Going Inkless

The street I live on branches off a larger artery across from an old industrial building where they work with giant concrete blocks. The place is nearly abandoned. You never see anyone working there. Only occasionally are there lights on or a truck parked nearby. I imagine that the property is an unprofitable piece of some larger construction empire, caught in an economic limbo between life as a viable working factory and value as someone's tax write-off. So while it waits for the balance to shift and make it valuable enough to tear down and build another dream, it has been our landmark for directing visitors to our street. "Keep on the main road until you see the big ugly thing on the left, then turn right." It's plenty ugly, too. Every morning as I go to work, I sit at the stop sign waiting to turn onto the main road, and our big ugly landmark just looms on the opposite side, staring back at me. Stark and cold, its face is the sort of sickly yellowed brown ...

The people in my life know I rarely get sick. I do try to live a healthy lifestyle: I generally favor healthy food options, stay moderately active, keep aware of sources of contagion without being overly cautious of them. (Your body can't learn to fight germs, after all, if it never meets any.) All this helps to ward against what's going around, but I don't think I have any kind of super immunity. The truth is I'm just stubborn. Colds come my way from time to time, and I just refuse to let them stop me. There's work to be done, and people depending on me. If I refused to get out of bed each time I had a stuffy nose, or a little pain, or I just didn't feel right, I would spend most of my life under the covers. So, sniffles don't slow me down, and I suffer headaches without aspirin . In general, I'll let the pain deliver its message, weigh it, and decide to go on if I'm doing no further damage. As long as I'm not making it worse or risk...