My tongue feels like I burned it. Like I went down on the steam wand of an espresso machine. Like I licked lye off the decomposing Amadeus. Like I took an oral shine to a sanding belt. SLB comes into my room late last night, whilst I'm busy playing the online diagnosis game, and tries to convince me that I either (1) burned it on some hot coffee without noticing that I had done so, and now it's slowly spreading through my mouth, leaving a trail of little yellow verrucae or (2) I ate too much sugar.
I haven't the faintest idea what it is (although SLB's sugar hypothsesis is clearly on crack), and unless it gets deathly bad before it goes away, I suppose I'll never really know. One of the online sources suggested it might be a strain of oral herpes or HPV, with the less common little, yellow blisters, but it seems to be alone in that opinion. They're adorable, my little yellow polyps, up at the front of my tongue, oozing and fretful. I'm sucking on ice to ease the ghastly. Last night I stayed away from alcohol, you see, just in case that made it better. It didn't; so tonight I drank like a fish and hung around with ED playing Guillotine and talking about: Girls, Boys, Great MIT Hacks, Sex, Drugs. He's now next-door making odd power-tool noises, building his bed.
I make a habit of acquiring diseases (or, to be frank, symptoms) which prevent me from enjoying the so-called Romantic Holidays. I try to have either a cold-sore or a sinus infection when the kissers come round on New Year's Eve, for example. Likewise Valentine's Day tends to be more bearable when my singleness is a valiant stand for public health.
I never used to be this hypochondriaque, but college did me in. Notably, the books of Eve Kosofky Sedgwick, notably Epistemology of the Closet, prescribe a morbid fascination with the dissolution of one's body: it's an express-bus to dandydom. And of course, few diseases are so fascinating to the healthy and horny than social diseases, since there's a sort of Dorian-Gray justice to having a lovely, young face and blotchy, unuseful pudenda. Where, in this case, my tongue is a locus of shame. [I will leave that as an exercise to the readers to unpack and giggle themselves to sleep.]
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All of which I'd rather write about than have this turbulent tingling in my mouth. No matter. KG still loves me (thus she IM'd to say). ECG and I had Vietnamese food and then English Country danced with KT last night. Both of which were lovely. I just tried rinsing my mouth out with salt water. No real dice, although the intense, searing pain of the salt water has one major advantage over the dull burn of the syndrome: that is, I cause it myself. And it comes from an identifiable source -- there is no mystery to the pain of salt on wounds. It's easy; it's proverbial, in fact. It seems to be making them angrier, which is a good reason to continue treatment, I think. Their teensy beige heads are poking up quite far beyond the surface of my tongue now, their eyes are blazing with hate. I know I have them, now; it's only a matter of time.
"Don't worry, you have nothing to fear from Tongue-Tongue; he's only tasting you. But, likewise, don't resist, for he can crush you quite easily. The tongue is a very powerful muscle, and Tongue-Tongue is all tongue. I am Dr. Mung-Mung. Now, release the nice moth-man, Tongue-Tongue. Here is an individually-wrapped slice of processed cheese."
Oh, by the way, I didn't get fired. LS quit on Tuesday, and so things are sufficiently ataxic for me to hunker down into job-security. LS, on the bad side of things, though, still has my copy of Zuleika Dobson. Did I mention my tongue hurts? I'm trying to use that like a ballade-refrain, or like the thematic library paste that's holding Austerlitz so firmly together. Is it working?
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Current Music: Simon Joyner, I will find you. Also thinking about the Monteverdi Lamento di Arianna and Haydn's cantata Arianna a Naxos. I own no tongue-themed music, except for chorale settings of O dass ich tausend Zungen hätte, and, sweetie, nothing would be worse.