Clinton, South Carolina, Monday, December 23, 2019, 1:17 p.m.

Most bad things have good sides, and vice-versa.

For a solid week, I have been sick. I’ve been getting better through the weekend. I’m close to well, though my throat is full of congestion and I don’t feel like yodeling. Last week, when I had to lead the national coffee rankings for a few days to get the minimum amount of work my job requires done, I had lots of great thoughts.

For instance, I might be struggling to fashion a story from a cell-phone picture of a basketball scorebook, which had, in turn been “texted” to me, though, in fact, there was little text.

Played good defense. Team win.

More accurately, I was “pictured,” and not pretty ones, at that.

Being weak and prone to fits of both sneezing and coughing, I drifted into the border of real and imaginary when I started to slumber. I’d succumb to the medicated fog for a while, then come to when some football announcer or president on TV started yelling. I’d stagger into the kitchen and turn on the coffee machine. Once, I activated the coffee without putting the mug under the spout, and the task of cleaning hot coffee up awakened me more than the coffee would have.

Then I’d get alert again and have to figure out what had been real and what had been a dream. In the right mind, it wasn’t that difficult. The scorebook, printed out in the next room, quickly proved that no sophomore from the junior varsity had popped 18 3-pointers in a row in a 3-minute span of the third quarter.

Nah. Didn’t happen. But it would’ve been cool if it had.

The delirious thoughts didn’t go to waste. One of them might make a short story. It might be what I’m writing now if I had that kind of time to kill. It’s firmly in my mind, though it seemed tenuous through my medicated fog. “Medicated fog” is a favorite phrase of mine. Tom T. Hall used it in a country song entitled “Who’s Gonna Feed Them Hogs?”

He’d lie there and cry out in a medicated fog / Here I am in this dang bed and who’s gonna feed them hogs?

Truly a predicament for the ages.

I compared and contrasted my own experience to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” an unfinished poem written while the poet was calmed by an opium pipe. Coleridge was interrupted, went to the door, and never remembered the rest of it.

At Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.

By God, that’s a lead right there. A few tweaks of journalistic convention, insert the final score, and it’s a crackerjack way to start a gamer on a Dallas Cowboys home game this year.

But, as is the case with graveyard leads at Newberry College football games, the world has room for only so many Xanadu beginnings, opium pipe, notwithstanding.

At least to this point in my life, I don’t get sick much. The previous one, in October 2018, was of shorter duration but worse effect. The hardest task I undertook last week was going to the grocery store. Between the rain in the parking lot and the multiple trips from the garage to the kitchen when I got home, I felt like I’d swum the English Channel. Once the fridge was full, I retired to the easy chair for some well-earned profundity.

I did not sleep well and dreamed vividly, and, when healthy, I hardly dream at all, and when I do, the memory doesn’t reach the bathroom, where I invariably go. Last week I had some dreams that I’ll remember on Judgment Day. They weren’t nightmares, but they were brutally honest, such as the one in which I wandered the countryside, boring people to tears with old stories of NASCAR.

They will inspire offshoots in the novel I am presently writing. They won’t be literally derived from the dreams but just philosophical matters for the main character to learn and ponder.

Sickness is a great experience, but I still don’t recommend it.

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Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.