No, you have not reached Marlo Thomas

Let me start by setting something straight: I'm sick.

Not figuratively sick, which may well be the case. But literally sick. As in, I have a cold. The worst cold I've had since the one two years ago.

The one two years ago was brought about by a 19-hour flight, sitting next to a man who only stopped coughing long enough to swig from a quart bottle of cheap Moldavian vodka.

Two days later, I had his cold, and it probably would have stayed pretty benign if only I’d tried his course of medication. Instead, I ended up tromping around the Baja California desert for 28 hours at a shot, working on 'Dust 2 Glory'.

'Dust 2 Glory', in case you haven’t seen it, is a documentary film about the Baja 1000—an off-road race through the Mexican desert run by dune buggies, dirt bikes, and super trucks with engines so huge and powerful, you can hear them coming from five miles away.

The drivers of those trucks asked me to keep my coughing down.

Is this cold worse? Hard to tell. This time I have a voice, though it's not mine. It's Marlo Thomas'.

In my head, it's actually kind of sexy. But I'm so congested that it's really about the only thing I can hear. It's fascinating the way a single word like 'phlegm' reverberates off the walls of my skull, and I entertain myself for hours by doing little experiments, repeating the same word over and over in different ways to see how long it takes for the echo to die down.

Then I start coughing.

I don’t know if other people do this, but when I get sick, I lose my perspective. One time when I had strep throat, I became convinced that the only thing—the only thing—that was going to make me feel better was popcorn. I singed my eyebrows off in that adventure, and almost set my apartment on fire, but that was nothing compared to this.

This time, the thing that I needed—the only thing that would make me feel better—was 'Lethal Weapon'.

My wife was thrilled. I’m not much for being pampered, and this gave her an opportunity to do something to help me feel better.

It took her six hours to find a store that rents or sells videos in L.A., but she didn’t give up. And when she walked back in the house, I noticed she was wearing ear plugs.

I think she wanted to understand my suffering, to feel how congested I must feel.

She loves me that much.

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