Deconstructing Immunity
Smoke at least a pack a day. I really cannot stress this enough, for the most integral part of any respectably unhealthy existence is cigarette smoking. Don’t worry. You will either learn to love it or crave it – inhaling deeply, feeling the carcinogens and jet fuel components slide smoothly down your trachea through bronchial tubes and then into the lungs where millions of tiny alveoli will greedily soak up the precious fruits of tobacco smoke. Forget the morning breath taste in your mouth that usually comes with a few drags, and forget your clothes, reeking of stale smoke, an odor impenetrable by almost any fragrance. Forget lung cancer, emphysema, nausea, malnutrition, bad skin complexion, heart disease, foul stenches, and the countless other negative side effects of smoking the so-called experts warn us about. You are gloriously unhealthy, and besides, you look so fucking cool. Don’t listen to those nay-saying propagandists. Having a smoke for breakfast is totally normal.
Cigarettes might not do the trick alone, however. Normally, it is advisable to mix tobacco with illicit substances, and for that matter, it is further advisable to mix illicit substances with each other as much as possible. There is no better way to forget about food and basic hygiene entirely, and the resulting drug-induced apathy will deal a reeling blow to any man’s immune system that he will feel. Pounding headaches and violent nausea after a Twisted Cocktail, instant paralysis due to half a box of wine and some Vicodin, a self-loathing freakout while on mushrooms in the woods. Constantly dealing with the effects of those things your mommy told you never to touch will effectively divert your attention away from simple everyday needs.
Food becomes secondary. Bathing is secondary, and hygiene, after all, is a central part of good health. Breaking down the daily routines that perpetuate good hygienic practice is an essential factor in waking up sick every morning. Remember this as well, and if you really strive to be an exceptional specimen of illness, you will eat no more than one meal per day, preferably some kind of horrid cardboard-tasting confection or a lethal dose of caffeine. Keep those eyes yellow and bloodshot, and eat anything strangers give you.
Cover these three main areas: cigarettes, edible/ingestible chemicals, and malnutrition/hygiene. They are the tripod upon which a glamorously unhealthy lifestyle is situated. For the most part, you will find yourself operational, woefully undernourished but operational nonetheless, and this is the ideal, I think. The idea is to maintain constant malady in symbiosis with a perpetual functionality so that at any one point, a body’s stability is dependent on both its sickness and its health.
For instance, stretch that skin over those ribs like a tight canvas, and keep those bags under your eyes. Develop a slight but noticeable quiver in your upper lip that hints at a wealth of melancholy underneath blemished skin. Angela Lansbury would weep for you. You must embody visceral unhealthiness. You must feel it, a pit in the depths or your stomach, gnawing away down there until that hungry, empty pit becomes a rock you lug around the rest of the day. Drag your feet and listen to the soles scrape sadly down the sidewalk. Hang your head woefully. Strive to be the antithesis to the Olympian ideal. One healthy breath is too much. One breath bereft of a hacking cough or a painful wheeze or a drag of that sweet cigarette could send the whole thing up the river.
The key to being unhealthy and staying unhealthy is forgetting there was ever such a thing as good health in the first place, and thus we have a total physical, emotional, and spiritual embrace of our pitiful state. It is what allows me to survive. I have known no other way of life, and therefore, the grass I’m standing on is greenest to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I haven’t had my breakfast yet.
