The Machine of Death

My wife and I are coming out of a little over a week of extreme fatigue and brain fog.  We get out very little, have had zero visitors for 2 weeks, so we were left wondering about the source and vector of our illness.  As we compared our activities prior to getting ill, the body of evidence began to build.  For a solid week prior we had used the exercise bicycle I had dragged up from the basement.

It seems to be pretty conclusive, once I got sick, I stopped exercising, and now I am feeling much better.  It seems as if I had banished the Machine of Death to the basement for a reason.

John,   I'm curious,....how do you feel this was contributing to the illness?  My younger sister, now in her early sixties, remains an avid bicyclist.  Just a few weeks back she was doing one of those 'gravel rides' .... I can't imagine doing 50 miles on pavement, much less gravel!  But the winter months are her exer-cycle time and considers the cardio pretty helpful.  

In Amityville Horror the house was on an old Indian burial ground.  My house is behind an old cemetery.   While in the basement and closer to the graves the bike may have been used as the vector by malevolent spirits.

They ride the bike in their basement "gym." It's HARD to stay in shape when you are non-corporeal! They were upset that you took their workout equipment away!
Beware the wrath of the wraiths!

I wonder.  Is it one of those bikes with a belt or other friction method for creating resistance?   It could be building up a static charge which some people ca be sensitive to, to the point of creating flue like symptoms with repeat exposure.   People who get car sick are ofte more prone to this sensitivity.

Some electric stationary bikes used to have this problem too.

Finding a way to ground the machine might help prevent it.  

Digging in the soil without gloves can speed up recovery, if you are up for it.

I seldom wear gloves in the garden.

The bike is pretty sophisticated.  Today it would cost in the 1000+ range.  Anyway it uses magnetic (maybe electromagnetic) resistance via 4 D  batteries.   I am not sure if the distance between the magnets changes or the power to the magnet change.  The later seems like a stretch with 4 D batteries.  But it has maybe a dozen route options.  Within those routes other modifications can be made.

If the fabric between the corporeal and spirit world is indeed thinner around the time of Halloween (Samhain) then perhaps before that holiday arrives you could install a stationary tandem bicycle in the basement.  By riding alone in the front seat, you could periodically look behind you to see if a spectre has appeared pedalling in the rear saddle....  

If so, pedal faster!.... :-)

So I guess that at some point one of you will appoint yourself as the guinea pig and use the bike again to see if that person gets ill and the other one remains healthy?

I remember when my son was a year old and broke out in eczema. I took him to the doctor and asked if it could be a food allergy, maybe to milk. I was told categorically that I should not mess with my son's diet and take out a vital part of his nutrition.  He was still being breastfed at the time, so I totally ignored the advice and put both of us on a really restricted diet for a couple of weeks until the eczema had completely cleared up. Then I would re-introduce one food item at a time, first to my diet and a week later to his and watch the results. Turns out I could eat anything without it effecting him but he couldn't have either cows or goats milk. Which kinda sucked as prior to his birth I'd been the local goat relief milker...

One of the other toddlers in the same town had a similar problem. His parents also ignored the local doctor but instead of the diet testing they took him to Harley street and invested a small fortune to be told that he too was allergic to cows milk. And oranges.

I would occasionally re-test my son to see if he'd outgrown the allergy. Or sometimes accidental tests would happen. Or, very annoyingly, my mother would test him and not tell me about it - cue some seriously heated discussions after I'd spent a week going insane scouring my house for allergens and failing to find any and wondering what he'd become allergic to now. Mercifully it turned out he was NOT allergic to sheep's milk so when we moved to Portugal we were able to source a locally produced cheese made exclusively from sheep's milk. It turns out that many sheep milk cheese is actually a blend as most flocks run a couple of goats with them, so we were very loyal to our producer. Which kinda backfired a decade or so later after I was widowed and he seemed attracted to his most loyal customer. But that's a story for another day. That cheese was tempting though. Plus all the manure I could ever want for my garden. Is it bad I was tempted?

But anyway, what I think I started off wanting to say was that, unless you're looking for an excuse to banish the exercise bike, maybe one of you could give it another go, by way of a test.

edit to add - he stopped being allergic to milk at the age of fourteen or so.

I feel that exercise bike was a contributing factor only for fatigue.

When was the last time you were in a public place or someone came to your house?  Most likely a bug from one of those.

Whatever, I am glad you both are feeling better.

No one has suggested fungus growth in/on the frame of this machine of death?

Huh!  I am already growing Wine Caps near the garden.  What kind of fungus should I grow in the bike?   Maybe Eric will have an idea.

While Eric does have vast amounts of success to my failed mushroom experiments, my understanding is if a substrate is already growing one species, introducing another is not recommended.

😁

Seems like you have an idea, but I’d still check for mold and carbon monoxide vectors with those symptoms.

I will trade you straight-up: the M.O.D. for our M.A.P. (mosquito apocalypse).

What do you think. Deal?

I lived in northern Minnesota for 4 years.  There are few things as pleasurable as stepping out on the front porch, coffee in hand, drawing a deep breath of the morning mist, and inhaling two lungs full of mosquitoes. Then there is the process of dropping to one’s knees…and eventually on all fours….and wrenching out the contents of one’s lungs.

Next time instead of dragging the machine, try rolling it end over end. This should, due to the sausage-grinder effect, make grated ghost out of your household spirits. (Grated ghost can be sprinkled liberally over paranormal pizza, afterlife appetizers, spectre spaghetti, haunted huevos rancheros, and poltergeist potatoes.)

Paint it pink. No serious haunt would be caught living in a pink exercise bike. All the other ghosts would laugh.

Interesting.  I wouldn’t be caught dead on a pink bike. All the ghosts would laugh.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Paint it pink..

But Douglas, if he paints it pink....and THEN you receive it in some sort of (tariff-free?) trade, will the anti-phantom effect work equally well against residual zombie mosquito apocalypse?  Perhaps with a large enough fan geared to the rear cog??.... ;-)

As an aside, skeeters just really starting to crank up now.  They got tired of waiting for some moisture in this dry spell so they are doubling-down on the use of the lakes and rivers of the region.  But dry enough that Fargo-Moorhead have not sprayed once yet.

The brain fog comes from toxins released into your system.

One thing that happens when you exercise is that all the toxins in your tissues that were stagnantly living in you, were stirred up to be released through your sweat or others means. Once you exercise regularly, this happens less and less as your body will expel all the stagnant yuck.
This also happens when you get a massage sometimes.

John Weiland wrote:

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:Paint it pink..

But Douglas, if he paints it pink....and THEN you receive it in some sort of (tariff-free?) trade, will the anti-phantom effect work equally well against residual zombie mosquito apocalypse?  Perhaps with a large enough fan geared to the rear cog??.... .

Given enough paperwork, red tape, politics and general silliness I think the spooks and spectres would just say "screw that, we're going to crack a case of vino and party on the back porch."

Elanor Gardner wrote:One thing that happens when you exercise is that all the toxins in your tissues that were stagnantly living in you, were stirred up to be released through your sweat or others means. Once you exercise regularly, this happens less and less as your body will expel all the stagnant yuck.
This also happens when you get a massage sometimes.

Also when you fast between mittents.

I'm pretty sure the ghosts were miffed that you wouldn't exercise with them. After all this time they've been pedaling away by themselves in the dark down there, they were offended you didn't even want their company.

Just how much did you push yourselves as you tried to exercise?

In addition to the idea of incomplete excretion of “toxins”, if you exercise vigorously after a long spell of no exercise, the cellular processes generate substances that can cause pain and discomfort.  If these don’t get metabolized they can make you feel pretty poorly!  Including GI symptoms.

I don’t know how often it happens to two people at the same time, but another contributing factor may be bodymind connection.

If you are seriously curios about how ideas thoughts emotions and stress get translated into physical symptoms, I can recommend two good books by author and MD, Gabor Mate:  “When The Body Says No”, and “The Myth of Normal”.

People who have PTSD or CPTSD or migraines or IBS, or a complex of symptoms that doctors can’t diagnose, and one after another insist they aren’t real, or you are very stressed, then these books might also be of interest.

I’m not saying the bike isn’t haunted, but there are additional factual, scientifically documented possibilities.

I’m glad everyone survived.