Solutions for coughing

 

As the worst cough I have ever had appears to be doggedly persisting I am thinking about how to apply my meager energy in effective ways to clerkmanifesto. I could dig around for unused photographs I have inevitably bulging in my phone and swelling up in already unfindable folders on my desktop. Or I could bring up classic posts from our copious history of missives here on clerkmanifesto.

But the truth is... those solutions seem like more work and energy than just... writing... something...

And despite being utterly exhausted and wracked with coughing, there's still always something to be talked about in this new French country I live in.

Like, for instance, honey.

I am going through a dangerous amount of honey. Decent advice for coughs is pretty thin, but sometimes it seems to all unsatisfyingly come down to hydration and honey.

So I drink a lot of water and hibiscus tea. And I put perhaps a bit too much honey in the hibiscus tea. Unfortunately my last honey, the jar I finished this morning, that I think is from somewhere in central France, had an odd medicinal taste. This would have been fine if it miraculously cured my cough, you know, like a medicine, but it didn't, you know, like everything else in the world at this moment. 

So I might as well get some honey that tastes really good.

My favorite honey in town is sold in the Patisserie around the corner (well, there is a patisserie around basically every corner surrounding our apartment, making for eight patisseries! This is the one to the South and the West). We went out to this patisserie this morning to find they are mysteriously closed until the start of June!

Honey crisis!

There are only about 847 other places where I can get honey near here. That probably makes it sound like an easy endeavour, but it is actually a bit exhausting in my current context. Like, do I have to go to all 847 of them in order to choose?

So we just had to come home and gather strength. 

I'll try to endure plain and sour tea for a couple hours, and then we can stumble out later.

With any luck it will result in something riveting to tell you about tomorrow.

The color of the sea in fewer words

 

Having so recently waxed eloquent (I mean, I tried) about the beautiful colors of the sea here, in heavy clarifying winds, and in the aftermath of rain, we went down to the Mediterranean again on yet another windy day. My cough was bad enough that I had not gone out at all the day before, something I have done every day since we moved here. Thrown a little by the bright day and impending Summer, I was underdressed, but the sun helped. And seeing the same kind of sea I had tried to describe to you, perfect and wild, I thought it might be nice if I could try to show you the colors if I could.

So we walked down to the shore. I took pictures and dodged the waves. I thought maybe I would end up with something I could madly augment to make my case to you. But looking at the pictures, even though in some ways they are a little plain, I did not think there was any honor or manipulation I could enter them in that would give any better sense of the sea today.

So at the risk of being a bit plain, and only because I am so eager to show you the strange and wonderful colors and texture of the sea here lately, I present these photos as they are. 

They still lie, but earnestly, and only in the sense that they undersell it.

New uses for the history of clerkmanifesto

 

As I may have just barely peeped around the corner of improvement for what is possibly the most intense cough I have ever had, it occurred to me that it might be nice to take care of clerkmanifesto in a way that was gentle on my energy levels.

It takes a lot of energy to cough so desperately and frequently!

And wanting to tell you all about my cough it occurred to me after 13 years of writing clerkmanifesto, and possibly as many as 20 or 30 miserable coughs, I may have shared some of my feelings on this subject in that glorious and exhaustive past.

I have.

I have written about my coughs several times, and I found one post that I felt does justice to what seems to be going on with my coughing right now. 

I think its just the sort of thing to read about on a lazy Sunday afternoon while at least some of us are coughing our lungs out, though we may just barely be starting to improve. 

And so here it is again:

From 2018:

Unlike in yesterday's missive, I will not be ceaselessly interrupting my comments here to cough. Well, I will be, but I won't be narrating it.

But let us take a moment now to reflect on The Cough. What a clever little piece of engineering it really is. One has this whole, essential, air system, with the lungs at the core. And they are really exposed to quite a bit, I mean, they are exposed to pretty much anything in the world. So there's this mucus stuff to protect the system. And if something nasty gets into it, or some virus invades, the mucus goes into overtime and throws itself mercilessly over everything, rendering it mute and neutral. But now one has to bundle this huge amount of cleverly used mucus out of the lungs and trachea and pipes and all that. How is one supposed to get rid of this stuff?


That is what The Cough is a solution to. Get a breathful of air. Compress it in one's lungs, and then blow it out one's throat in an explosion that blasts out the used up mucus into the mouth where it can be properly discarded. 

So the solution to getting stuff out of the lungs? An explosion made of the air that's just sitting there anyway. It's brilliant.

Unfortunately it is pure misery for everyone involved in the process. One could easily use this to prove that the universe is fantastically clever, but cold to the point of sociopathology. But I prefer to picture someone so wildly carried away with a piece of fantastic design that they forgot it was going to be used on real subjects. Although it might all be the same thing. There is no god, really, it's just one great big Mad Scientist.

Storybook city

Continuing from where we left off yesterday, with a selection of my local collected street photography that I've taken here in the Belle Epoque City. These are peppered with an array of storybook characters quietly occupying the available spaces of the images. I leave it to you to suss them out as you like, or just take them overall as pleasant views of my city as Summer approaches. 

Everybody visits this city, so surely do these people as well, and no need to make them uncomfortable with a lot of gawping and fuss.

 

Street scenes

 

While I am here in our apartment coughing my lungs out, I thought it might be simplest to show you a scattering of local street scene experiments I have been idly playing with. I don't manage to get out much into the city lately, what with the hacking and exhaustion from lack of sleep, so we can count these as more imaginary trips, or even hallucinations brought on by my illness. 

That sounds about right...