I've been mixing Nyqil and scotch again. I would call my cold remedy a “Sweet Dream” if it didn't
induce waves of nightmares where your legs don't work and Grandma has
a knife. It's an attrition remedy, something that stirs up all the
evil viruses in you and pushes them out your skin. That's where those
nightmares come from, all the evil swirling, so even Grandma in her
wool sweater, the one place where the world always feels soft and
shapeless and bearable turns over and it's just as out-to-get-you as
any other midnight mugging in a Staples parking lot. You wake up
soaked in sweat feeling like you've been dragged across asphalt and
you have to get up for an hour so your bed dries out and you don't
catch your death, but that's the evil leaving you. It's why you feel
so fantastic, so Sound of Music-ey when you get over an illness. All
the evil has been sweated out and you can run amongst the other
humans to throw all the beautiful ideas together, and it feels like
harmony as you walk down the crisp autumn streets. It feels so good
to be doing something. This will edge out into the usual ambivalence
by about 2pm on your first “cured” day, once you remember what
life looks like, but getting over a cold rules, is what I'm saying.
Feeling good feels good.
I'm blaming this one on kids. It's the
kid's fault. There was a family function this weekend with a bunch of
sub-4-year-olds running around. I drank some of the imaginary tea,
which turned out to be a very real cup of rhinovirus. The kids don't
go to school yet, so I don't know how the cesspool of germs they cart
around is so potent, so beyond anything my adult body has
encountered. As we age, it's not as if were exposed to fewer
contagions, what with public transit, workplaces, bars etc. We still
get into situations where we're packed together breathing a lot of
other people's air and touching the same doorknobs. We just have the
immunity for contagions, so we get sick less often as we age. So how
do the bugs children have seem to be stronger? Why can't I fight
them? How is it that an adult's defences are useless against a pint
sized attack?
Is it the childlike creativity? Is it
the imaginary tea? Is this the trap? The play, the interaction as the
place where the bugs are introduced. Part of being an adult means
being allowed your own personal space. It starts at the point where
you become too heavy to pick up, so your parents can't sweep you up
in their arms whenever they like. That's the beginning of personal
space. As we learn that we can actually have our own space our growth
in size means the tantrums we throw to enforce that personal space
start ramping up into dangerous territory. We stop getting our toys
out of a shared chest and start getting our personal controller that
only we touch for the duration of the mario-kart session, and
obviously video-games mark the end of a shared, imaginative play. The
point where play becomes rote, more a matter of re-spawn than
re-imagining, and we all become wirelessly connected, sharing the
experience but none of the germs.
Imagination is the means through which
germs infect us, or rather, it manifests in kids who lack the
perceived boundaries we grow as adults and spreads through their
willingness to play without them. In childhood, play gives us a
reason to ignore the barriers that the learned personal space creates
later on, and leads to all the diseases that adults blame on children
after-the-fact. Since we can't just crush their little dreams by not
drinking the imaginary tea, adults play along, and end up getting the
sniffles because of it. Imagine that. A world without sickness is a
world without imaginings.
I don't know why we allow this
imagination thing, because it turns out it's bad for adults as well.
There was a study published this week linking creativity and mental illness, and here's another saying that writers as a
group had incidents of mental illness in numbers 20x the general population. Imagination, coming back around to make us ill. Who knew
that allowing a person's creativity to chase down it's own ideas
would cause an anxiety disorder when it dreams up every possible
scenario that could kill a human in every situation that person finds
themselves in. Among other things that are bad, like schizophrenia
causing the strange, outlying thoughts that can inspire originality
in art. I've always thought that creativity was caused by a chemical
imbalance in the brain, certain neurons misfiring and accidentally
creating the ah-ha! moments that people call imagining. It's bad for
us, people, and we have to get rid of it. For the sake of our tonsils
and our sanity. This means no more mapping DNA structure, no new movies and no new ice cream flavours. Bacon Avacado will be the last
innovation to come out of Baskin Robbins. We're shutting down this
creativity thing for good.
Wait, I'm also remembering that I
washed the dishes after cake, which means I touched every utensil.
The boundary might have broke right there and caused the sickness.
Never mind the boycott. Continue your imaginings. It's not bad for
you. Just never do anything nice for anyone ever again, because it
might make you sick.
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