I am sick.

Not that “hmm, I have a sniffle, I guess I’m sick” kind of illness. I've been walloped by a “germs oozing from every pore, sweating one moment, shivering the next” sort of sickness. Yesterday was spent coma-like on the couch. Today, I'm feeing about 2% better, which is good because I'm typing from the friendly confines of the Presidents’ Club at Newark Liberty International Airport.

How could this have happened? Let’s take a look and see if we can find any trouble spots…

Could it have been Thursday night, when I took the redeye back from PHX (which, as a result, has skyrocketed past IAH to the top of the “Most Hateful Place on Earth” standings – but that is a story for another day…)?

Could it have been later Friday, when I met KJ in Red Bank around 4 p.m. for happy hour, which wound up lasting 8.5 hours? Could it have been that we got excused from one establishment for what we’ll call a miscommunication and needed to walk through whipping wind and rain to get to another one?

Could it have been Saturday, when we made two trips to the boardwalk to check out the god-awful weather conditions, which included blinding rain and wind so strong it was blowing sand sideways at us from the beach?

Or maybe it was Sunday when, already feeling the onset of said sickness, I was double booked with social events? Was it when I started the evening at a house party featuring a beer pong table in the middle of the living room? Or was it later, when I spent several hours sitting outside at a water-side bar?

I don't know. It doesn't seem like anything out of the ordinary. But something did me in.

So in less than an hour, I'll be getting on a plane to fly back to PHX. I can't imagine how I'll make it through a five-hour flight without my head exploding, but I'm going to give it a shot. If you don't hear from me for a while, you'll know what happened.

As a sidebar to Friday night's antics, it's worth mentioning the following highlight ... after several hours in Red Bank, our friend Sully was going to meet some other folks. Always game to meet new people, we agreed to follow him, without asking where we were going. We drove for a while and eventually had no idea where we were. Never bothered to ask, either. It was an unimportant detail. We were having a good time, so it was of no real concern where we were.

Fast forward a few hours, and we were standing around playing darts with our new friends, and there was suddenly a buzz in the crowd. On all the local television stations, the reporters were standing on the beach in Sea Bright, getting blown over by the wind and rain from Ernesto. The bar patrons were excited because all these news folks were right outside the bar.

Apparently, we were in Sea Bright, which is a hotspot for flooding anytime bad weather threatens. And it's a badge of honor of sorts to ignore said bad weather and enjoy the warm cozy confines of the bar, mere feet from potential disaster.

Good times.