Dedicate yourself to finally creating the Smokey the Bear/Woodsy the Owl erotic fan fiction the world has been clamoring for.
Watch every British murder mystery show ever made. Lie still and listen to the soothing sounds of logical discussion, the chirping of sparrows in the rose garden, and the gentle squish-squashing of viscera when your ailment becomes overwhelming and you can no longer sit with eyes open.
Prop yourself up in the plaza: dispense optimistic, folksy wisdom to townsfolk whether they want to hear it or not.
Dedicate several hours a day to revenge fantasies/plotting.
Commission a mural directly over your bed so you have something to look at. Make it something you will never tire of. Perhaps a tasteful nude portrait of Peter Falk? You are after all, one classy invalid.
Get real, real good at Mario Golf.
Overthrow global economic systems by hacking. Dress like a ’90s club kid and only listen to John Digweed and/or Dieselboy for purposes of authenticity.
Give yourself stick tattoos of arcane information from your medical charts.
Create a Classics Illustrated version of Nathanael West’s A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin.
Finally formalize the spiritual practice of worshipping your parents’ collection of lawn ornaments.
Practice sneering.
Make a miniature model of the town you grew up in, exquisite in its perfection. Each tiny midcentury ranch house the appropriate shade of slate gray. Each lawn radiating eerie green sameness. Each SUV filled with tiny plasticine nuclear families. Look at their placid smiles. Look at their starched khaki trousers. Oh, these phonies will pay for how you were treated.
Obsessively dust your prized collection of tiny glass animals and quietly, steadfastly try to placate your alcoholic mother and the rage-filled brother who grudgingly provides for you both.
Take up obscure handicrafts: tatting, scrimshaw, quilling, and the like. Embroider tiny bags to sell your wares at craft fairs and online with the slogan “Handmade by an invalid” and, somewhere, the image of an angel’s wings.
Film, star in, and distribute your own telethon from the comfort of your Craftmatic Adjustable Bed!
Become a superfan of murder mystery foley artists. Who made that spongy thudding sound in Columbo Season 10 Episode 14: “Columbo Likes the Nightlife”? Only you can provide this vital information AND the 45-minute description of exactly how it was made and recorded. Just think of how much fun you will be at parties once you are back on your feet! Until then, your murder-mystery-foley-artist fan podcast “Whack Thump ARGH!” will have to do.
Spin a cocoon around yourself out of silk that you secrete from glands near your mouth.
Move to the sewers of Paris, learn to play the pipe organ, invest in only the hippest most au courant facial couture, settle down with a nice opera singer.
Develop the sexy look of a Victorian in the throes of galloping consumption. Your pallid visage, with its blood-red cheeks and lips, your heroin-chic thinness, and the way you sigh so beautifully in between racking coughs will no doubt rend the heart of a suitor. Lock him down now, while he thinks you’re dying!
Serve as an example of sweetness and morality for your more spirited sisters; die.
Discover that the cure for your ailment was “a good attitude.” Sing to yourself every morning and smile until your cheeks ache. If you remain sick, you didn’t smile hard enough.
Begin a correspondence with Robert Browning.
Befriend a housefly that is buzzing around your room. Name him Algernon. Connect your recovery to Algernon. See yourself in him. When he suddenly dies, realize that your recovery is a hollow lie. Sink into a silent torpor and never speak again.
Throw your own funeral. Invite all of your friends and family to make speeches about you as though you are dead, while you stare into their eyes, unblinking.
Learn black magick. Command an army of spiders to fetch your books and bring you mugs of tea.
Philately!
Be grateful that you’re not a giant cockroach and that your father is not trying to kill you with a newspaper and his cane.
Learn how to build ships in jars. Begin to put other unlikely objects in jars. Build up to putting your house in a jar. Now you live in a jar. Lucky you!
Get really, really good at Quarters. When you are better, you can go to frat parties and make bros get drunk and stumble around for your amusement.
Sit in your front window striking fear and a blossoming sense of mortality into the hearts of the neighborhood children.
If anyone tries to tell you anything you don’t want to hear, have a coughing fit and fall over.
Buy a 19th-century medical dictionary and insist on referring to all ailments in that parlance.
Keep bees.
Get eXtreme! Practice until you are the most epic finger skateboarder the world has ever known.
Remain in stasis until you are recovered. Emerge as a beautiful butterfly.
The Klingon language and folkways are not going to learn themselves!
murder-mystery-foley-artist fan podcast “Whack Thump ARGH!”
NGL, I would listen to it & subscribe.
This all just reminds me of the worst villain of all: GRANDPA JOE. I’m instantly filled with rage.
Dedicate several hours a day to revenge fantasies/plotting.
Already there and I didn’t even need the lengthy illness.
Yarnbomb everything. The four-poster bed, the tea set which the nurse leaves infuriatingly close to the edge of the table, the syringe and lavage, the credenza, the small dog who is your primary companion, the infuriating nurse, the calfskin-bound volumes which your father so assiduously collected and never read. Cover everything in intricate and colorful windings of yarn, until it all assumes a jarring, padded sameness, and when they are searching for the tablets the doctors insist on prescribing you, escape through the window.
And my dad thought it was weird that in last year’s father’s day card I thanked him for never hitting me with his cane and a newspaper, and that I trusted he would continue that trend should I wake up as a cockroach.
At least I think I’m funny.
My father — a lifelong non-reader who answers all questions about books with “I only ever read Broca’s Brain,” and must be forgiven for this because he was the one who discovered that Urechis unicinctus secretes the hormone preemie babies need to develop their lungs — once promised me most seriously that he would never hunt me for sport a la “The Most Dangerous Game.”
I was genuinely moved.
Or like the Mitford sisters’ father in real life…
“Urechis unicinctus is a species of marine spoon worm. It is widely referred to as the fat innkeeper worm or the penis fish.”
So, thanks for that. I think.
They’re very cool! At least I was trained to find them cool from a young age. They make these neat labyrinthine shells.
So… I actually wrote part of a Smokey/Seymour slashfic last year because I thought it’d be hilarious but I just ended up creeping myself out. I, however, will happily take this opportunity to share it with the world!
For those of you who somehow don’t know, Seymour is the anthropomorphized, cargo-shorts-wearing pronghorn mascot of the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico.
I present Smokey/Seymour in its partially-finished glory: http://pastebin.com/2vvyv731
This is perhaps one of the most beautiful lines I have ever read: “Smokey grinned as he looked hungrily up and down at the pronghorn’s slim figure. Hungrily because he was a bear and a predator but also because he was aroused.”
That’s the line I was most proud (which might be better typed in quotations marks) of writing. Also, the beating heart of the tale.
Write a poem ab
The “murder mystery sound effects” thing reminded me of that episode of “Frasier” where they attempt to do a live radio mystery show, and everything goes hilarious awry. (With Pepe the dwarf, et al.)
Being able to spin a cocoon would be amazing. Think of how much that would come in handy in awkward social situations, or long flights.
I have a 19th-century medical dictionary. I highly recommend getting one for purposes of self-diagnosis.
Spoiler: it’s never dropsy.
HEY! I’ve got dropsy. (Seriously, I do.)
I mean, some people also have lupus, but that doesn’t make the line any less funny.
Dropsy is a pretty funny-sounding disease. It hardly ever kills you either. I look forward to the next 30 years of it. (whine whine moan bitch grump grump.)
The most fun about those old medical books, like the one my Mum got as a wedding present in 1935 is that everything is fatal since there were almost no vaccines and certainly no antibiotics. Makes conferring with a modern doctor very reassuring.
Dropsy is terrible! Drink coffee so you don’t get it!
As much as I’d love to do all the classy, quirky, hilarious ones, let’s be honest. I’m getting REAL good at Mario Golf. <3
I’d like to add to this fine list: “become deeply involved in the RPF fandom of a sport you don’t watch, which is currently in the offseason, on the basis that your friend from a school you no longer attend has sent you a great deal of information about the large foreign child who is currently the star of your local team, which is impressively terrible and mostly known for their questionable Christmas-related rapping habits.” When people ask why you suddenly know so much about this sport, sigh deeply and murmur something about a long story.
Sit on the porch with your cane between your legs and one hand atop the other, the top hand drumming fingers. Watch the neighborhood children go by, never waving at them or saying anything or moving any part of you except for your eyes and, of course, your slowly drumming fingers. Time your porch-sitting so that you’re always out there to see that one neighborhood boy, the one who is usually by himself and tends to have a lot of books. Time your blinking to his so that it will appear to him that you never blink. Be sure to catch him walking by at least once late at night, and if you’re really baller about this whole shtick, set up some lighting so that he’ll catch the glimmer of your eyes no matter how dark it is. Then, for the coup de grace, call out to him sometime when he’s going by with books and have a pleasant discussion with him about his favorite authors, especially if they were also yours.
Mostly I stared vacantly at QVC and drew in coloring books.
Should have gone with the spider army thing instead. Definitely that.
“If anyone tries to tell you anything you don’t want to hear, have a coughing fit and fall over.”
If I have recently had a cold, or if it’s cold in general, I can actually do this. It’s great for cutting off unwanted, rambling film synopses or explanations of what’s wrong with Obama. I am making my post-bronchial spasm work for me!
“Give yourself stick tattoos of arcane information from your medical charts.”
If that’s not cripplepunk, I don’t know what is.
Holy moly Strophoria! I had no idea that cripple punk was a thing until just now. My world is tilted for the better for it. THANK YOU! (Christine, one of the authors)
I actually own a 19th century medical encyclopedia (or encyclopaedia? dammit, Ted) and we should all start referring to our ailments thusly. For instance, masturbation (clearly something is wrong with you why are you touching yourself?) is referred to as “onanism” and can be cured by things like ice-cold baths, mercury and (I kid you not) sleeping naked. TBH, mercury pretty much cured everything in those days.
Persuade your doting father to buy you a perky young companion from the mountains, who will arrive in the big old gloomy house and breathe life into it, who will ignore all conventions and who will eventually take you back to the mountains with her and get you to walk again, making fools of all those idiot doctors who wouldn’t know a severed spinal cord if it bit them.
Realistically I would have to pee frequently and require a chamberpot in my room. Who attends to these matters? Will there be fresh fruit? Who changes the linens? Creativity does not thrive on soiled sheets. WHO LETS THE DOGS OUT? One must be practical, fluffed pillows aid digestives and keep hair looking fresh. Pedicures must be arranged. Will the flowers always be seasonal? I get very short tempered if my inkwell is running low and my favorite writing paper not plentiful. The boy must by quiet when entering my room, help can be annoying