GIFTED: ON PARKINSON’S, POISON, AND PERCEPTION

The 16th century Swiss physician, alchemist and all-around polymathic freakshow Theophrastus Bombastus von Honenheim, better known as Paracelsus, famously said “Alle Ding sind Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.” For those of you who don’t speak Renaissance Swiss-German either, that roughly means “Everything is poison; it just depends on the dose.”

Sweating It Out

There’s a very rare hereditary syndrome known as CIPA (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain and Anhidrosis) in which people are incapable of feeling physical pain. They have no sensitivity to temperature and partial or complete inability to sweat. Most who are diagnosed with it don’t live past their mid-twenties. For people who literally cannot feel pain, life is, oddly enough, short and brutal, and sometimes “no sweat” puts you at seriously elevated risk for heat stroke and seizures.

This morning I had poison for breakfast

I’ve been immobilized all day. I’m staring at the ceiling, imagining the mildew developing on the laundry I failed to move from the washer to the dryer—and contemplating death. By the sixth hour, the suicide scenarios are becoming increasingly hilarious—cinematic in scope, elaborately choreographed as a Balanchine ballet. They involve colorful explosions, cyanide capsules hidden in my spy-glasses, Bengal tigers, katana swords, active volcanoes.