The Fever Dream that is America
A good flu can be cathartic.
Of course, the first day is always traumatic: The scratchy throat, slight cough, itchy eyes. You know something’s coming on but you don’t yet know how bad it’s gonna get so you’re in this unsettling unwellness limbo. It’s probably too late for zinc, so you pop an ibuprofen, do two jumping jacks, and hope for the best.
Next thing you know, it’s two nights later, you’re laying crossways on your bed, a blanket covers only half your body, wadded up toilet tissue bundles lay in every corner, a half-empty bottle of DayQuil Severe Honey Cold & Flu sits next to a half-empty mug of long-cold ginger root tea, and you’re in the throes of a full-on fever dream starring every person and situation from your past you’ve worked so hard to forget.
That’s been my life the last several days — sicker than I’ve been in a long time. Omicron? Stratus? Common old unnamed flu bug? Who knows? Covid test was negative, but some manner of hellish virus positively knocked me back into the dark, cold recesses of my mind.
About 12 hours into this thing, when I realized I was truly down for the count, I canceled all my appointments and settled in for a series binge and landed on Sex And The City. About 24 hours later, I was drenched in sick-sweat, drifting somewhere around the third season of the show. There I lay in a fog, comparing my own personal escapades to those of the women on my laptop screen. As ill as I was, I was actually feeling less judgy about the choices (mistakes) I’d made in my own past.
Somewhere deep in the crevices of that fever dream, I recalled how decades ago, from a different life perspective, I watched all those SATC characters cheating, lying, drinking, shopping, living the most silly, surface, superficial lives in a state of suspense. But now, as I watched from today, I somewhere in all that sloppy circus found some...serenity.
This latest bout with the flu had me thinking about the past. Here was this television series from circa 2000 — before 9/11, before the latest racial reckoning and real talk about things like gender...before so much. We know now that the show handled so many cultural issues very poorly. Of course back then, we didn’t know what we know now. And I’m sure the writers of the show were mainly White people who were writing from their White people perspective about some things they knew or cared little about and so a lot of short cuts were taken (all the way to the bank. That show was a hit!)
It was after my fever dream when I watched one episode where Samantha was fighting with three Black transgender women in bad wigs written in stereotypical loud, crass, butch fashion, and more than once Samantha called them (rhymes with grannies) and I thought to myself, The worst of my sickness is over. Do I really care to keep going?
The thing about the past is, it’s always there. It can never be changed, no matter what anyone says or does, the past is fixed, baby. The things that were done were done. And I have to believe the past is not there for nothing. It serves a purpose.
From my perspective, so much of America’s past reads like a royally messed up fever dream. But, it all happened. I don’t care who’s in office or who has power or who’s pulling strings and banning books and taking down exhibits and re-instituting hurtful names — the past happened! And, this isn’t the 1800s. Or even 2000. We now have the ever expanding internet and informational video reels and, like, the real power of collective and cultural memory, man! We have witnessed how knowing the past has the awesome power to actually put us on a course that informs a higher behavior that — clutch your golf club, dude — sets us free!
That part — the free part — trumps the fever dream all day, and gives us that heady feeling we really want.
The plan was to work my way up to the sequel of this now canceled show, And Just Like That. I don’t know, I may keep going, if only to be reminded of the progress that’s been made. But, I would bet my bottom dollar that Samantha isn’t calling transgender people — oh wait...I remember reading she wasn’t even in most of the new stuff. Huh.
What a flu that was. A good flu can be cathartic.