I guess I do not have swine flu. Yesterday I felt lethargic, even groggy. Last night I was up until 4am with stomach cramps, stomach pains, and projectile diarrhea. I had to talk myself down from vomiting several times.

Uh-Oh, I must have swine flu. As a senior citizen (I'm 28 years old, which makes me a senior citizen by MTV's standards - the only standards that matter) I know my own body pretty darn well. I never get sick in the spring. I've never had a flu, a fever, or even a cold after the month of March. So my discomfort must have been a symptom of swine flu.

To convince myself it wasn't swine flu I took an inventory of everything I had eaten that day: sour grapes, mushy blackberries, buttery eggs, jalapeno hummus, olives, and black bean soup with hot sauce. Okay, it wasn't the swine flu! Thank goodness.

In a way, isn't this whole swine flu thing kind of fun? Okay, the plague of Athens was not fun, but this virus is far from wreaking the sort of havoc described by Thucydides. I've never read Daniel Defoe, but Albert Camus made rats and rampant dying sound like something of a hoot. And let's not forget the best writer to ever live: Stephen King. Wasn't "The Stand" (book and miniseries) a blast? I'm surprised I haven't been having dreams of an angelic old black lady enlisting me in a fight against evil.

The Greeks talked of moira, the fate even the gods were powerless against. Nietzsche likened it to a slate falling from a roof, knocking our purposes dead. Cosmic stupidity. Doesn't something like swine flu activate our vestigial anxieties of the arbitrary recklessness of fate? Of a time - not long ago - when entire towns, villages, and cities were wiped out of existence by plague?

Perhaps the swine flu will serve as a refreshing reminder of what life once was or what it may still be. Maybe people will put down their crackberries and once again attempt to experience that forgotten state known as "life". Your Blackberry is not going to give you a stronger immune system. A virus doesn't care how stylishly worthless you are! It will kill unfashionably worthy and fashionably worthless all the same!

Maybe if people are too frantically afraid of getting sick or dying to frantically plan for a long future of the usual mindless automatism the human race can recapture it's lost soul and dignity! At the very least watching average people confront numinous, unseen terror will be great fun for the whole family!

But I'm still glad I don't have it!