Back in the saddle again, after being sick as a dog all week.

Wait..."Sick as a dog"? I should be so lucky. Who wouldn't want to experience the state of Sickness through the canine prism? Two or three days curled up on an enormous beanbag. There's a buffet set up right next to your bed and unpaid attendants keep coming by to refill it with drinks and entrees. The job done, they mutter a quiet but very sincere "Poor baby," give you a little scratch behind the ears, and then they tiptoe out and let you go back to sleep.

Granted, when the source of the sickness is a two-days-dead raccoon snarfed from the side of the road, Dogsick is nothing to envy. "Never again," you would swear to yourself, after the latest symphony of colors geysered from your muzzle and snout. But of course one of the many bonuses of being a dog is that you're joyfully unencumbered by the onus of long-term memory. "Dude," your dog tells you (via that thing dogs can to with their eyebrows), "I swear, if you'd told me anything about that enormous ham being for the guests, I would have totally not grabbed it off the dining-room table like that."

And while you certainly know differently, you have to just let it slide. You have to acknowledge the creature's shortcomings and even pity him for them. Yes, having a built-in problem with retaining and building upon basic information may get dogs off the hook for all kinds of major and minor transgressions, but it also means that every single novel ever written by a dog has been utter crap. Mysteries, particularly. Have you read Those Damned, Damned Squirrels Of Hamsley Manor, by John le Carre's springer spaniel? The murderer turns out to be Lord Brythe-Hamilton...even though the Inspector made such a big unholy deal out of the fact that the killer had to have been part of the Fifth Battallion of the Scots guards? As if Brythe-Hamilton was ever on skis in his life.

As I say, crap. Give me one of those taut revisionist thrillers from the modern ungulate movement.

What I'm getting at is that I've been sick for a week. It started off as a lack of elan, which is perfectly normal for a Bostonian in the weeks of and immediately after the World Series. It transitioned into creeping ennui, briefly stopping off in baseline lethargy before my illness felt confident enough to progress into actual symptoms.

Oh, I was heroic. Would you have expected anything less from me? My life is an ongoing struggle against the slings and arrows of outrageous deadlines. When Ihnatko takes to his bed, the Wheels of Industry shudder and quit. Ne'er-do-wells sieze the opportunity. Many of you are now nodding your heads knowingly. Finally, it clicks into place: all those enormous coronal mass ejections over the past couple of weeks. Yup, I know and I'm sorry. That plasma is supposed to stay there close to the Sun's core, making toys for good little boys and girls, but I really haven't had the energy to maintain my usual fatherly influence upon their difference. What can I say; protons will be protons.

Oh, and "The Cat In The Hat" got released. See, that never would have happened if my CPU weren't so hideously underclocked.

But the body knows best. I foolishly assumed that this was one of those Nuisance Sicknesses — you know the kind, where you do what you do through the normal course of a day, except you do it with two wadded-up bits of Kleenex stuffed inside your nostrils — so I kept at it. Then there was the day I slept for 18 hours, then the next day when I woke up about six or seven hours later than I imagined I would (ie, about four or five hours later than I imagined I would have filed my newspaper column). And that was the weekend.

That's mostly behind me, now. Phlegm and mucous have had a nice little trip, but all that travel has left it exhausted and now it's content to remain in situ within my respiratory system. I sympathize. I've been to Alaska and Hawaii and while it was great to get out of the house, after about a week I was glad to just get back to my familiar digs and stay put.

In the meantime, I've lost probably five days of productivity, during a period when I pray daily for Superman or The Flash or whoever to perform whatever feat of shabbily-explained scientific mumbo-jumbo that causes another 120 hours to be put up on the clock.

At least I have the sudden novelty of conventional waking hours. For nearly a week, my sleep cycle was perfectly normal, but only on that as-yet undiscovered planet where the day is 39.2 hours long. Here on Earth, it's a different story, but I now find myself waking up at around 4 or 5 AM.

This is the third day of this sort of thing and it's still a wonderful novelty. On Day One, I treated myself to a 6 AM diner breakfast. On Day Two, I took a sunrise constitutional. Today, Day Three, I've already watched "The West Wing" and "Junkyard Wars" and it isn't even time for me to not watch "The Today Show" yet.

I mean, sunlight is an awfully nice commodity. Long ago, I adopted vampire work hours as a survival mechanism. Editors and publishers have friends, spouses, children...that sort of thing. Even PR people (for God's sake) have better things to do at 9 PM than call me up and throw an hourlong monkeywrench into my intended work schedule. Yes, the inky night which stalks just outside my window mirrors the blackness of my soul, which in turn is gotta influence what I write about this new plum-colored rubber iPod jacket. But it works wonders for productivity.

For the past few days, though, the birds, they sing. The sun shines out and sugary frost transitions happily to glistening beads of dew. Men in natty double-breasted wool suits adjust their snap-brim fedoras as they kiss their starched-and-aproned wives goodbye and stride out of the house, freshly-polished wingtips clicking on the concrete as they snap a wave to the milkman and head for the brand-new 1964 Marauder lurking in the garage.

(Metaphorically. If any milkmen have visited this neighborhood since I've lived here, they've been the undercover kind. "We are the darkness that night itself fears. We are the many and the one. We make no sound and we leave no footprints...we leave only mystery unframed by thought, and a selection of the finest organically-produced milk, juices, and yogurts to families throughout Suffolk, Norfolk and eastern Worcester county." That's the slogan embroidered on their black hooded jumpsuits, in black nonreflective thread.)

What I'm saying is that at this early stage, this early-to-bed-early-to-rise business is still fresh and charming. It's possible that I'm just being naive. Heroin, for instance, is a really sweet deal the first few times you do it. Feels great, it's free, and there's a good chance that you'll win acceptance into a whole new social circle. You might get to rub elbows with some the most elite members of the entertainment and music industry. It can be lucrative, too; if you can get that grey-skinned singer to autograph a few CDs, they're definitely going to be worth a hell of a lot more money in three to five weeks' time, judging by how slowly their unbalanced pupils are reacting to changes in light.

Later on, though, you'll wish you'd read the rest of the brochure between signing the contract. As yet, I've been way too smart to make the mistake of getting into drugs, alcohol, or gambling. I'll be damned if I allow conventional working hours to send me down the same sad and desperate road that has ruined so many of my friends' lives.

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It's only just now occurring to me that I wasn't cut out to be a newspaper reporter. Which is actually not a big deal; imagine my disappointment if this had been a lifelong goal, or if I'd spent my adult life working as a bad one. Dodged a bullet there, I think. Otherwise I'd be cancelling any appointments I might have for the next ten days and placing a phone order at the liquor store for the Keith Moon Rainy Day Fun Pack.

The revelation came when I learned that there's a ukulele bandit at large in Hawaii. Mind you, I have many of the instincts necessary for a career in journalism. I can sense that this is a hot story that demands reportage. I can make a few phone calls and collect the facts. No trouble there. But then comes the time when you have to hit command-N and fill up a blank window with keystrokes, and here my troubles begin.

"Law enforcement continues to prove powerless to stem the ongoing reign of fear inflicted upon local residents, as ukulele crimewave enters its fourth week."

OK. Nnnnnot bad, I suppose. Or,

"The nylon strings of our state's adopted instrument, which once rang out through every street and strata of island communities, are nervously muted today. Over the course of the past month, ukuleles have been desperately concealed deep inside closets, hidden underneath floorboards, even thrust inside banjo cases which no sane man would dare to open. Yes, on a day when no ukulele is safe from the clutching, remorseless fingers of the Oahu Uke Fiend, it's a penetrating chill — and not balmy Pacific breezes — that surrounds our once laid-back islanders."

A little overboard, maybe. Go for the direct route?

"15th UKULELE REPORTED MISSING. Police urge postponement of Friday night's all-hula presentation of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes'"

You see the problem. A real pro would be able to bang this right out and slap it straight onto the front page. I'm no good at that. I'm forced to lean back in my chair and speculate.

You want my insight on this crime wave? I'm betting that it'll turn out to be the work of bumbling Cockney jewel thieves. They've stolen the British crown jewels, see, and minutes before Scotland Yard collared them at Heathrowe, they hid them inside a bag off a passing luggage cart. Unbeknownst to the thieves, it was Gwen Stefani's ukulele case and the cart contained the luggage and instruments of No Doubt's current world tour.

Sprung three weeks later on a technicality, the thieves follow the bag to Hawaii and desperately track down every ukulele that arrived in the islands while they were incarcerated. This will last until just after the sixth commercial break, when the thieves determine that their true target is No Doubt's halftime show at the Pineapple Bowl, which will feature a dramatic exhibition matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and the spunky kids of the King Kamehameha Orphanage. There will be a guest appearance by Don Ho, a surfing competition during which No Doubt's drummer sprains his wrist, and a madcap golfcart chase through downtown Honolulu which ends in Aloha Plaza's famous Precariously-High Piles Of Fresh Fruit Marketplace. The truth will finally be revealed immediately after Stefani's big ukulele number at the halftime show. It will turn out that the band's enigmatic replacement drummer — the one whom Gwen had a crush on — is actually an undercover agent from Scotland Yard, and before the first encore he will reveal in front of an live international audience that the two go-go dancers at the edges of the stage are actually the thieves in drag.

But all's well that ends well. The Queen (watching the game at the Palace) will call No Doubt's road manager right on his cellphone and she'll donate the stolen jewels to the orphanage. Then they'll cut straight into "Just A Girl."

It's not a bad little theory, mind you, but just try to convince the editor of the Metro section that you've got the public's best interests at heart.

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Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents copyright © 2003 Andy Ihnatko.