1904, 1916, 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012.

         Yo Hinomura, the Japanese potter who is kidnapped, hypnotized and tattooed by the 108 Dragons, a Chinese Mafia gang, and turned into the assassin "Crying Freeman" because he sheds tears after a kill.

Being sick, even with a condition that might not necessarily turn out to be life-threatening, like say a very bad cold, is an isolating experience.  You feel confined, cut off, alone in your feverish half-day-dreaming-state and too weak to do much about it, so calling someone is a way of reaching out, cutting through the veil of illness, especially if there's nothing good on TV.   Not everyone, however, is going to be sympathetic.  Take D for example.

D: "You are calling me on your cell phone.   You never call me on your cell phone.  Where are you?"
ME: "I'm in bed." 

D: "Because what, the land line was too heavy to hold?"
ME: "Actually, yes."  Dramatic pause.  "I'm sick."
D: "Are you going out?"
ME: "No.  I just said I was sick."
D: "Doesn't stop anyone else.  Then they hug you and kiss you and THEN mention how there are dead birds in their front lawn or they just got back from China and this is how epidemics start.  Ask Dr. Sanjay Gupta."
ME: "I think I have a fever."
D: "How do you know?"
ME: "Montel Williams is driving around in a big orange bus giving drugs to poor Midwestern people and it made me cry."
D: "Have you seen the new Zayles' diamond commercials yet?"
ME: "Yes," I whisper hoarsely.  They're like the old Kodak Moment commercials.  Or the Folgers college-kid-home-for-the-holidays who wakes up his loving family by making coffee.  Loved ones.  Christmas.  Guys giving out diamonds.  My eyes well up with fever tears. 

D: "Okay then, so now I know it's nothing awful or litigious or requiring the posting of bail I gotta run."

Vaguely dissatisfied and with so much left unsaid, (my suffering, the nature of disease, the queer fate of women who marry men named Peterson) I hung up and ordered Thai food -- I find Tom Ka Kai when you have a cold so rewarding -- and read a little of Patrick Dennis's holiday work, "Joyous Season," which is a clever tale told from the point of view of a young person who overhears adult conversations and repeats them without always understanding what he's heard.  Such as when his mother's best friend confesses she divorced her husband for being a "laden homo sapiens" who was "impudent in the hay."  

Which for some reason reminded me of how in Japanese Manga like Crying Freeman the "naughty bits" -- the body parts and certain elements of sexual positions -- are invisible.  In a graphic text this strikes me as pretty bizarre, but such I am told is the nature of censorship in Japan, and that for some reason instead of posing the figures in a way that would avoid the problem, the artist employs emptiness, a void, hiatus.  The lacunae of the manuscript are nearly more revealing to me than, for instance, the missing phallus would have been. 

More dramatic, that is, than getting the story wrong.  Or what we don't talk about when we talk about love.

Or is that just the fever talking?