Yes. Hello. OK. Bodies. “Ugh
,” amirite?
I’ve never been at peace with the whole body thing. One, I look like a damn fool. Like, actually cartoonish. Like, people have on the regular spoke to me some version of the sentiment, “dude, you might be a cartoon, actually,” and you know what they are not wrong.
The Body Thing
But let’s talk about that whole body thing. It takes so much work to maintain, there’s a wide range of unappetizing foods that must be consumed in order to keep it in good maintenance, and a distressingly wide range of delicious foods that must be eschewed far more often than I’d like, for same.
And pull ups! Have you done pull ups ? Pull ups suck. Though, I’ve found few exercises as satisfying when you can just absolutely crush out a set of 10 clean reps. Which, you know, takes a lot of fucking work to get to and more to maintain honestly the work just goes on and on and I’m back to this whole body thing.
The Litany Against Comfort
It’s just part of what I think of as, variously, the List of Painful Frustration, or, “O Body, How I Hate Thee, I Shall Enumerate the ways.” AKA “Besides all this ‘being healthy as a moral and ethical duty to your loved ones’ labor, there are the additional body frustrations in the myriad ways the whole thing can - and will - go wrong.”
i.e., all the ways my body has gone wrong, long term, plus, uh, some damage I did to it, in no particular order:
- all the damn work, re: above
- migraines; relatively well-controlled, but still sneaky bastards
- retrolisthesis
- my back hurts, all day, every day
- rosacea
- “I thought I was done with acne!?”
- shaving sucks, which is why I’m always scruffy these recent years
- arthritis leading to 1-4 total lifetime hip replacements
- depression & friends
- it’s not Maybelline, I was born with it
- concussions, multiple
- of a number too close to ten
- this doesn’t seem like enough for CTE but let’s put it on the list of shit to worry about
- those brown, scaly, itchy, patches of skin on my back
- “Oh, it’s allergies.” “… to what, Doc?” “You’ll never know.” “Fuck.” “Yeah.”
- it doesn’t stop aging into deepening decrepitude
- it doesn’t! WTF!?!?
- sweet tooth
- Sugar, I wish I could quit you.
This doesn’t seem like a lot to complain about in the grand scheme of things. These are all treatable (and I am treating them - important to be part of your own solution!). But this is the list I carry. You all have your own lists and they add burden to your life.
And if you’ve got a list, or even if you are so gods-graced that you do not (yet) (you will) (did you know you never stop aging? it’s terrible!) why the fuck would you risk adding to it? And I’m not talking about “mothball yourself in the closet to prevent all possible future injury” dopiness here.
The COVID Bit
I’m talking about wearing a mask and socially distancing during a pandemic.
There’s of course a lot of focus on in the news and all our mental states about the fatality rate of the novel coronavirus infections. I’ll jump ahead and say “it’s higher than the flu, by a lot” and you can choose to Google that yourself. In fact, there’s some research that indicates that overall (ignoring age group) it’s only around ten times more deadly than the flu at 1% IFR then some quick research and math says that with about 330MM people in the U.S., we’re looking at 3.3MM deaths if everyone gets it.
3,300,000 dead people is a hell of an annual savings in birthday cake.
But the simple math on the current stats as of today give us:
(165,564 deaths / 5,196,698 infections) x 100 = 3.19% IFR
3.19% of 330MM is 10.5MM dead.
Ten. Million. Dead.
But hey! It’s chill. That number is wrong because we are certainly undercounting the number of actual infections (by a lot ) and we are probably not catching all the COVID-19-related deaths, either. A flip side to this thinking is, “Good! If we’re undercounting infections, then we’ve got to be getting closer to herd immunity faster than we think, right? Hey, my grandparents aren’t dead yet, so that’s great news for them!”, but this would be wrong. We’re probably not even in the neighborhood of herd immunity .
But the grim spectre of release from the trials of this mortal coil, as good as that sounds after what 2020’s dished out so far, is by no means the only trick of COVID-19. Oh no, not at all! And that’s because there is mounting evidence that this disease does systemic damage to cells, maybe because it loves to key onto something called “ACE2 receptors” and they are … everywhere in you. Lungs, heart, gut, kidneys, blood vessels, nervous system, other tissues, eht seh-tuh-ruh, eht seh-tuh-ruh.
Unless you wanna roll the dice on death or taxes taxing, lifelong additions to your personal List of Painful Frustrations, I recommend not catching this disease. It’s in your self interest to self motivate maintaining being infection free. Bonus! Everyone will think you are a very nice person, being so careful for the sake of others!
And, it’s patriotic. You would not want to be contributing to something that’s killed more Americans than died in every conflict since Vietnam, combined . Don’t be an enemy soldier, amirite?
OK. So. All that said and you now being well and convinced to keep these critters out of you, I’ll now, at last, end where we’re told to start. With a summary. But I wanted to make you suckers read the long form first ha ha etc..
tl;dr
I am already cursed and doomed to haunt a continually rotting mansion I can never adequately repair, I don’t need to catch a disease that has a high likelihood of adding a horrific variety of long-term negative effects or death, and I don’t need you to give it to me since there’s only so much I can do on my own.
I’m wearing my mask and keeping socially distant. You should too, please. For patriotism and for your loved ones and out of your basic desire to have your humanity respected as you respect that of others.
p.s. I didn’t put a “politics” tag on this post, because this isn’t a fucking political issue.