The more taxpayers moved their bowels at home, the more direct-to-consumer distribution expanded. If they wanted Feather Soft Three-Ply more than not getting cancer, was that not their right?ĭespite predictions, supply chains stayed intact.
No one knew how to initiate the conversation, let alone go about redressing the hazardous chemical exposures associated with paper and pulp manufacturing, for instance. Modern convenience depended on the ubiquity of abnormal cell replication. He knew people got cancer from corporations, which paid politicians to not pass legislation to restrict their ignoble environmental practices, waste management policies, poisonous food and drug production, or provide their employees health insurance. ―Thirty percent off when you bundle your hysterectomy and double mastectomy in the next thirty minutes.īut cancer stories weren’t unique. He heard, ―The best hospitals for the best humans. Cyst-ridden testicle drawings wading through concentric circles of ambiguous fluid. He watched toddlers shaved bald roller-skating over zydeco music. The brutality normalized, like brutalities before it. It said, ―Get used to it.Īnd set its sights on further secreting the killer into a cache of ambivalence. Tumors were touted as character-building, rites of passage.Ĭure was a word that didn’t refer to material reality. With so many forced to reckon with malignancy, without means to distinguish between correlation, causation, and arbitrariness, not to mention the sensation of a new plague, far less pestilent but more contagious, cancer had ceased to hold the public’s gaze.
Cutting people open and pumping them full of narcotics and radiation until they were just undead enough to get sick from something else had proven more lucrative. Culture affected commiseration.Īt some point, however, society had pivoted from cure to treatment. When someone got diagnosed, the subject was broached tentatively. He could remember when illness had been regarded with reverence. The vocal fried narrators, who resurfaced every seven or so minutes to ask, ―Are you going to let cancer keep you from partying at Six Flags this election?Īnd answered before he had time to shake his head, ―No way! Because you don’t settle for less. WHEN he was of age, he moved out of his mother’s house.Īfter two years upstate, one of aimless travel, eleven in the city, and three months of shelter in place confined to a two-bedroom apartment on a street below sea level, which dead-ended in a chain link fence abutting a freestanding brick facade crumbling under an accumulation of kudzu, he moved back in with her.įor some time, he’d lacked access to broadcast television, and the near-celebratory tone advertising had taken toward cancer in the interim alarmed him.
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