Fevered notes on the absurd
There are probably two things going on when I think about it:
I am currently braving a 4-block trek up to a nearby CVS, championing a 4-day running 102.8 degree fever. It takes this type of handicap to realize just how amphetamanized so-called normal nyc walking really is (that or being a tourist). Tragic(?)
I am re-reading Infinite Jest. Comic(?)
In hindsight, walking to the pharmacy was probably ill-advised, a term I believe I have now officially earned the right to use, for rather than in spite of any irony it implies here. You have to understand that at the time the antibiotic I was after represented in my mind a deus ex machina of sorts1, something completely orthogonal to what I had been doing which evidently up til now had not been working (see thermometer reading). As far as I knew, the antibiotic could be a magic pill that makes everything better, I thought.2 And really why shouldn’t it be!
I was steps inside the pharmacy, surrounded by the typical things: fun-size bags of Reese’s pumpkins and looming refrigerators stocked with waters and coconut waters and reverse osmosis waters and boxed waters. The place was cast in a hazy glow, something like a moderately foggy day in San Francisco sans actual fog. The same lighting that gaslights you into questioning whether your blood sugar is low or you’ve been transported into a David Lynch film.
Focus, Zach.
My body plowed on. I imagine it looked more like forced motion, my locomotion that is. Like gravity along an alternate plane. It also then occurred to me, skulking through the CVS aisles, that my sweatshirt’s hood was pulled up over my head. I must’ve done this at some point along the walk over, figuring it would conceal what I had carefully avoided looking at in the mirror but knew approximately as the visage called zero sleep and sauna-sweating dehydration and sickly sunken cheeks with a sallow and dull glow. In short: a bit scary. What I hadn’t thought through, and now that I do think through it is probably why I attracted stares that lasted just a tad bit longer than what felt normal or natural, was that trying to cover this type of thing up with a hood is like a middle schooler’s attempt to spray Axe deodorant over post-gym BO-drenched armpit. It’s a little too late for that. Not only is it too late for that, the purported method of concealment or counteractment actually does the opposite of its intended purpose. That is, it serves to attract more attention to the very thing which it seeks to conceal. The only thing worse than inhaling air reeking of BO is inhaling air reeking of Axe deodorant and BO at the same nauseating time. Anyone who has been inside a high school boy’s gym locker room knows I am not making this up.
By this point, the store had taken on the form of a closed ecosystem in my mind, with its own sort of dynamic equilibrium defining how matter and energy flowed and the rhythms of the various lifeforms inhabiting it. Where the real action takes place, food-chain type assertions and re-assertions of dominance, and the place to be as the de facto ecologist of this place is the pharmacy counter, where I had now finally managed to wander to in my delirium. I was surrounded by various species ranging from the placid to the real equilibrium-shakers. A woman, mid-thirties, sat cross-legged in a chair, minding her own. An older gentlemen who probably shouldn’t be wearing jean shorts in jean shorts skipped up to the counter with a swiftness and gaiety that gave me second thoughts about my assessment of his age or whether jean shorts are actually not exactly what he should be wearing after all. But the real specimen of intrigue here was the man at the pharmacy counter. Well there were several, men and women of various sizes and shapes, manning the counter. But there was only one. He was the closest thing this world had to a supreme being, an orchestrator, and unmoved mover.3
Jenny, came his voice in something far too light on decibels for how far it carried. The woman’s legs uncrossed and up she was all in one yogic motion and to the counter she went gently receiving the brown bag from the orchestrator. He emitted a warm but subtle smile and off she went, and onto the next he went. Next was the jean shorts guy who seemed to have some rapport with the orchestrator but now that I think about it everyone seemed to have some rapport with the orchestrator. Did I also have rapport with the orchestrator and just not know it yet?
Every system has its disruptors, the ones who make damn sure you know which way the entropy arrow points. A man, short in stature, baggy jeans and some kind of gauche faux-leather jacket with decals and a head of dreads emerging from beneath his hat entered the vicinity. The orchestrator took notice. The man wore tinted wayfarers, the type that block out 80% of light and seem actively hostile to one’s ability to navigate in a world so sight-centric. Beware of people who wear tinted sunglasses inside; they know things we don’t. He craned his neck into a near perfect angle of projection, bellowing, I need my eyedrops, to no one in particular. Far back behind the counter, the most doctor-y of the bunch emerged up from behind the file-foldered stacks of pill bags with a look of recognition.
We sent them to you, they’re being delivered to your place, the doctor-y guy knew this was his grenade to jump on.
I need my eyedrops, the sunglasses repeated with slurry determination.
The delivery guy is making deliveries right now so by the time you get back home they should be there, he responded in what I admired as nothing short of a profound, homophonic demonstration of the bounds of human patience.
But I need my eyedrops now, the stone-cold sunglasses persisted.
I understand that, but we can’t just write you another prescription and give it to you here. He paused. Do you want me to call the delivery guy and see where he’s at?
Yeh I need my eyedrops.
The sunglasses were a bit closer to me now, regrettably, and I think there are more correlative rather than causative explanations for what I’m about to say, especially when one considers I am most probably de facto unreliable narrator by virtue of my own enfeebling fever, yet still I feel obligated to mention, for the sake of completeness, that with his nearing in proximity came a certain smell typical of a certain substance typical of bloodshot eye-irritation. The skunk barged its way into my mucus-plugged nostrils. Here again though, I was reminded of my own warning just mere minutes ago: the sunglasses know things we simply cannot.4
Meanwhile all else was good in this microcosmic CVS world. The orchestrator continued dancing to his own rhythm. I think there was music but I am not entirely sure I wasn’t just hearing things. A young adult woman and a Swedish guy exchanged equally amicable encounters as he received and parted with them both elegantly. He made some comments to the girl and she smiled and laughed. He made her day genuinely and irreversibly better. It was clear: the orchestrator was meant to be here, now, bending the ecosystem around him one brown pill bag at a time.
Everyone been helped? he whisper-projected.
Looking around and seeing no one else, I walked up to the front. I typed my name into the tablet. The orchestrator gave a nod and a smile and swiftly returned with my own brown bag. Zach, here you are, hardly even audibly. I thanked him and backed away.
I made my way through dense aisles, shampoo and soap, dental and then cosmetics, to the front of the store. Opening the door to the outside felt at once refreshing and overwhelming. Inside, I had found something self-contained, a world of its own. Now I swam right back into traffic, the bustling streets of nyc. The sun shone and no single person seemed to play any larger role. The orchestrator, a big fish in a tiny tiny pond, would remain relegated to his corner.
I made it back to my apartment, antibiotic in hand, and collapsed on the couch. Infinite Jest was still there, bookmark holding my place somewhere in the middle of a footnote about a footnote. The fever was breaking, I could feel it. Things were starting to make sense again, which is to say I was starting to filter out the strangeness again. But I’d seen it. The real absurdity. Not Sisyphus and his boulder, tragic and alone. But the orchestrator and his pill bags. The sunglasses and the eyedrops. The yogic woman and the jean shorts guy. All of us playing our parts in a tiny ecosystem that means everything and nothing at the same time.
What struck me about this whole situation was the absurdity of it all. But not the capital-A Absurdity that Camus wrote about—the cosmic meaninglessness, the silence of the universe in response to our deepest questions. That kind of macro-absurdity, the kind that leads Gen Z to the performative nihilism of the “gen z stare,” feels like an overreaction to me. An overtreatment for what the world actually is.
The real absurdity is right here, in the micro. Two people interacting at a pharmacy counter. A man in sunglasses demanding eyedrops that are already en route to his apartment. An orchestrator dispensing brown bags with monastic calm. When you actually sit there and watch people, really watch them, without the usual filtering, the little things they do are truly, canonically absurd.
We would do better, I think, with less macro-absurdity and more micro. Fewer gen z stares, less performative nihilism. You don’t need to perform attentiveness to absurdity when everything around you already is absurd. Everyone moves to their own rhythm, syncopated or synchronized, and there’s a kind of magic in both. The harmony and the disharmony. There’s a natural irony in the gap between what people think they’re doing and how they actually move through the world, and it’s a hell of a lot more honest, not to mention downright comedic, than the manufactured kind.
Maybe Sisyphus is more like a guy handing out pill bags, bopping to his own beat, than an Adonis rolling boulders up a hill considering himself happy, whatever the fuck that means. It need not be so serious. I will lie back down on my couch, fever abated, and reopen Infinite Jest. It really is an absurdly funny book.
Ill-Advisory Explainer 2: The fever brain operates on a kind of magical thinking where solutions become totemic. The antibiotic isn’t just medicine; it’s THE THING that will fix everything instantly. This relates to Explainer 1’s binary thinking mode (see note 1, which appears later—I wasn’t exactly thinking linearly when I numbered these). When you feel this bad, anything that might help becomes infinitely good in your mind.
Ill-Advisory Explainer 1: Now that I’ve unlocked this arcane knowledge, I will sprinkle some explainers in here to help you understand how this system of thinking works since you couldn’t possibly understand. It tends to be more binary in nature: good things seem really good, bad things really really bad.
Ill-Advisory Explainer 3: Whew ok we’re back on track as far as numbering. When feverish, your brain starts assigning cosmic significance to mundane roles. A pharmacy tech becomes a deity. This is probably because your world has shrunk to just survival, so whoever can help you survive becomes all-powerful. Also I may have been hallucinating.
Ill-Advisory Explainer 4: I stand by this even when not feverish. But the fever does make you hyperaware of these social signals we normally filter out. Why IS he wearing sunglasses inside? What IS he hiding? Probably just light sensitivity but my brain is not accepting that answer right now.