So I got really sick and spent a week alternating between cold sweat-sleeps and wandering around in a dazed fug while my head steamed with virus. my voice was shot; I could only talk in small bursts of painful croaking, a condition which had to be quickly explained whenever I answered the phone. (I scared both my bank manager and Josie at the printing plant, by picking up and answering like a demented frog beast.) I was really sick.

I was sick this time last year. I mean, the same thime last year. Exactly. I remember, because it all took place during the week of last year's Detroit Motor City Comicon, which I didn't attend. (Incidentally, I didn't go to this year's Comicon either, but not because I was sick in either case. Being rendered useless by disease was just coincidence on both occasions.)

The reason I didn't go this year was that I'd decided sometime around Christmas to spend 12 solid months hammering away at putting out the best comics I could with as few distractions as possible; i.e. no conventions. But the reason I stayed home from Detroit last year was different; I was working on a flyer campaign at the time. -I mailed out something like three and a half thousand envelopes with a T&K promotional, and I'd set aside three days in which to organize the whole thing. But on the evening of the first night, I ate a pizza with rotted anchovies on it. It knocked me out for half a week!

This happened at Carson's place, where we were stuffing the envelopes.  After eating the bad pizza I got to feeling really sleepy as you do just before you get really sick. Carson looked at me stumbling around in a bleary daze, and invited me to spend the night in the guest room. I gladly took him up on the offer. So I lay there trying to sleep; I was in such a bad way that even my dreams were about feeling weird and nauseous.

I dreamed that I was on a train car. -One of those old wooden and cast iron trains made with passenger compartments and sliding doors and English, Sherlock Holmes-y countryside gliding along outside the windows. The train rattled and swayed and I sat there concentrating every effort on not throwing up. (The last time I threw up, I was around Heath's age, and the experience was so horrid, I swore I would never throw up again. Ever. And over the next decade and a half, through main force of will, I digested some of the most unbelievable gastronomic nighmares you could possibly send through a person's intestine. Stuff that any sane sperson would have given the ol' heave-ho without a second thought. All because I was both stubborn and scared.)

After an imaginary English county or two rolled by, and I'd turned a shade or two greener, the sliding door clattered back and into the dreamy, shuddering passenger compartment stepped none other than Dr. Who, as portrayed by mop-top Tom Baker; the fourth Doctor, I think. (Could be wrong.) -I hadn't given any thought to Doctor who since, again, I was around Heath's age, watching the British sci-fi classic every Saturday evening with my family. Conjured up by my subconscious, the floppy Time Lord with his mile long scarf sat down across from me, and despite his normally lackadasical manner, he put a comforting hand on my shoulder and told me in all seriousness...'Mark, I'm going to tell you something important, and you have to listen. -Sometimes you can't hold on to the things from when you were a young boy. Sometimes you have to allow yourself to be weak. Sometimes you just have to let yourself throw up. That time has come.' (Corny, yes, but as always in a dream, it seemed to hold the significance of the universe.)

The dream swam out of existance, and I stumbled from the guest bedroom barely able to navigate, got lost trying to find the toilet, and grabbed for the next nearest thing, (the waste paper basket next to the toilet), and vomited the undigested remains of a very nasty pizza. It took me half a year before I could look sideways at any food even remotely Italian. And a childish part of me still wants to heave a brick through the window of the friendly neighborhood Dominoe's...

And, of course, Carson being one of the inspirations for Quinton's mad scientist ways, (another, oddly enough, being Tom Baker's Dr.Who), had cut two perfectly round, doorknob sized holes into the far side of the wastepaper basket because he'd needed a pair of plastic disks for some project or other. Liquid pizza traveled right through those holes and splashed all over the wall. Barely a drop ended up in the intended target. I spent the next three hours dry heaving and scrubbing the wall in the dead of night. Really gross, and I apologize for sharing.

But here's the neat thing about this fond memory...(And I've asked a couple of different people about this and each time they became very thoughtful and eventually went away before answering me...) Put yourself in the same situation I was in. -In a dream train with a belly full of poison, and pretend you were orally-retentive like me. If your psyche needed to conjure up a trusted figure from your youth in order to deliver some much needed advice, who would that person be? Dr. Who was the last guy I'd have guessed, but in retrospect it makes sense. Who would it be for you?

You can get back to me on that.