There are two ways to look at life. Actually, there are thousands, but when I’m staring at a television screen at 3:00 A.M. while my cranium feels like it’s being compressed by a hydraulic press, I tend to dwell on two of them. The first view is that nothing stays the same and that the only driving force in anyone’s life is entropy. The second is that everything-from the specific way John Cusack holds a boombox to the semantic absurdity of pharmaceutical advertising-is completely connected, even if we don’t realize it.
I was thinking about this while watching a commercial for an extra-strength analgesic. The announcer, possessing that kind of authoritative, non-threatening baritone usually reserved for men who own yatch(s), looked directly into the camera and told me the product was “good for headaches.”
And that’s when it hit me. I don’t want something that’s good for headaches. I want something that’s bad for headaches. A headache is a localized biological insurrection. Why would I want to provide it with “good” things? I want something that is a total disaster for my headache. I want something that treats my headache with the same scorched-earth policy that General Sherman applied to Georgia.I want something so brutal. I want something that is good for me, but a catastrophic failure for the throbbing sensation behind my left eye.
This is the central paradox of our accelerated culture: we have become so accustomed to the language of “relief” that we’ve forgotten how to actually experience it.
