A sore throat marked a new period for me, striking the night I came home from New York. Its severity fluctuated at certain times of the day, usually better before bed, but all progress reset when I awoke in the mornings. I poured boiling water into a cup at work, squeezed a lemon wedge into it, and mixed a teaspoon of honey. Immediate and noticable improvement to my condition. Dark blue bitter syrups cannot contend with nature's gifts. I heard throats grunting around me, and slight fatigue and irritability from those in the kitchen. I'm not sure it started with me, but I was stubbornly determined to deny the reality of my illness, for financial reasons. Now their voices are huskier and deeper set to underscore the growing pains of autumn. There's no romance in this, it's more like a flat joke made by an unknown poet.
I understand my processing speed to be quite slow for as long as I can remember. To an extent, the IQ model doesn't tell the whole story of cognitive ability, and neither does neurodivergency bring neat answers for my limitations. Learning to read took years, the alphabet being a great mystery for twelve years, and then one day it clicked and English became my strongest subject in school the next year. I can listen to a song three hundred times and remember 10% of the lyrics, but then I acted in a play and could memorize three pages of text in a few days. Cleaning takes me longer than the rest of my coworkers, and despite being thorough and detailed, I can tell my relationship with space and the movements of my body are staggered and filled with inefficiency. My mind looks at an order written on a ticket, and I'll overlook a modification noted clearly underneath the menu item. Everything takes long to sink in. Sometimes I'll moralize the predicament by saying all these blunders speak to a lack of effort, rather than a cognitive impairment.
If I had things my way, I would never have a phone call for longer than three minutes long. My ear gets hot, and the thoughts of electric signals damaging my already mediocre brain is a stressor to me. We never should have cut the cord on the landline, and we never should have replaced paper menus with smartphones, and we never should have created nuclear weapons. But because we could, we had to, and that is a bug in human psychology, that a hypothetical must always be fussed around with to satisfy some peculiar fantasy.
I understand there's been a frenzy ever since we threw out the Bible and secular humanism proved to be too unimpassioned. The climate activists are impassioned, and they get sanctified in the denigration of fine art and the blocking of freeways and the disruption of sporting events. I saw animal rights activists and they all wore V for Vendetta masks while they held footage of a fishery going about its carnage on screens they held in their arms. Even those with perfectly defensible positions must add antisocial hysterics to their engagement tactics. It's not enough to believe in the cause, you must also become a freak in the eyes of the larger public. They ask, "How do we get people to pay attention?" and naturally resort to theatrics. Their answer is to distance themselves and establish themselves as a threat. In their view, this is the strongest strategy for issuing an invitation. The miscalculation here is such an aggregious, pitiful manipulation, that it removes any sympathy we might have had for their cause. When a Pro-Life organization came to my college campus and erupted a plastered monolith with the aim of comparing The Holocaust to abortion in the US, the tackiness of their emotional persuasion made me hate them.
Desperation colors everyone's actions today. We are riddled with anxiety and the limitations of our imaginations. We debase ourselves in response to the hopelessness, and we become shameless for the illusion of dignity. When so many channels of control elude us, we grab the bottom of the barrel and pretend it's the closest thing to power we'll ever feel. There's no need to whore ourselves, to cling to communities with false promises, or to establish a personal brand of tyranny. When I read through a book of Chinese proverbs, the vast majority of them emphasized Patience as a high virtue and roadmap for good character and happiness. There ought to be more enthusiasm for ideals that promise an honorable existence. Frustrations can't be numbed with false remedies, and we can't undervalue our capacity to endure.