The last few days I’ve been suffering from being sick, probably from some new strain of the flu. The worst was on Thursday, where I threw up everything I ate. I ate four slices of bread, 4 eggs and some orange juice. None of that stayed down, leaving me with a net foodage of nothing.

I don’t get sick often, which is why this was such a surprise. Also, I had taken a flu shot earlier, which is why I’m geussing this was a new strain. Also, it was very late in the flu season. I remember back when I was in elementary school it seemed my family would get it almost every year, but I haven’t had it for like, 10 years. I point the blame for this case of the flu at a particular close friend of mine, who shall remain unnamed.

So, at this point you are probably wondering what I mean by “Green Unicorn”. Here is a chronology of my flu experience (very approximated):

10 am Thursday – Threw up clear liquid

10 – 12 Thursday – Slept?

12 – 3 pm? – Made two slices of toast. Ate slowly over the next 3 hours, while watching the George Lucas director’s cut of THX 1183. I had to stop several times to throw up the toast.

3 – 5 – ?

5 – 7 – Made a nice big dinner of two slices of toast and four eggs. The eggs were somewhere between scrambled and sunnyside up. In this period of the symptom, I was beginning to enter the stage of delirious hilarity and neediness. Being sick and effectively alone in my house, I was unfilled. I was also starting to sort of imagine and hallucinate, and I was beginning to feel cold. Wow, I need to work on my writing.

7 – 9 – I began to watch Spinal Tap with the commentary, which turned out to be the bandmembers in character. I was delighted that they kept the mockumentary facade, and that they managed to keep thier characters and voices after 20+ years.

9 pm – Threw up everything I just ate. At this point I reached a new high in humour for what was going on. I appeared that despite my acute attempts to eat, I would not be allowed to do so. I then proceeded upstairs to sleep off the flu.

10 pm – 10 am. This was a blurry period, where the Green Unicorn comes in. at 10 am I woke up, apparently better. I still have a headache, which is either from the flu still, or playing Rag Doll Kung Fu for the past few hours.

In the blurry period, I remember being very cold (which means I had a fever, if you’ve read your body manual). I know somebody, well more so am aware of them, that overdosed on ecstasy and had their brain overheat because they passed out and nobody looked after him. I changed position in my bed every ten minutes throughout the night, and I always had the nagging thought that my brain would overheat. I had visualizations of the Divergence Theorem and Heat Conduction equations from MATH 227 and PHYS 231. Not only that, but in my delirious half awake/half asleep state my brain began to wander and repeat itself. I found myself trapped in thoughts I couldn’t escape, like things I had forgotten to do or people still talking to me. This has to me in the past whenever I’ve visited a new, fast-paced place and been forced to do a routine for a long period of time, usually school or minimum-wage jobs. I get mentally stuck in it, and being a frequent insomniac does not help.

I devised the green unicorn to get rid of these thoughts. What is something I am not likely going to think of, but isn’t too abstract so as to be unimaginable? A Unicorn. What is the least likely colour for a unicorn to be? Green. Its not magical or natural.

Whenever I entered a routine thought-pattern in my flu-driven delirium, I would call in The Green Unicorn, which would tear up the fabric of what I was picturing, and then EXPLODE, leaving my mind blissfully empty. It wouldn’t actually break up a wall of the scene where I was, it would literally roll it up like a carpet as it charged through.

I’m going to use this now on to destroy or alter dreams I don’t like, I suppose until it becomes so commonless place as to be dilute, but then I’ll invent something else.