As you may have noticed, there wasn't anything here after Wednesday last week. That's because I got sick. Man, I felt lousy! I slept all day Thursday and Friday, took tons of Echinacea, vitamin C, and made sure to smoke lots of cigarettes and drink plenty of coffee. Still, none of my usual remedies seemed to be working, so I decided to go see my doctor. "You're not looking too well," he said.

He listened carefully as I described my symptoms, and the more I told him, the more concerned he began to look. "Doc," I said, "what's up? You're starting to spook me."

"I'm going to put this to you straight," he said. "From the looks of it, you have Ebola."

"Doc," I said, "what have you been smoking? I don't have freaking EBOLA. Are you nuts?" He's a good man and he truly cares. But sometimes I have to wonder where he went to med school.

He can also be tough, though, and this seemed to be one of those times. "You see the monkey on this television screen?" he said. "Look closely. Yes?"

I told him yeah OK I saw it. Sheesh.

"Well, this monkey looks a lot like you," he said. "And this monkey has EBOLA!"

This was clearly ridiculous. I mean, it's true: I felt like hell, my head hurt, my throat ached, nothing seemed worth doing. On second thought, scratch that last one. Nothing ever seems worth doing, even at the best of times. Suffice it to say, I was feeling pretty messed up. In body, mind and spirit, to coin a phrase. But I knew I didn't have no Class-4 biohazard hantavirus, for Pete's sake. The Doc, however, remained unconvinced. So he took another tack.

"Look," he said. "if you want to die, what's it to me? Why should I care?"

He had me there, I had to admit. But he was also starting to piss me off. Why all these existential questions? Why all the philosophy? Finally I couldn't stand it any longer. "Doc," I yelled, "enough with the small talk, already! Isn't there anything you can actually DO?"

"Let me think about it," he said. He looked at me straight on in the most disconcerting way, and for the longest time. I guess he was thinking.

After what seemed an eternity of this he asked, "Do you work with a computer much?"

Do I work with a computer much? What could I say? "Yeah I do," I told him. And he exclaimed "Ah-ha!" in a way I really didn't like at all. Then he wrote something on his pad.

What was he writing? He looked so serious, it scared me. And remember, I wasn't feeling so hot in the first place. So far, all he'd done was terrify me with these dire prognostications based on... what? Poor guy had flipped his lid, far as I could tell. This was insane! I was about to walk out, when he finally turned the clipboard toward me.

The way he put it -- and the way he looked at me! -- overcame my last ounce of skeptical resistance. Even though I noticed he'd misspelled "whatever." And so, long story short, that's why there weren't any posts after Wednesday last week.