Complaining about cocktails at The Ritz

As the comedian Louis C.K. once opined, “everything is amazing, and nobody’s happy.”

Please excuse the typos in today’s essay. I’m currently clinging to life as I suffer from the plague. (It might actually just be the common cold… But sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.)

One thing that continues to reassure me, however, is that there isn’t a man carting dead bodies outside my house requesting everyone “bring out your dead!”

After all, it wasn’t that long ago in history that a simple cold could mean something a bit more serious than a few days curled up on the couch — especially considering the poor dietary habits and squalid living conditions most human beings endured just a few centuries ago.

As it turns out, we live in pretty amazing times — and that’s worth remembering. When you’re in the throes of battling off some viral infection, however, that kind of perspective is sometimes a little difficult to keep in mind.

Actually, such a perspective is often difficult to maintain even in the best of times. For example, we constantly whinge about how “unprecedented” and awful our current political landscape has become; but is that really a fair assessment to make of America’s partisan history?