Once last year I was riding with a good friend of mine, an import for a slavic country. He said that he’d had a problem much like mine.

"I couldn’t breed," he said. "And my teats hurt."

"Really?"

"Yes," he said, "And it might be the same thing what’s been bothering you."

I was pretty sure I hadn’t complained of hurting teats, or of problems breeding. Only a chest infection. But by now I was sucked into his story and wanted to know more. I asked him what he did about the pain in his teats.

"What do you think? I went to the dentist."

Serbians are a stern and severe people, given to warfare and strife. At least this is how the press has conditioned me to think over the past decade. But not even Vlad the Impaler, I thought, would resort to having a dentist use his tools on the sensitive parts of his chest. I was beginning to acquire a whole new appreciation for these people.

More than that, I wondered why he was telling me this, and I asked him.

"My teats! My teats!" he said, pointing to his mouth. I had an infection in my teats, and it got into my lungs. I couldn’t breed!"

It seems my friend's fricative-challenged Serbian-style English caused a degree of misunderstanding.

I’m recalling this conversation at this point in time because I caught a flu-type-thing just over a month ago, as Y2K spilled into Y-aught-one. It settled into my lungs, and during most of January I had a very hard time breeding. More than that, I had piles of papers, stacks sitting here and there, and I was way behind on projects. I felt like I was underneath a low ceiling. My lungs and my office all closed in on me. My claustrophobia threatened to turn into abject depression.

Healthwise, eventually things cleared up. In retrospect, my lungs do a funny thing. They seem to get progressively worse, and then lapse into a full-blown flu-like funk. (As I regularly see my dentist, I don’t think my teats are the proximate cause.) When they finally do clear up, it feels like I have a whole new set of perfectly functioning, clean-as-a-whistle, alveoli. My breeding is at this point spectacular in the extreme.

I decided to leverage the general euphoria inspired by my healthy lungs, and I did my taxes. If you gave me a choice between doing my taxes and having a dentist go to work on my teats, there would be no clear option for me. Keep in mind, I’m a sole proprietor, involved in three or four separate revenue streams – each with their own profit and loss calculations – and I’m married to another sole proprietor, with her set of tax issues that must be commingled with mine. Add to that the fact that I’ve been putting off the streamlining of the accountancy of all my business issues over the past year because I’d been too busy building a business to have issues for which to account.

No news or features went up on either Tri’live or Slowtwitch from January 30 thru February 3. For five days I labored, recreating and making sense of the past twelve months, numerically speaking. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my teats hurting. Not from a teat infection, but because I’d been clenching my jaws.

Finally, on the fourth day, it was done. All that remained was the final day of cleaning up all the toxic waste – scraps of paper, files strewn, coffee cup rings, file drawers to be recumbobulated: this year’s paper replacing last.

I can breed again.