The World That's Coming

It never fails. Each year, when the weather starts getting just a little bit nicer, the thought occurs to me: I need to get out in the yard and clean it up; it’ll be good for the yard, and it’ll be good for me, to not be sitting at my desk the entire day, every day. The very idea of yard work — or even, basically, the idea of moving and lifting things and being active feels both exciting and necessary.

And then, after my first attempt every single year, I remember: I am a weakling who sits at his desk the entire day, every day, and I can manage maybe an hour, two tops, of active yard work before I want to take a break for the rest of the day. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, almost; I could be uprooting trees, weeding, or waving the weed wacker around like there’s no tomorrow; after an hour or two, I feel like I need a sitdown and preferably one that’ll last quite some time, if given the opportunity.

It’s a reminder of how inactive I am for the majority of my time, and underscores the mild guilt I feel that I don’t follow through on my multiple promises to myself to head back to the gym, or even just go outside on more walks. (To be fair; that’s far easier in the summer, when the weather is less determined to make you close the windows and not even look outside without shivering.) For all that I might think that I’m in relatively good condition, considering, that’s a thought that comes from the same place that believes that I still have the same body that I did 10 years ago, which is also the same place that suggests that maybe a doughnut isn’t the worst idea because I probably deserve a treat.

Despite this, despite the experience every year, I still try when the weather gets better. I still think for a brief moment, maybe this is my time to properly get active, this will be a good start, and I still put in the effort for those one or two hours before I collapse in sweat and regret. While the best ending to this story would be remembering to actually rejoin the gym and start working out again, I think that the fact that I try every single year is a decent runner-up, at least in the short term. When I get too jaded and achey to even think I’m capable, that’s when I should really start worrying.

One of the surreal things about being sick for three days and, more importantly, letting myself be sick for those three days — by which I mean, not trying to just keep my head down and pretend that everything is normal even though it’s clearly untrue, as I have developed the unfortunate tendency to do, because being a workaholic is a bad thing — was coming back to everything afterwards and seeing just how many fucking emails had accumulated in my absence. We’re talking hundreds, easily.

It goes without saying, I suspect, that the vast majority of them weren’t something I necessarily needed nor wanted to read. It’s a weird fluke of my job that I get added to so many mailing lists and promotional mailings in addition to things that I might, at some point, have intentionally signed on for only to forget doing so, that I get upwards of 10 emails per hour during daylight hours as a baseline; that I’ve got work email and personal email addresses also means that I get a lot of these mailings and promo emails multiple times even before they get sent to the same address multiple times — occasionally, with “FWD” or “RE” added to the subject line, in case either tricks me into opening them — just to complicate matters.

I think, sometimes, about the first time I got internet access, back when I was in art school and they set one up for each of the students. It was a nearly-impossible-to-remember address, based around our student metriculation numbers, so it’s not like we’d have been able to easily share it with anyone even if we knew anyone else besides friends we saw everyday anyway with emails of their own. Nonetheless, we’d check our email inboxes every day, once a day or so, sitting there through the soundtrack of dial-up internet — we had to log-in and dial-up each session as individual students — and then the slow load of Outlook or whatever we were using at the time.

Each time, we’d wait however long it took, excited and expectant that something would have happened, that some message would be waiting there. And each time, we’d be wrong. What a world, to go from that to a day where I delete more than three hundred messages without a thought, confident that none of them were written by people who are even fully aware of who I actually am.

I have a bag of old family photos, and I genuinely don’t remember where they came from. When I say “a bag,” I mean it — it’s a plastic bag that looks like it’s seen better days, and everything in it is loose and looking as if it was just stuffed in there with no rhyme or reason. The contents are a mix of photos from around 90 years ago through, maybe, the turn of the century…? No, wait, a few just after I moved to the United States, so that would be the early 2000s. It’s a heady, quietly awe-inspiring thing to thumb through, seeing the sweep of time go back and forth as I pick through each picture: here’s my grandmother when she was younger than me, getting married; there’s my dad as a baby, so it must be 1941; now my dad is getting married and he looks like a teenager; there’s my sister as a baby; there’s me; and so on.

I don’t often leaf through the bag, because… well, who has time to do that, usually? But an upcoming family occasion had people asking if I had particular photos, so I found the bag and looked through it and realized that I’d utterly forgotten that it isn’t just filled with photos, but all kinds of correspondence and paperwork that clearly belonged to my grandmother at some point. There are telegrams from her husband when he was in the service for World War II, as well as a letter from the government that he’d been killed in action, and a letter from Buckingham Palace sending condolences. Birth certificates from multiple generations of my family on my dad’s side. A whole history of paperwork that I’d entirely forgotten existed, all in this shitty old plastic bag.

It struck me, after going through the bag, that I suddenly wanted to print everything in the world out and put it in bags and boxes and leave it there for people to find years later. I have files and PDFs and JPGs and everything on laptops and devices and CDRs and in the cloud and and and, sure, but it feels like all of those things have a barrier to entry that this bag just doesn’t. Like these days, we’re hiding everything away, but history is just right there in that bag to be discovered.

The point where I realized I was properly sick was early on Saturday morning when it dawned on me that I didn’t have a headache, as such — instead, it was that I could specifically feel an ache in different parts of my skull: my cheekbones were sore, for example, as were my teeth. The back of my skull, where it met my spine.

The thing is, that wasn’t a particularly new sensation for me; as soon as I realized that’s what it felt like, I also realized that the odd specificity of pain actually wasn’t that odd for me — or, perhaps, not that unusual. That’s what it feels like for me when I get really sick, and it’s the sign that I’m not just feeling rundown or a little “under the weather,” or anything similar. It’s when I can separate a dull general ache into multiple simultaneous pains (that are usually accompanied by something else happening elsewhere in my body; this past weekend, a dizziness and general foggy-headedness that wouldn’t shift, and a scratchy throat) that I know that I’m in trouble.

And, sure enough, this past weekend, I was in trouble. I ended up laid out in bed entirely on Saturday and most of Sunday, and then taking Monday off as well because I wasn’t back up to fighting speed just yet. I felt betrayed by my body, or whatever sickness was invading it: it’s not uncommon, sadly, for me to keep it together when I’m not feeling great during the workweek, only to fall sick on the weekend, but to so entirely lose track of my entire time off to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed at all? That just felt unnecessary.

To make matters worse, there had been things I had wanted to do — not even fully-considered-plans, but just vague, seemingly-simple things like it was going to be sunny and warm and because of work, I hadn’t really left the house in a few days and I just wanted to walk around outside thank you very much. But, instead, I was left not thinking clearly, watching the fourth season of The West Wing on HBO Max, because that was all I felt like I could handle at that moment.

And throughout the whole thing, I could feel individual teeth ache, throbbing in time with my fucking cheekbones.