Remember tuesday night how I was sick with allergies and making political jokes out of it? Well that night shit got really really bad. One of my worst attacks ever. And all this in between days on site for Conquest, the TV show I've been PAing on. So tuesday it wa so bad I couldn't sleep, even though I was utterly demolished from work and needed to wake up at 6:30 to do it all over again. In fact I wrote this unfinished homage to a bad allergy attack: "With all the wisecracks i made light of my allergy situation, but since its going to fuck with my ability to sleep tonight and may very well cost me this PA job I'm digging, let me get into the shit. Tonight it's bad, it's really really bad. Shotgun to the dome bad. I would say it is misery of the highest order, but that can't be true, right? I can say it is certainly an apogee in personal wretchedness. People, understandably, have trouble appreciating the disturbing effects that my hay-fever-style allergies may have. It's not as obviously awful as a migraine headache, for example, a horror my mother often experiences. In fact pain is not really what distinguishes the allergy experience, at least not for me; although many forms of pain make an appearance. I think that may be what is hard to grasp about the misery I experience. If it isn't especially painful, how bad can it be? I am not skilled enough as a writer to log most of the sensations that I experience: the simple claustrophobia of not being able to breathe through my nose, the bubbles that expand inside my face, the dull ache behind my eyes that stupefies, the other dull pain where my jaw muscles are. Then there are sharp itches that I feel in places I will never be able to scratch: deep up my nose (inside my brain), behind my eyes, down my throat. I itch intensely in many places that I can touch too. I also rub certain areas uncontrollably and over the course of hours these spots become tender and red, then later painful to the touch. The corners of my eyes, my nostrils, my scalp-- all these areas become highly uncomfortable to touch in any way, but I can't stop. The overload of discomfort sends me into this kind of seizure. Every so often I shiver with itch and my arms wildly rub my face and body. This shiver may be a misfire of the same synapses that cause me to sneeze. It sucks. The sinus experience deserves its own section. These pockets in my face become pressurized and depressurized rapidly as changes occur. Mucus flows from one pocket to another or a sneeze changes the dynamic. This causes a rather bad headache, and makes my ears get all funky too…. I gotta stop writing soon and there are a couple more things I wanna say so I'll rework this section later. These experiences many people have had to some extent or another, but I believe that me on a bad is a whole different plateau. Trust me I take no pride in saying so. When things are real bad, such as tonight, I get some extra bad features. My sneezes begin to smell of vomit, because I am sneezing traces of just that. Further, I often will try to alleviate pressure in my nasal passageway by holding my nostrils shut and blowing into my closed nose. This can power through the blockage for a minute or so sometimes. When things get real bad and I have been doing this for some time (by now it's instinctive), air comes out of my eye. Yes ladies and gentlemen, air pops out of my fucking eye. It happens very fast, like the air broke through something it shouldn't have and escaped as fast as possible. The feeling is always surprising the first time it happens in an episode, but becomes less so. It feels like a sharp prick in my eye, and also comes with a psychological hit that I find pretty soul shattering. I'm done writing about this tonight, even though I missed a lot of stuff, especially the powerful sneeze that comes on top of everything else, wracking my body like an earthquake. And they come in barrages. Well maybe this is ridiculous cus everybody knows what it is like to have a cold, but im pretty sure its not because I know what I know. I can't write anymore its almost three I gotta wake up in 3.5 hours." But I didn't fall asleep after that, I stayed awake until past 4am. I had a sort of mental crisis that hasn't yet been resolved. I was certain that sick and sleep deprived as I would be, there was no way I would be of use on the set Wednesday, so I should stay home and rest for my sake and theirs. But I felt like such a pathetic loser for being too sick to do the job. I begin to feel so awful about my pitiable body with its diseases and my life that was lost at sea. I couldn't even make it to the work I was getting, how would I ever make something of myself? What did I wanna do anyway? Was I staying in LA or leaving town? Where the fuck was I going? Most of all I felt bad just that I would miss another day of life, progress, and cash because of my damned allergies. So i decided I would wake up and call in the morning at least to be respectable. In the morning I felt like the gum that's been under your shoe for months. But I felt so bad about being a no show I thought to myself, well, I'll drive up there and tell them in person I'm too sick, then I'll go to my parents place and crash all day. So I drove up to the ranch we were shooting at that day. Turns out I went off to the wrong side of the ranch, and so did some others who hadn't been before. All of us sat with our cars in the shade of some enormous pine trees and waited. We assumed everyone else was late. When that theory became untenable we searched around and found the site. Turns out the ranch was an old haunt for 80 action shoots. They had a fake ghost town for western shoot-outs, and a proper modern train on tracks for who knows what. The whole thing was unreal. Imagine, a fake ghost town that gained some street cred since it was no longer used as a set. It was a real ghost town built to be a fake ghost town. Dig? Meanwhile the whole zone was overrun with sad farm animals: cattle, horses, dogs, and one adorable but stubborn donkey-mule feller. All these animals were running into the shots and us PAs had to literally be animal hustlers. We made all those funny "ya" sounds. I even tried using my beemer to drive the animals off the site (which, after all, was their pasture). By they way milk comes from this really gross hairy sack that hangs from the back of the cow like some sort of alien parasite. Eeew. So I worked the whole day. Sometimes I felt like I was in a dream, sometimes I wanted to die, but I made it through the whole day in one piece. I just didn’t have the heart to leave. Plus the scene was so weird and funny, horses eating watermelon while we shot crossbows at medieval armor in the so-cal sun. This week I'm back on the show. We're doing "weapons of the bible." Cool. Still in crisis though. I'll tell you all about my interview at NL tomorrow. It is an awesome place, and pretty much the perfect job if video games is where I wanna go. But now it's in my face and may be mine if I want it and I find myself unsure if I do. I need to get some serious insight into my own desires for myself real quick. If I take that job I will be 100% committed and into it, otherwise what' the point? If you have any advice I could use it. Please email me. But I'm pretty sue this is one of those things where nobody can really give advice, I just gotta figure it from the inside out. Email me anyway.