For the past decade, the conditions have tired the body. They’ve tired the mind, most particularly. For the past decade, the world has been imposed on its consumers far more than they would like, and a collective headache has spread a throbbing dull discomfort. The occipital lobes have been shot by the blaring blue light of mass media, and the somatosensory cortex has seen better days before the sun stole the Earth. And when one even attempts to step away from the conditions, maybe they visit a forest or a lake, or if they’re desperate, a nap, the deep sounds of a roaring highway pierce through the mirage of tranquility.
But it isn’t all bad. There are moments. There are whispers of aspirin softening the tensed collective frontal lobe. There are moments where one escapes. And when they come, it is most often in the form of guilty pleasurables.
Below crumpled receipts and forgotten dinner mints, floating, isolated, lonesome in the corner of one’s bag or purse or knapsack, is, if they are lucky, one loose cigarette, flaccid, with lint packed in with the tobacco. Where it comes from cannot be sure. Taken off a friend or passerby during a particularly demanding time, or perhaps it isn’t even the cigarette that is unfamiliar but the bag. In any case, the cigarette, beyond where it originates or its implications, is affirming to the mind untreated. The cigarette is not healthy by the standards of those who invented the term, and healthy life is certainly what most critically look to for false assurance of long-term security, but health in the form of dread is no better than heart disease. To cure a headache there must be sacrifices. To find solace from all existential conditions there must be compromise. And to reduce any additional troubles long term, use a match, not a lighter.
If the home one resides in is smoking-friendly, or perhaps is at least forgiving, burning a solo cigarette while submerged in a scalding hot bath may speed up a patient’s headache pain relief from far too many hours of contemplation. Indeed a bath too deep for movement, and too hot to ponder is medicine in an oversaturated world. A bath bomb may be too topical, so reaching for bath salts or bubbles poses less as an aide-memoire. There are severe cases of 21st century headaches, with which one is too long exposed to cruel politik on the internet that they begin engaging in apathetic tendencies. In these cases, becoming increasingly ubiquitous, a dose of spending the entire day in the bath is permitted, and in fact necessary to ease their tension and anxiety.
Many people find the hours around dinnertime pose the most threat to their headaches. But it has been long established to cure an anxious mind by a sleeve of saltines. Rather than skittering across the kitchen, aimlessly trying to find the produce one purchased the preceding week and discovering it moulded in the crisper, reaching for an entire sleeve of saltines is as beneficial to one’s health as it can be. Musing on serious issues, ones not only facing today but future issues that face many, is bad for the appetite, too, so the limited variety of flavours and colours and textures found in saltine crackers aids both in digestion and repression.
Finding balance, they are saying, is in mode. Chic even. Choosing, with intention, to take the escalator rather than the stairs, but doing so rather than seldom travelling upward. This is how one must operate to keep the mind in stasis. Choosing here not for the remedy but the sedative, and the sedative over madness.