New uses for the history of clerkmanifesto

 

As I may have just barely peeped around the corner of improvement for what is possibly the most intense cough I have ever had, it occurred to me that it might be nice to take care of clerkmanifesto in a way that was gentle on my energy levels.

It takes a lot of energy to cough so desperately and frequently!

And wanting to tell you all about my cough it occurred to me after 13 years of writing clerkmanifesto, and possibly as many as 20 or 30 miserable coughs, I may have shared some of my feelings on this subject in that glorious and exhaustive past.

I have.

I have written about my coughs several times, and I found one post that I felt does justice to what seems to be going on with my coughing right now. 

I think its just the sort of thing to read about on a lazy Sunday afternoon while at least some of us are coughing our lungs out, though we may just barely be starting to improve. 

And so here it is again:

From 2018:

Unlike in yesterday's missive, I will not be ceaselessly interrupting my comments here to cough. Well, I will be, but I won't be narrating it.

But let us take a moment now to reflect on The Cough. What a clever little piece of engineering it really is. One has this whole, essential, air system, with the lungs at the core. And they are really exposed to quite a bit, I mean, they are exposed to pretty much anything in the world. So there's this mucus stuff to protect the system. And if something nasty gets into it, or some virus invades, the mucus goes into overtime and throws itself mercilessly over everything, rendering it mute and neutral. But now one has to bundle this huge amount of cleverly used mucus out of the lungs and trachea and pipes and all that. How is one supposed to get rid of this stuff?


That is what The Cough is a solution to. Get a breathful of air. Compress it in one's lungs, and then blow it out one's throat in an explosion that blasts out the used up mucus into the mouth where it can be properly discarded. 

So the solution to getting stuff out of the lungs? An explosion made of the air that's just sitting there anyway. It's brilliant.

Unfortunately it is pure misery for everyone involved in the process. One could easily use this to prove that the universe is fantastically clever, but cold to the point of sociopathology. But I prefer to picture someone so wildly carried away with a piece of fantastic design that they forgot it was going to be used on real subjects. Although it might all be the same thing. There is no god, really, it's just one great big Mad Scientist.