You ain't so big, you just tall
Place this year gently into the garbage.
I Herxed myself today. (Not like yesterday). I took too many anti-inflammatories and then got the flu but the sickness was coming from inside the house, so to speak. The Jarisch Herxheimer reaction sometimes happens when you take a bunch of Advil or antibiotics. Your body will lose inflammation around…whatever it was inflaming around or some other crud in your crud body will be evicted and on the way out it all gets in an APU and rat-a-tat-tats the squiddies of your person for a bit. This means fever, sweats, aches. Flu shit. During COVID you might think “oh shit, I’m dying” and during Ordinary Times you might think “ugh I’m dying” which is different but similar. CBD and other alt-cannabis dorks see the Herx as a positive cleansing, the good stuff flushing the bad stuff out of you like a salmon cannon.
My theory is that I Herxed myself right into the hospital back in July. My shoulder was in rough shape so I was chomping Advil like I was back on my high school junior football team. I was a nose tackle, guard, and a theatre kid so I was Soft and Hurting 100% of the time. This turned me into a kind of shelf painkiller sommelier. Mmm, yes, this Robax has a nice mouthfeel but have you tried this rare, imported Motrin? It fucks pain in the face®! Apparently this class of NSAIDS aren’t great for asthmatics, something I wasn’t informed about until 2021. (In defense of my diagnosing family physician, he once asked me if I thought getting my tonsils out was a good idea after I asked him if it was a good idea. He had challenges, primarily around being a prick). Hospital doctors are a curious sort so they shoved all kinds of swabs and needles into my noodle veins (14 attempts and an ultrasound machine to get blood, a new record) to find out why a somewhat healthy 32 year-old man was in the hospital with pneumonia in mid-summer. They couldn’t figure it out! I’m sitting there in the COPD wing during the bad COVID days with a smirk on my face. I know what happened. I did this to myself. You fools. You think something outside of me is as good as me at killing me? You absolute clowns. You morons.
Alright, are you ready to make this topical? A good columnist will take a personal anecdote and make it a metaphor for macro events, and it will be relevant (I bought a fence to keep nutria from eating my lawn and it was kind of like Israel’s Iron Dome). A bad columnist will take a personal anecdote and make it a metaphor for macro events and it will be irrelevant (I bought a fence to keep nutria from eating my lawn. It’s kind of like how Roe v. Wade is making my family fight at Thanksgiving because America is divided). A really bad columnist will keep typing a paragraph like this to draw attention to this kind of activity to fill space (uh).
Maybe the world is in kind of a Herxheimer reaction right now. The piling crises combined with world historic levels of information access and getting in the digital face of assholes you hate access has combined into a fever for planet. The aches and pains feel worse because, as usual, we’re doing this to ourselves but now we know very well we’re doing so on a broader scale than ever. Maybe the world is, on the eve of 2022, experiencing exactly the same thing I did back in July because I am the main character of the world. You have to wonder if I am absolutely right and smart.
🥑Everyone is making record profits but the workers are asking stupid questions like “am I in danger” and “why do I have to risk my life for this dickhead not wearing a mask and posting his bravery to TikTok”. So our leash needs a little yank to remind us that they can do whatever they want and if we ask them to stop that’s Communist and you should be ashamed and don’t you know Stalin did genocide?
🌭Robot replaces local worker.
🍦As previously covered in this newsletter TransAlta will close some power plants using coal and natural gas. This is now being touted as having “completing it’s phase out of coal generation”, which is just delightfully full of shit.
🍬We have a shortage of prosecutors so we have to get corporations to bring justice to people who lower their profits.
😗Hello Fresh is endorsing Rob Ford and paying union busters huge amounts of money. All the more reason to switch to the VASTLY SUPERIOR GoodFood.
🤨Airlines said their employees weren’t that sick so the doctors and scientists in the U.S. Government say “yeah fuck it why not” so they can go back to work sooner and their customers can just come and spread plague wherever even though it seems like omicron is pretty bad or at least bad enough to make it so people who get shot or hit with cars have no hospital beds.
🌸Cheering for striking student workers at an Ivy League university is the definition of critical support.
☃️Ham sniffers pushed to the brink before holiday rush.
🥠Changing laws to get corporations to bring jobs? Passe! Changing laws to attract new, wealthy citizens? So chic!
🦾Danes? Danes!
🦒Brian Eno is down with the grift.
🍓Corporate person? Fuck that! Tree person? Hell yeah.
👠This is probably mostly political or to the benefit of the NHL as a league but on the off chance it isn’t, congrats to the NHLPA for actually reducing health risk for its members.
🧶Kellogg’s workers got the goods after their strike, but not until the company tried to illegally fire them all and replace them with scabs.
📉Doing all videos for this section. Here’s us talking about omicron.
🎧Mr. Rob talked about China! He’s clearly a red!
🔇Hilary Agro says drugs should be legal! I agree!
🎚️Big Shiny Takes had Andre on to talk about hot wood!
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Our editor is Clinton Hallahan. Newsletter subject lines are stolen from these songs.
