This may even include some teenagers and youths who happen to be 18 going on 55, so to speak. But probably not, because it's mainly about health problems.
I was talking to my old Old Friend, Pope Sternodox, yesterday, and following that I phoned my even older pal, Dr. G. Gordon Gordon.
WE DIDN'T TALK ABOUT OUR HEALTH PROBLEMS! For a change, not one of us had anything terrible going on. In fact we were doing pretty damned well... COMPARED TO A LOT OF OUR FRIENDS, or ourselves just a couple of years ago.
GGG just had a big show of his computer art in Austin, and it was a WALLOPING SUCCESS! Even FINANCIALLY! And he hasn't had to have a limb or organ replaced in months. And he has a beautiful, cool young wife!
Sterno has been a big success at his new job as DJ at a fancy stripper bar, and he and several old Doktors (including Huey) practically run the Little Rock weekly paper, and he has a beautiful, cool young wife!
I have the most beautiful wife of ALL and she's so young that tomorrow is her birthday:
02-20-02
At 8:20 pm, or in military time, 20:20, pm, it'll be:
20:20 02-20-02
Last time that line-up happened on digital watches was 1,001 years ago.
Anyway, the point is, Sterno and GGG and I didn't talk about our health problems.
You can't imagine what a blessing that is, at age 48 and up. Because we did mention some of our friends' health problems. And our PARENTS -- !! Holy FUCK!!! Our parents are, I hate to say it, falling apart before our very eyes, little by little IF THEY'RE LUCKY! And our parents are only, what, twenty or 25 years older than us?
We'll be like that in TWENTY YEARS? Twenty years is fucking NOTHING! 20 years goes by in the blink of an eye. (After the first 20, anyway) Why, a sweet little baby can grow up to be a hairy-armpitted adult in that time -- HARDLY ANY TIME AT ALL, it goes by so fast -- especially if you're raising a kid or five. We've only got TWENTY YEARS before our teeth are GONE, everything hurts ALL the time, people condescend to us because of our hopelessly outdated world views, etc. etc.???
Some of my middle-aged peers, though, aren't as lucky as me, Sterno and GGG. They might not have beautiful young spouses, or even pouchy old spouses. They might even have LOST one. Or they might have a MESSED UP spouse. Or a messed up kid. Or they themselves may be in similar physical shape to our PARENTS.
A BUNCH of them are already DEAD.
And that got me to realizing that, come to think of it, MOST of the guys that I know who are my age are not only not as lucky as me, but they're pretty fucking DEPRESSED right now. Because all the shit I just enumerated above is hitting them, all at once. And the economy is fucked. And retirement is getting closer but is getting scarier at the same time, 'cause all the money's vanishing. And the war. And the assholes. And the PAINS and the doctor bills. And, maybe worst of all, if somebody else is real sick and you have to take care of them, even though you're not doing so hot yourself.
And thinking about all my peers who feel that way some or all of the time -- and that's a lot of my boomer aged peers -- it made me think, I better tell them what I know about this:
IT MIGHT GET BETTER!
It did for me, Sterno, and GGG. Not that long ago, GGG almost died, Sterno WANTED to die, and I was hard at work making sure I would hurry up and die (not that I knew that was what I was doing at the time.) And it was for all the tiresome reasons listed above. My 25 year marriage crumbled into dust due to serious health problems. (At the time I thought it was money problems too, but I'm still as broke as ever, in fact much broker just lately, and yet everything is FINE.) During the 90s I was variously diagnosed as having hypoglycemia, an aneurism in my brain, high blood pressure, chronic vertigo or Meniere's Syndrome(sp?), about a dozen skin diseases, and for awhile there, I was so shell shocked that I couldn't even get it up to JACK OFF. Then there were the problems faced by my ex, which were probably a lot worse. (Me being only one of those problems.)
Looking back on it, I guess you could say I was kind of down sometimes. My dog Beast died, my dad got real sick, my other dog Puddin' just disappeared, my buddies started getting diseases and divorces, my daughter was going out with a guy just exactly like me and my buddies used to be, my son knew fifty times more about dinosaurs, computers and girls than I did and obviously pitied me. It was the Church of the SubGenius that was keeping me going. At least that was doing better, once Jesus repented, quit his jobbed and Slacked Off (ha!) and moved to Dallas to help with the biz, in April '96. That made all the difference, and Church-wise, things actually started to improve mightily. Best of all, there were more and more women and young folks involved actively. And the devival scene was generally lots of fun and just profitable enough. There was always the promise (and always will continue to be) of something REALLY cool looming just around the corner for "Bob".
That kind of thing is not enough, though, when all the REAL things like body, home and family are falling apart. I mean, yeah, that's great for "Bob" and the SubGeniuses and the project and all, but...
Anyway, it all finally came to a head and imploded or exploded or whatever. For months I lived in a squalid, and I do mean fucking SQUALID, place. I listened to Jimi Hendrix's song RED HOUSE over and over again. (Luckily there are about 50 versions of that song floating around.)
I kept trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but WHEW doggies. Then my friend Princess Wei up in Cleveland broke up with her boyfriend, and I found myself with something to live for. I single-mindedly pursued her hand in marriage, and now everything is just about perfect, for ME! (It would be TOTALLY perfect if you were to go to SubSITE right now and buy something. I would suggest YET ANOTHER 11 HOURS OF SLACK IN MP3, the CD-R.)
The fact that my mom almost died a few weeks ago also served to put things into a new perspective for me.
So now I think about my pals and acquaintances who might be doing JUST FINE at work, but their back NEVER EVER STOPS HURTING. Or they are in perfect health and like their work, but their spouse is a complete and total alcoholic for some reason. Or their marriage is fine but the company is about to go bankrupt and everybody's getting laid off and they just suddenly got the notion that maybe they fucked up and wasted all the best years of their lives for nothing but rent, when they could have been partying it up and getting rich and famous and fucking tons of groupies while snorting coke, if they'd only pursued their art, like, you know, R. Crumb or Rev. Stang. Or they just found out their son has been arrested for torching a church while on speed. Or, they had a car wreck at JUST THE WRONG TIME and everything went down hill from there.
The litany of woes is indeed endless, and the wonder of it is that more people don't just jump off bridges. It proves that most people aren't all that SURE there's a HEAVEN.
My message is, DON'T JUMP!!
Just as you never know when space junk is going to plummet down and crush you and your house, you also never know when it might fall down and crush your SECRET LIFE LONG TREACHEROUS ENEMY'S HOUSE! (And you never even knew you had one.) Who knows, I know it sounds dumb, but they MIGHT invent a cure for cancer tomorrow! Hell, they invented every other damn thing.
YOU JUST DON'T KNOW.
Unless you're depressed. THEN you KNOW. You know everything SUCKS, and is only going to get worse.
Well, I'm NOT depressed, but I HAVE been, and take it from me, I *KNOW*:
YOU JUST DON'T KNOW.
Just as it is sometimes a great RELIEF to remember that you WILL, after all, DIE, no matter WHAT, it is also good to remember that you don't know ONE SINGLE OTHER THING as surely as that.
There might BE a Loch Ness Monster! Probably not. But wouldn't it be cool, IF?? Just as one example of something to live for. THE NEXT ISSUE OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. There you go, there's something to live for. And I don't even read that. The miracle might be in there.
That gal you admired for so long MIGHT SUDDENLY DIVORCE HER HUSBAND over something you knew NOTHING about, and your most IMPOSSIBLE DREAM might come true!
You just do NOT know.
Just because you're 50 years old and depressed, you might THINK you know, and it's true that you know more than those LUCKY snot-nosed brats, but, I PROMISE you, YOU DON'T KNOW.
You don't know how BAD it might get, NOR HOW GOOD.
So there, Mister Know It All.
I sincerely hope this doesn't depress the fuck out of those who were NOT depressed.
My friend Mark Hundahl had a friend who, one cold windy night, was walking across a bridge in I think Boston when he espied a poor desperate bastard about to leap off the bridge. My friend's friend, having nothing better to do I suppose, started trying to talk him out of it. The guy posed to my friend's friend the single hardest to answer question.
"Then tell me ONE THING worth living for."
My friend's friend had no idea what the magic word might be, so he took a wild guess, thinking of something worth living for just then, on that cold windy bridge, to him.
He said, "A hot pastrami sandwich?"
The guy went "Hmmm... hmmm, yeah, okay." So they went and got a hot pastrami sandwich. The guy might have jumped off the bridge the next night, for all I know, and in fact the whole story has the ring of an urban legend to me. But the point is.
Hot pastrami sandwich.
(Vegan weirdos might prefer to think of those Boca brand meatless "Spicy Italian Sausages" with melted jalapeno soya cheese.)
P.S. All those health problems I had disappeared when I started SLEEPING REGULARLY, and eating a good solid breakfast the MINUTE I woke up, and then eating something decent at intervals all day. By "decent" I mean the 4 main food groups without too much greasy sugary crap. And much as I hate to admit it, I really did have to quit smoking and drinking to excess, too. But I wouldn't recommend that to everybody. Excessive smoking and drinking is sometimes what it takes to stay alive. I know how that is. But SLEEP is truly the ultimate narcotic, and food is the only kind of speed that you don't crash from. I know I sound like "Mom" saying this, but some plain old common sense things are true for SubGeniuses and humans alike, and indeed hold true for most mammals. But living in the virtual 29th Century universe like we do, and being a bunch of fucking weirdos, it's easy to forget those things.
You just wait till you haven't been able to SHIT for three days. THEN you'll know what's IMPORTANT in life.
*Luckily this has not happened to me yet. I think I am gonna go heat up one of those Boca sausages right now and have a couple of prunes with it. THEN A GREAT BIG FAT FROPSTICK shovd right in that SPECIAL HOLE, AHHHHHH. And some random Pink somewhere will go another day without falling victim to The East Cleveland Sledgehammer Slayer.
Original file name: Health Pep Talk - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44
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