Tubercular Dude

Did not know this until just now but a few weeks ago was World Tuberculosis Day, which honors the date the TB bacterium was discovered in 1882. The CDC says no ‘celebration’ until it is eliminated. The discovery came with its own pandemic, killing 1 in 7.

From the safety of 140 years thence, this seemed high and I thought perhaps it was ‘one in seven of those afflicted’ but that seems low, and literature of the time is replete with people dying of consumption, including authors themselves, and it is after all the CDC, so it can’t be wrong.

That word consumption was a’course the old term for tuberculosis, and the entry sounds a bit frosted people continued to call it so even after science and medicine had forever arbitrarily settled the formal and official name of what people were dying from.

But this is OK, because it leaves consumption as a term for the much more widely spreading killer it more directly describes.

Only mentioning this just now not because I can add so much to the discussion — the disease has been as widely diagnosed as it is pursued — because a moment ago I was innocently lolling and several recent flits of information bit themselves into the same part of my psyche, as they do when wanting attention.

In various fora the last few days there was

  • noting of K-12 schools continuing to impress children into servitude as salesman of crapulent product — wrapping paper thick as onion skin; cheap ‘crap chocolate’, as an acquaintance calls Hershey’s and its ilk; subscriptions [formerly magazines but possibly online ones now?] none of us want, need, have time for if we’re using it right, etc.

Given the quality and quantity of these items and efforts we may call such schools alimentary.

Just a bit, as I do want to understand. So there. Online women’s mags; can prolly subscribe via schools.

  • realization this very jour that as much as I’d like to be rich and handsome, being presently neither, what I’d most like to be is out of debt. And I’ve been to graduate school; as the kids say, there’s yer problem. The vast vistas that’d open with a few years of fairly concerted effort … might never get rich or handsome but wd def be able to live on a farm, tool around the country in the truck, walk the various caminos [Spain, Wales, Poland, Appalachia … ]

Consumption, a’course, is about actual, well, that is, ill … consuming, and not just money.  During our own pandemic a few forms emerged from the general malady — hoarding toilet paper [of all things, tho it makes exquisite sense bec it’s comfort, synecdoche, etc.] and lining up in fast food drive-thrus.

[She’s not a fan of those either.]

Cannot attack drive-thru consumption from vantage of superiority but certainly can knowing whereof I speak. Very very very very bad on both financial and health grounds. Which a’course we know, except not in the Socratic sense or more than material meaning. We have the info, but don’t know it, really not at all, as a species, or at least a people, or there’d be nothing to discuss.

Also didn’t know until right now the term consumption was coined by Hippocrates, c.460 BC. The Greek is phtisis, onomatopoeic in its excellence, and involved, natch, literal consumption by the body of itself, with a middle stage of mere emaciation, ironic in its connections today to debt and drive-thrus. Living large kills us slowly.

And there is this: consumption is also [and more dangerously] still the internal affliction, as it relates to our thoughts, feelings, assumptions about others …

Finally, pace the question of morbidity and mortality raised above in the ‘1 in 7’ statistic, it was essentially always fatal.

So there’s that.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

True Romance

Mentioned last week the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term used in film to refer to a female — not a woman, mark you, but a girl or perhaps female, depending on the level of [im]maturity — who exists in a story not for herself, more deeply not as a Self, but only for the

Read More »

On Real

Learned of late that several people — at least three husbands in young marriages, two with young children, everyone in his 20s — had not only never read The Velveteen Rabbit … but hadn’t heard of it. That sorta explains why it’s public domain and I can link to it here. Also explains why when

Read More »

Subjective, Objective

The other day I wrote on a wing and a whim … and misremembering. Or as Prufrock put it, quoting Woman — That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. Nearly nothing I recalled happened in that way. Except of course the recalling. And a bit more. Wasn’t a

Read More »

People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

Read More »

Random

Drudge Report

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she

Read More »

Meme! Meme! Meme!

Memes are perfect for the extremely limited things they can do. Or as my Da usedta say, prolly swiping from mid-20th century comedian Benny Youngman Berle, they’re in pretty good shape for the shape they’re in. If they weren’t limited they wouldn’t be easy and if they weren’t easy they wouldn’t be common and as

Read More »

Do Piece — Anger (Buechner)

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving

Read More »

Shock and Appall

Our system is perfectly designed for the results we’re getting. We worship wealth and crave power. We have a job called “celebrity” and wink at vulgarity and reward villainy. We admire brashness. We randomly excuse or excoriate peccadilloes: depends on the news cycle, the fame or infamy possible, and the money and status of those involved.

Read More »

Related

Trusting Taylor Sheridan

Yellowstone sucks. Och! — but you knew that. Wait … umm … we can agree on that right? + Prolly not — else why this blog post and the recent headline that its ‘creator’, Taylor Sheridan, said Season 4 is in the can. + I tried to get through Season 1 again. Had bought it a

Read More »

Plague Dog

During the lockdown read The Plague, turned page next to The Book of the Dun Cow. Not an immediately clear connection not least because Dun Cow is far lesser known. Both chronicle communities within a larger one within a larger world. First, of course, is the full circle vicious and virtual, during a pandemic; latter

Read More »

Like A Rolling Stone

A totally unscientific survey — texted my brother-in-law on the other coast — shows [my] fears of the death of the ice cream cone have been at least mildly exaggerated … tho looking, literally, a little topsy-turvy. A’course, I’d not heard anything specific; the reports were only in my head because about nothing from this

Read More »

Semi Stuff

Here’s a way to say it — I pay attention, I notice things, I remember, I make connections; my mind moves fast — and long, on the connections. Draw the well deep, carry far the water. [The semi-colon technically ‘replaces’ the period but artfully between the two a difference wd be how a semi-colon can

Read More »