brain fog

“I can’t get into all of my prejudices and superstitions about when it’s okay to work and when it’s okay to rest. I think it’s the thing that I am the most neurotic about. I’m like, I’m like,” I was saying to Harris, looming over him at Prairie Lights (which he welcomed he did welcome and encourage, for the record), “I’m like a dead body, you know how when you tie a dead body to the back of a car and drag it around it gets dirty and all kinds of things stick to it? That’s like me and my thoughts about work, I’ve just accumulated all of this—“ and I couldn’t think of the word. That was the brain fog. So was the ranting and the subject of it. Right now, the word that occurs to me is flotsam. But I mean xlam, the wonderful Russian word, which is kind of the Bouba to the Kiki of ‘junk.’ Now you know exactly what I am talking about. “I sound like [you-know-who],” I apologized.

“You do not,” Harris said. “But you are close.”

Where does brain fog come from? They started using it during COVID. There’s something beautiful about it in the current pantheon of sick words. Unlike the prevailing cornucopia of ultra-scientific acronyms, ‘brain fog’ sounds like i.e. a burp of the humors. Phlegmatic Brain Fog. An ailment of the spirit. And it just means when you feel and act kind of dumb, kind of slow, forgetful, and sloppy. Because usually you’re so smart, that when you’re dumb, it is magic. The most exciting thing that I learned about it on the Cleveland Clinic website is that according to them, like, the doctors who write that website, right?, it’s doctors, is that you can get it by having excessive screen time. Justice for the Havana Syndrome 1500.