David Spates "Therefore I Am" Published Aug. 9, 2005

I'm driving myself crazy with this hack

I've been annoying myself for days. I've had this awful, hacking cough, and it just won't go away. I hate to listen to people cough. I just find it very annoying, and it's even more abrasive when I'm the one doing the coughing. If someone else is coughing, I can leave the room, but, sadly, you can't escape yourself.

I know it's stupid. People cough. I need to get over it. Well, nothing would please me more than to get over it. It's bad enough to have the cough and suffer throat-grinding, lung-squeezing barks every few moments, but listening to myself is even worse. I'd like to tell myself to shut up already, but that would be rude.

Sounds can drive people batty. My wife can't stand the sound a nail clipper makes. She still trims her nails, but she absolutely despises the sound. I have to wait until she's out of the house before I can cut my nails. Sometimes, like when she's on vacation and not out of the house at work, I won't have an opportunity to cut my nails and I start to look like Howard Hughes in his later years. Strap a pair of Kleenex boxes to my feet and I'd give DiCaprio a run for the part.

One of our vehicles, a 1993 Nissan Altima with more than 150,000 miles on it, can be quite annoying too. Somewhere deep within the dashboard it makes an incessant clicking sound, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's like driving with a metronome. Click. Click. Click. Click. It averages about three clicks every two seconds, and it never, ever stops.

Well, that's not true. It does stop. It will stop for a day or two or three, just long enough for me to think that perhaps the automotive gods from on high had somehow repaired the problem. But then, just when I had almost forgotten about the noise, it comes back and goes on for weeks. Click. Click. Click. Click. The automotive gods are laughing at me, I just know it.

A trusted mechanic told me it would cost hundreds of dollars to fix, something about a plastic air-conditioning valve not sealing like it should. He's probably right. Who knows anymore? Today's cars are like rolling supercomputers, with enough processing power and software to carry pi out to a billion decimal places. A mechanic could tell me that the gophimyer flange is out of sync and I wouldn't know any better.

"My gophimyer flange?" I'd say. "That can't be good. Go ahead and replace it."

Maybe the biological version of my gophimyer flange is malfunctioning. Maybe that's why I'm coughing. Everything else under my hood is OK. I wake up in the morning feeling pretty good, but as the day drags on and my cough count begins to inch toward quadruple digits, I wear down. There are only so many coughs I can tolerate in a day.

And they're not shallow, discreet coughs that sound as though I'm trying to get someone's attention. These are full-body coughs that rattle my brain and cause my eyelids to involuntarily squint. I've taken every syrup, pill, elixir and cough drop my wife's pharmacy has to offer, but I'm still rattling the rafters.

I shouldn't even be writing this. I started a different column, but I couldn't concentrate. My own cough was too much of a distraction, so I decided I'd make my hack work for me. Perhaps I can convince the folks in the Chronicle newsroom to incorporate the phrase "the hack's hack" into the headline. No good? Nah, you're right. It's too easy.

After years of being an ex-smoker, I might as well go ahead and smoke a pack. I wouldn't be any worse off than I am now. I'd still be coughing, but at least I could reacquaint myself with 20 old pals.

Wait, that's a bad idea. I might get hooked again and not be able to quit. Then, 40 years later, I'd be one of those old-timers with a constant smoker's hack. This cough has been bad enough, and it's been only a little more than a week. I can't imagine spending the final 10 or 20 years of my life listening to myself cough.

I can see myself in the old-folks home sitting in a rocking chair next to my wife, the two of us completely out of our minds. I'd be crazy from my own coughing, and she'd be nuts from listening to the manicurist down the hall.

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David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@chartertn.net.