The Incredible Banality of Being

They say that one man's cast-off is another man's treasure, and they mostly think of women when they say it, as generally speaking woman's fascinatingly endless capacity to adapt is no match for man's fascinatingly rapid ability to sate. Or something like that.

Anyway, today we'll apply this... fertile principle to something unrelated, which is to say the banal. Something quite banal has happened to me yesterday, and I'll recount it on the expectation that you may find it on the contrary, quite fascinating. Doesn't this sound like an enticing premise for a blog post ?ⁱ

Moving on : my tooth started hurting over the weekend so I had a dentist appointment arranged for Monday. I went there, the dentist did his job and as we were done he said

"We've caught it early enough and the roots are clean, so you won't be needing antibiotics - what you're feeling is just inflamatory response around the tooth, not actual infection. Get some Nurofenⁱⁱ to control the inflamation and we'll finish up next week."

"How about Algocalminⁱⁱⁱ ?" came my response. Because I'm not a great fan of this whole "gotta keep replacing the drugs with new drugs to conserve pharma profits" racket^iv they've got going where suckers live^v and are trying to get going everywhere else, and by any means necessary.

"That's a pain killer, not an anti-inflamatory", says the doc.

"What are you, kidding ? Metamizole is an anti-inflamatory". Because it is, that's what it is in fact : a generic and so very cheap nonsteroidal anti-inflamatory.

"Fine, so take Algocalmin if you're in a relationship with it."

"I'm just asking!"

"Whichever, really."

So there you have it, negotiated medication.^vi When's the last time you did something as banal as negotiating your medication with your doctor ? You know, from the proper position, you're the CEO of your own life, he's the hired specialist for a certain field, you work something out together ? Not that often, is it. Half the time you don't do anything like it even with salesmen, you go around wearing the shoes some girl in a shop somewhere told you to get, you're watching the TV the man on the TV said is the best TV for TVing and so on and so forth.

Well... here's the thing : just because the banal doesn't play much part in your own life doesn't make it anything else. It just makes your life quite insane, as not even the banal can be redefined by the lives and deeds of the muppet horde.

How much actual, real banal does your life contain ? How much of the banality of your life is really fake, ersatz, counterfeit ? Good entry point for a little introspection, I would say.

1. And what's worse, isn't it a little sad that while All Other Blogs® post pretty much on this principle, it had to be 2014 before someone actually articulated it ? [↩]
2. Brand name for Ibuprofen. [↩]
3. Local "brand name" for Metamizole, in use since the old days of Romanian communism. [↩]
4. It's a racket, and it's particularly objectionable in this case because Algocalmin is way more effective than Nurofen at controlling fever. Sure, one kid in however many hundreds may experience perfectly reversible agranulocitosis as a reaction to it, but on the other hand Nurofen also has its own antiplatelet effect (and I don't use either for fever-as-in-having-a-cold anyway, I use Paracetamol, which of course comes with its own risk of hepatic toxicity in high doses).

   Anyway, what the nonsense boils down to is "this cheap and widely available medicine may be inconvenient for one in a hundred, and therefore it should not be either used or available at all - instead everyone should use this expensive alternative which arguably is just as inconvenient for one in a hundred, just a different one". Meanwhile healthcare costs balloon while the quality of healthcare drops and nobody knows why and wherefore. Try an' take a guess, seriously now. Why should you not use some drug that gives some other people hives ? [↩]

5. Like say the US. [↩]
6. I was also the first case this guy ever saw that had dental work done without anesthesia, because I don't subscribe to this "gotta anesthetise everything!11" trend dentists got going in the past decade or two. He confessed he didn't believe it possible. You hear that, doctor - and quite competent one at that - completely blinded by the fake "knowledge" of reality some retards with a financial interest built all around him, to the degree he wouldn't know the banal. And from there on it spreads, the doctor doesn't know you can have dental work done raw and be just fine, the parents don't know because "they want the best for their kids" - as if insulation from pain is in any way a good thing, the kids don't know cause who'd be there to tell them and soon enough you can't go take a shit without driving there. It's just not done, so therefore it could never work. Right ? Must have a degree to blow your nose, must go to dating classes to lay some chick. Must get a FDA permit to stick pickled peas up your asshole.

   What sort of life is this! If tomorrow they tell you Amanita are poisonous you're gonna swallow that whole too, because who's nuts enough to try poison, right ?

   The betterment of society through organised lying to people, or the bowdlerisation of everything around, that'd be the progressive agenda since the progressive movement was fucking invented. Stuff like all the climatology pseudo-science isn't accidental, a few ninnies getting overexcited. Stuff like all the climatology pseudo-science isn't even part and parcel - it actually is central, lying is the point of the entire exercise. Being a progressive means being a mendacious piece of shit. That's what it means. That's what it is. [↩]