Sometimes living in California is a lot like living in California. The Whole Food crowd. The earnest. The fit, the organic, the brown rice, the soy latte, the supplements, peace, fucking love and granola.

I’ve had laryngitis all week. Either I have a particular throat-stabby burning rhinovirus, or the lovely, verdant hills are sprouting allergens all over their earthquake built peaks and valleys, or both. Fuck viruses and fuck pollen.

Universally, the folks at work recommended vitamin C. Not just vitamin C but the cultish little packets they buy at Whole Foods Market and pour into bottles of water. s Maybe I’m just too fucking cynical to enjoy a good, old-fashioned placebo effect.

A few people pulled out various viles of magical elixirs. I feel like shit, I will continue to feel like shit throughout the allergy season and/or the virus performs its little parasitic dance of birth, colony, free-for-all and death in about seven days. So it is and so it shall be. And, hippie cures of natural combinations of alleged healthy ingredients won’t change my fate.

I ended up in a joking argument about it all and about healthy food movements and organic this and that. What I want to know, what makes the chemicals you buy at Whole Foods superior to the vitamin-laced chemicals they spray on magically delicious, tasty cereals? I point out my youthful appearance, a product of chemical preservatives. Years and years and years of ingesting preservatives.