An Excerpt From My Book of Essays

Chapter 3: AM I SICK YET?
from my book: It's Earth: There is No Intelligent Life

AM I SICK YET??!

I feel surprisingly good today! Is there a pill I can take to keep feeling this good tomorrow?

I wish there was another way to put it. America is totally over obsessed with being healthy. We are so obsessed with being healthy that we take medications that make us sick to prevent the chance of us not taking a medication, and err--getting sick. It’s lunacy!

Doctors offices around the nation are crammed with idiots screaming that they have something that they found on WebMD. Suddenly biblical conditions once eradicated by basic innovations in sanitary technique hundreds of years ago are popping up in diagnosis all over the country because by God‘s will; Bob has it. He’s Bob. He has African Sleeping Sickness. After all, his nose has been running frequently on and off over the last week. Could it be allergies? No. Fuck Hey Fever! It’s African Sleeping Sickness. WebMD says so. I just need to find a doctor who agrees with me and gives me drugs for it! Buy repellant! Buy repellant!

However who does society blame for our national hypochondria? Can we really find one person to blame that we can visit at their home and ask, “Why are you such an annoying sniveling little prick?” People are quick to hit the hills and preach to the townsfolk about how the drug companies are raping and pillaging the medical care in this country. Others are quick to tie advertisement companies to a stake and set them ablaze. Personally I think that the blame is too thick to simply lump on top of one group over another.

Let’s start with the nutrition Nazis in this country. The people that came up with the triangle of gluttony aka the food pyramid. If you couldn’t remember what the food pyramid said, like most of America, simply remember one thing. If it tastes like shit it’s probably good for you, at least according to the federal government. When I think of people that know what’s best for me; I think federal government.

On the bottom of the chart were the grains. Grains. Pastas. Sweet rolls. Long flakey sticks of cornbread. As a child the USDA recommended 6 to 11 daily servings of grains. Nobody could tell you an exact amount that would be right for you. In fact nobody could decide on what was classified as a proper serving size. So we all looked at t the food pyramid and thought to ourselves, “Great! I’m only on roll number 5. I can have 6 more of these fuckers and I’m not going to gain an ounce! Somebody motorboat my ass!”

Here we were totally happy as a society. We knew that cigarettes and alcohol could eventually kill us, but as long as we kept the breads between 6 and 11, we’d live to see the following century. Life was good! The birds were chirping! MJ while not black was still alive! It didn’t get better than that.

Then somebody in a food advocacy group shouted from the rafters, “Wait you assholes! Fuck you! America is getting fatter and it’s because of too many carbohydrates! These carbs are EVIL!” So the USDA did what any good regulatory administration did and caused a panic. They decided upon simply six servings of fortified cereals, breads, rice and pasta. The Bush administration immediately released a press statement indicating that f you went over those six servings for any reason on any particular day, Iraq would launch a WMD directly at your head. Carbohydrates were suddenly beat up on the playground and deprived of all possible lunch money and we still had no clear definition of what a serving really was. All we knew was that somewhere, somehow, Iraq was watching our portions. We needed to be afraid. Iraq. WMD’s. 9-11. Food portions.

But around 2007/2008, when we were entering the swan song days of the Bush administration, the USDA finally came up with a food pyramid that would set America clear. One that would have the townspeople rejoicing and singing in unison! “We’re free! We’re slim and were going to the gym!” It would be glorious. The paralyzed would rise from their wheelchairs and dance to Thriller. MJ would be black again. George W. Bush would execute a grammatically correct statement and life would resemble a motivational poster.

Then the USDA released its new and improved food chart. What followed was confusion. Suddenly Americans remembered that they didn’t “do” the metric system. The cripples sat motionless in their wheelchairs. MJ was still a white woman and Dubya still couldn’t speak human. Therefore, on that sad day, the fat canary died of diabetes.

So rather than focusing on preventative dieting we moved as a nation towards something Americans embrace well. Pills and supplements. Products such as Ally began popping up on pharmacy shelves all around the country. Soon thousands of middle aged overweight women were singing the praises of this weight loss product and sharting their blouses simultaneously. As Ally brought an increase in underwear sales so came crash diets, yo-yo diets, starvation diets, liposuction, gastric bypass, more lipo, breast augmentation and implantation, sucky-sucky three dollar lifts, tantric sex treatments, and Lifetime television for women.

The result? As of 2010, we’re still fat as hell. With mile wide body types come mile wide health problems. So how do we fix these health problems? Let’s get the drug companies to market patented medications with countless side-effects to help people offset the negative side-effects of shoving pounds and pounds of congealed grease down their throats only to experience new side-effects brought on by the new medication to counter out the old side-effects. Yeah.

Drug companies are free to release crazy medications that are advertised as being “special super power” pills. My favorite is Zetia. It’s like the other “statins” that help reduce evil cholesterol levels but it works differently. It’s “special”. Does it reduce your chance of heart disease? No. Is it anymore proactive then generic medications like Simvastatin (Zocor) or Pravastatin (Pravachol) or even slutty ol’ Lipitor? Nope. But it is special nonetheless. Drugs are like snowflakes. We like snowflakes. Snowflakes taste so pure on our tongues. Snowflakes equal drugs. Therefore, drugs must taste just as pure upon our tongues. So get me a 90 day supply of Zetia for $300 dollars and I’ll wash it down with a Big Gulp and a half-pounder with cheese.

I will never forget when I came to the conclusion that we are all so screwed. There is a show on network television simply called “The Doctors”. On this show various “medical experts”, ironically all of which had their own reality television shows and spots on Oprah at a certain point in the last decade, discuss the latest things to fear about your health. Various members of the audience, made up obviously of homemakers and plants…cough…I mean medical students, ask these experts about their medical charts and cough…test questions…cough.

I was sick at the time with the cold from hell and I couldn’t even get out of bed. As I grew bored with watching rednecks get blown away on the Weather Channel, I turned on this show and suddenly became aware that I was no longer on planet Earth. It was suddenly clear to me that we are on nothing but a giant spaceship. This spaceship is hurdling into the depths of a black hole and the pilot is Ke$ha.

Let me share with you the details of this epic moment in television history.

The main doctor was talking about what normal turds should look like and was using raw hamburger to demonstrate the proper length and density of a normal dump. If your dump did not fit within a certain category on his “poop chart” you were considered abnormal. I didn’t get to hear what he meant by “abnormal” because I was too busy picking up my teeth after my jaw nailed the floor. Here I sat, high off my ass on Claritin-D, and watched in awe as medical student after medical student described to this doctor the most intimate details of their bowel habits…and I took notes.

Since that day I’ve been watching my dumps to make sure that one day I don’t shit the black spot of death. In conclusion, we are all so…so…so…doomed.