Down With the Sickness

Fucking boy was I sick these last few days. I was sick in the kind of way that moving makes you just pulsate with pain and ooze. The rhythmic percussion of my internal organs were like an abrasive clanging of pots within my skull. Orchestras of phlegm and stuffy mist played inside me, conducted by demons with cerebral palsy. I was the kind of unnamed seasonal, viral sick that reminds you that before like, say, this century, people used to just drop like flies in the winter time because of pedestrian shit like the flu. Goodness grief, it was awful. Let it be noted though that I was sick for approximately 48 hours. As torturous as they were, I'm not exactly gonna rewrite my will, (reminder to self: find out how to make a will and buy acres of land for my ancestors.) in fact I don't think I've even gained any perspective. In an age of instant gratification, some shit just doesn't really matter. It takes all of 3 minutes for me to start to feel the effects of Advil when I get a headache--I don't even think a three year-old would complain about that. Toddlers are extremely demanding, short tempered, prone to erratic unjustified outbursts and highly impatient, but I have a feeling that most infants, would take Advil and go, "Huh, that was surprisingly effective." I can remember, like it was yesterday, because as I said, it literally was yesterday, my flaccid, unkempt visage, crumpled in my bed, waiting for death's sweet release. I would have gotten addicted to cigarettes and then gone through the extended, laborious process of quitting smoking if God would have just erased my symptoms. And yet here I am, at 2am with a 9:30am class tomorrow morning, rolling the dice with my immune system. "Double or nothing, on you not fucking collapsing Benny Boy!" Have I learned nothing?

In the era of the internet, we polarize and miscalculate valuations within this life; it's like if "The Antiques Roadshow" hired Stevie Wonder to appraise fucking porcelain sculptures. Everyone my age seems so reactionary and radical. Type the wrong smiley face in a text message and cataclysmic waves ripple through people's flesh, yet national, well respected, news publications are starving for readership. People even have the audacity to complain about paying for music. When someone cannot instantly download a recorded piece of music they act as if the internet told an off-color joke about their heritage. If I walked into the Beatles' recording studio, grabbed the recorded tape off of the reel after they finished producing it and walked out and distributed it to all my friends, they--the most peaceful band on earth--would probably beat me and strangle me to death with the cord of a hookah. People always tell me (and I do empathize with this) that they don't have the money to buy the song. Well shit, then you don't buy it. If I can't afford a car I don't perform a heist on my local Ford dealership. When the internet goes down or the GPS takes you the long way people get livid, as if something personally attacked and threatened them. Just do whatever the fuck you did before 1990. And if you're young, then take a huge leap of faith and trust that people had friends, got jobs and even got laid without cell phones at some point.

Life, with all its modern amenities, is beautiful. I am not some hipster who thinks that the internet is poisoning the water. The pros clearly outweigh the cons. I don't want to be halfway across the Oregon trail, eating the half-cooked leg of my mother in order to survive. I also, though, dont want to have to recover from cancer or go to jail for 40 years in order to appreciate a summer breeze or classical music. People often times, when they share my point of view, tend to idealize a simpler past. A pastoral image of a woodsy cabin in spring emerges in their mind in which babbling brooks and woodland creatures sing soft lullabies to you in a rocking chair while you smoke your thick, maroon colored pipe hewn out of a redwood tree you and the townsmen cut down as you watch your wife mend her summer dress and enjoy the sweet taste of a succulent apple. Yes, the slow languorous lifestyle of our idealized pasts are beautiful and serene. But they were also highly dangerous and boring. People used to beat their kids for sport and every other child you had died of a disease named after a color. One would hope and think that there has to be some middle ground. A capacity within all of us exists to look at the small, beautiful details in life and derive meaning from them and to also be able to post a status about that same thought on Facebook later on. Do away with instant gratification, for no person is ever wholly gratified or complete, people require instant appreciation: the ability to see value in life, quickly and rapidly, in a world that moves blindingly fast.