I Hope This Doesn't Cheer You Up

From: W_____
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 6:40 PM
To: Undisclosed Recipients
Subject: Fwd: I Sure Hope This Doesn't Cheer You Up

Fellas and Fellows,

Forwarded below is a troublesome message T. A. FartMan sent to our online cancer support forum today.

He thinks it's hilarious.

But I think it's totally inappropriate for him to be sending this kind of purposefully confusing message to a support group for us cancer patients who are desperate for clarity and certainty in our sadly discombobulated lives.

If FartMan doesn't stop posting this kind of stuff, I'm afraid he's going to get us banned from the group. He acts like he's some kind of super anti-hero who can fly above it all, looking down contemptuously at all the mushy online kisses, hugs, and handholding. FartMan really does think he's above it all, but I think he feels that way only because he has never really accepted the fact that we have Stage IV colon cancer. And that's fine if denial allows him to cope. Whatever works. But interaction with the support group is important to me, and I don't want him to ruin it for the both of us.

The truth is, I think FartMan spends way too much time sitting in his Throne Room, feeling superior, and writing this kind of crapola, while fumigating his brain with his own percolating gases.

Anyway, FartMan has been avoiding me all day, because he knows I'm seriously pissed, so if any of you happen to see him out farting around town, I would appreciate it if you would tell him to cool it with the confusing contrarian messages he keeps sending to our support group.

But I want you to judge for yourself, and that's why I'm sending along FartMan's latest obnoxious message which you will find below my signature. Chuckle at your own risk.

W________


From: The Astonishing FartMan
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 4:20 PM
To: Online Cancer Support Group
Subject: I Sure Hope This Doesn't Cheer You Up

I think all these so-called "studies" about how attitude affects health and life expectancy are just plain silly.

But it sure can be a lot of fun to pretend to take them seriously.

So if you would join in my child's game of pretend, you might imagine how I—being crotchety both by nature and by training—could not subdue the warm uplifting feeling suffusing body, mind, and spirit as I read about a recent study confirming (exactly as I have always believed) that "Cheery people die sooner."

Yes, that's a direct quote from the headline of a media report you can read at the following link:http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/42577652/ns/today-today_health/

The suggestion that ornery old cranks like me might outlive all those impossibly annoying cheerful people, especially the young ones, well that thought positively cheered me up, to an extent that some might consider shamefully schadenfreudeish-- . . . . . . until I realized that by allowing the study to cheer me up, I had thereby forfeited the expectancy of several precious years of my formerly purely and uncorruptedly crabby life.

But then the prospect of this loss of life expectancy restored my native emotional dispostion--angry and depressed--and, thereby, one hopes, also restored to me the expectable years I feared were lost to my one careless lapse into cheeriness.

And now I hesitate to permit myself to contemplate my emotional reaction to that reprieve, lest a feeling of the mere mildest complacency again subtract numberless years of expectancy from my sourpuss life and render its remainder a Permanent Catch-22 maze befuddling even Mr. Heller.

Needless to say, these rapid psychological reverses, re-reverses, and re-re-reverses have left me ridiculously confused, not knowing whether to feel happy or feel sad, most particularly about whether I will live forever or drop dead before I finish writing this sentence.

So now I think we need a double-blind randomized study to determine whether confused people live longer than people who aren't confused.

I would vote for the confused, and, while we wait for the rollcall, will remain . . . .

Your Melodious and Malodorous
Super Pooper Hero,
The Astonishing FartMan