Amerika

When decades worth of worry come crashing down finally as you knew they would many years ago, your body may go into a bit of shock and, petulant, decide to become sick. This may shock you as someone who rarely gets colds or flu.

Unlike the Baby Boomers (the “Me Generation,” individualists, rebels) my generation does not believe in “teachable moments” where, like good cordycepted Communists, we gather everyone and distill life down to a few simple statements of dogma, but we do believe in learning from experience.

The first phase of illness is marked by defensiveness and charity:

• Walking to the other side of the room is difficult. If you need something, get it yourself. If you cannot get it, you were destined not to have it. Stop oppressing me!
• My sleep has become more precious than anything else in the world. Anyone who interrupts my sleep should be shot, or at least moved somewhere else. This doubles when a fever hits.
• This blanket, this specific blanket, is warm enough to ward off most of the chills. If anyone tries to take it from me, I will stab, I will kill, I will maim… and still I will be the victim.

Then things stabilize and the acetaminophen kicks in, maybe some antihistamines too, which by suppressing inflammation reduce pain and bodily overreaction:

• Now that my pain is gone, the world can just burn. Yes, I will be here with memories of my victimhood at the hands of COVID 489 BC or whatever I just got, so I will know that I suffered. This entitles me to tell the world to burn itself elsewhere.
• Coughing no longer hurts violently. I am still too weak to get water or food whenever I want it. A government agency should be dispatched to solve this problem because although it no longer hurts, it does not feel good either, this whole motion thing.
• Many things have become someone else’s problem. The lack of soda water was resolved by clicking buttons on an Amazon account. I redirected phone calls to colleagues I would not trust to successfully empty a trash can. But I, the sufferer, need this now.

The first state is the defensive side of modern nature: enslaved by jobs, political correctness, bureaucracy, and complex lifestyles, people lash out while playing the victim because they feel bad and have no hope. (For some. Many are just the usual chaotic mindset conflict-driven people who tend toward gossip, circuses, and hipster bar punch-ups.)

The second state is the bourgeois mentality of palliative analgesic sedation. You have ended the pain, but the disease remains, at least for now. Therefore, you stop caring about much of anything except feeling less pain. This is an addictive cycle where the more pain you reduce, the further pains you seek to identify and target.

One can learn a great deal from the simple effects of things. If reducing inflammation produces a state of well-being, what is triggering the inflammation? Is it necessary? If acetaminophen reduces pain, and this makes me lazy and selfish, what does this say about pain?

One also becomes focused on the difference between misfortune and suffering. Misfortune is what occurs to us periodically and erratically; suffering is the mindset we adopt in order to tell us a story where none of this is our fault and people should help us out.

My feeling is that as archaeology improves and we explore more areas of Earth thoroughly, we are going to find that modern humans have existed for millions of years, and have always had the know-how to make herbal infusions that address pain.

This means that many have had these contemplations before. We start to realize how everything is a cycle with two parts, and when you remove the half of the feedback loop that is the pain, something goes screwy with the rest.

Tags: bourgeois, inflammation, paracetamol, passive aggression