Pollen Season Is Getting Out of Hand...

I hate flowers so fucking much.

Artwork by @venerealdisneys

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There was a time when I was overwhelmed with clammy agony whenever I was forced to listen to someone talk allusively or not-so-subtlely about some dream they had, or their wedding planning, or their various allergies. There’s no sense in pretending these conversations were urgent or would provoke some previously unremarked-upon sense of basic empathy, but they were irritating nonetheless. That was until pollen season veered fully off the rails. There is something novel and even existential about a realization that arrives with having half-borked sinuses: You never appreciate the ability to breathe out of both nostrils until it’s too late.

Every day, at every level of the corporate food chain, and in every way imaginable, people who own things are devising new ways to fuck over the people who make things. But that kind of institutional dysfunction and spite has become the ambient backdrop to the full swing of spring, because Mother Nature has determined that millions must cry (at the beauty of life that sunshine brings). The Weather Report says the pollen count is abnormally high, which according to science, means bumblebees are fornicating with daffodils at a striking rate. An intimate and consenting relationship between bees and flowers, for some unfathomable reason, has to ruin our lives.

My eyes are somehow painfully dry, yet pouring tears. I’m not at full waterworks, but there’s a teardrop snaking down my cheek, like I just watched the final scene of “Homeward Bound.” My nose feels simultaneously congested and runny, like I’m being waterboarded by my own mucus. My nostrils are suffering from LA rush hour traffic. This minor-key epic could inspire a whole book called Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies In a Changing World, which proffers a philosophical conundrum—choose between knock-out by allergies or eternal drowsiness by meds. The cruel irony is you suffer from both anyway.

All I want to do is go outside and sit on a patio and order a margarita, but I will need it rimmed with crushed-up Claritin D.

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