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The fine art of unwellness
It's a fact worth much lamentation: most of us are in various, terrible states of abysmal health. We start off as babies then it just gets worse from there. Torrey Meeks takes matters into his own hands...
by Torrey Meeks
It's a fact worth much lamentation: most of us are in various, terrible states of abysmal health. If you don't have bad eyes, a twisted spine, large, knobby calcified growths on your forehead, a palsy, some kind of chronic depression, premature baldness, a yellow fungus that makes your toenails thick and scaly, a heart murmur, bad cholesterol, or something serious, incurable, debilitating, generally uncomfortable, and ultimately a pain in the ass, well, I've got news. You're not one of us. Go back to whatever planet you came from.
It's implicit to the human condition. It's hardwired into our DNA. It's the stuff of life, like it or not. Being wrong and weird and feeling like Humpty Dumpty but not so cute is tough shit. You can't change it. It goes something like this:
THE BRIEF HISTORY OF A MAN
He's born. He's ugly and covered in white mucousy stuff. If the midwife knows what she's doing she rubs the mucousy stuff, called 'vernix', into the baby's skin because that's the smart, savvy move. The thing has a pointed head and looks like a sundried tomato. It blinks around a couple of times, tries to commandeer its limbs in a blitzkrieg retreat back to the womb, thinks 'Ah shit,' then realizes it has set itself upon a sixty or seventy year downhill slide from physical dependency to physical morbidity, which really sucks. So it does what any self-aware rational being in the same spot would do. It stretches those chompers wide and gums out a Princess Bride like squall of Ultimate Suffering.
Over the course of his life he'll ask and wonder more than once: Why do some of us get sick?
Eternal, asked by the dying and the ones left alike, pondered by reckless kids and ancient spouses, it's a question by nature indiscriminate. It crosses boundaries of race and sex and ties us together with bonds stronger than all the wars for liberation and marches for tolerance ever will. Suffering is a universal language. To those who are blind to its terrible face goes the title 'monster', and rightly.
The answers to the question 'Why is suffering necessary?' go deeper and farther than most people think. Most of us like to believe the sick-healthy seesaw is a mechanical operation, the up-down float of shifted weight, mass, gravity.
Eating this equals that, eating that equals this.
But in the realm of degeneration and recovery, the rules change.
The laws of nature in which apples fall downward, and it is accepted as fact that with the proper trajectory and enough fuel you can shoot the said apple through the atmosphere into space, don't hold true. The rules lose cohesion. Suddenly apples are falling upward and you need a steady supply of rocket fuel just to keep your feet on the ground, to keep from floating away.
Without reason a happy, strong man with three children, an honest smile and a pretty wife goes from having a cold to walking pneumonia to dead. And for what? Next door the caustic, senile granny of 92 calmly evades accident and plague, having exhausted all good reason to live twenty years ago. Spiteful and bitter, she coughs up large, impressive tracts of lung outside your window at 6 o'clock every morning with malicious punctuality.
And it makes you wonder.
What's it all mean? How do you get better? How do you avoid becoming sick? Why are we here, and alive? Is there some greater design?
I don't really know. I'm not sure. I'm a beginner at all this, just like everyone else. I can't promise any answers next time, maybe just better questions.
So I leave you with this immortal phrase, and maybe it holds some nugget of truth, some rough ore that can be refined and applied like a folded steel sword of logic to the amelioration of malcontent at the general state of things:
S'il n'existait pas Dieu, il faudrait l'inventer.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
About the author
Torrey Meeks lives to write and writes to live. He also writes to pay the bills and to buy the gas for his motorbike.Read his American Newswire column
