The Sweating Sickness
The sweating sickness sounds like a kind of inane thing until you hear how many people were killed by it. It’s a question of branding, I suppose. While sweating sickness does locate us temporally (English at that time wasn’t too sophisticated and so even its best speakers would be at like a fourth grade level by now standards), it doesn’t do much to make clear the overwhelm of the time.
First: the disgusting amounts of shvitz, everywhere. Everybody looking like they’d been pumping all day long. You remember those Gatorade commercials where the athletes’ sweat was the neon drink itself? Everyone was doing this then! And then dying! The cities were littered with Gatorade-drenched corpses! They said if you lasted 24 hours you’d be ok. Well ok, I mean, very well. You’ve just got to find a way to stay cool those first 24. Just don’t think about the green liquid cutting a cute slalom down your cheek. Try not to notice how many of your friends and aldermen are stacking up in the gutter, their Gatorade sweats commingling to produce incandescent, 2015-style mash-ups.
So when you ask me why I don’t want to take a jog with you, why I’m so meticulous about where my sweatbands are and the temperature I keep my pod and then I close my eyes and start mumbling to make the anxiety go away, well, I mean, that’s how come.
