a wad of paper towel that just cleaned up an accident in the kitchen, conjuctivitus that has blessed me with watery eyes red enough to make me look like a demon in need of exorcism, and a raging sore throat that could only be a gift from Satan himself. I can reminisce now about the days when I ate food. Ah, how nice it was to swallow. Nothing but nutrional shakes for me these days.
You know that something's wrong when you have to manually pry your eyes open in the morning when you wake up because they've been glued together by the copious volumes of yellow puss that was weeping out of them throughout the night. If you've ever endured pink eye or conjunctivitus before, you know the gig. After rubbing and scrubbing your eyes under warm running water for a minute or two they start to loosen up, but there's still a few globs of phlegmy goop clinging to your eyelashes. Yuck! It's a procedure in itself just becoming vision-enabled each morning.
On Wednesday of this past week it came upon me to rent as many of the old Pink Panther movies as I could possibly obtain at the local Blockbuster Video store. Ended up with "The Pink Panther", "The Return of the Pink Panther", "The Pink Panther Strikes Again", and "Revenge of the Pink Panther". As a child growing up in South Africa, I remember seeing some of the Pink Panther movies in the days when video hadn't even hit our southernmost region of Africa yet. We were still watching home movies on Super 8mm projectors, with mother and kids pinning white bedsheets to the wooden railings that carried the lounge curtains, while father was setting up the projector and contending with spooling the film reel into the projector. I remember it being quite a delicate process that had to be done just right, or the film may stutter about like an epileptic going into convulsions.
Anyway, I have fond memories of giggling in hysterics at the antics of the idiotic inspector Clouseau - it was a family thing. I guess I figured that watching these movies again as a grownup would afford me a certain sense of emotional comfort in my illness. Kind of sentimental of me, I know. Gotta say, while the very first Pink Panther movie wasn't nearly as funny as the Pink Panther I remember, the sequels seemed to have a far higher "density" of humour and slapstick gags. Also, one of the most hilarious characters of the Pink Panther series was notably absent from the original movie - a certain mentally fragile Chief of Police Dreyfuss who was hellbent on exterminating Clouseau. All in all, the Pink Panther movies were a trip down memory lane and somewhat of a time capsule that brought back memories of the era in which they were filmed.
So, the Pink Panther series was gobbled up without delay. It is now Saturday and more movies will be eliminated this day, courtesy of the Beatnik video library: "Con Air", "The Man in the Moon", "The Winter Guest", and "Jefferson in Paris".
It's a fine day for an invalid to be alive!