Let’s assume that you, like me, have been stuck in your house for 5+ days because of the 2019 GREAT SEATTLE SNOWPOCALYPSE ™. If this shitheel storm continues, we must assume that your confinement will get stretched out for at least another 5+ days.
Are you going insane? Just a little bit? Are the walls talking to you? Are you talking to the walls?
Fortunately, your cabin fever problem can be solved, like so many problems, with the advice of a famous, accomplished figure of the past.
Let’s learn how famous recluse Howard Hughes spent his time—and see if we can ride out this storm the same way!
1. #CONTENT
This is suuuuuuuuuuuuuuper easy, dude. Netflix, amirite! It’s time to watch Birdbox 20 times. That’s what Hughes would have done, and he was FUCKING RICH. He was so dedicated to #content that he arranged screenings of movies where he lived when you couldn’t just do that. He had a projector and all that shit set up and had an employee change the reels, etc.
Of course, since he was rich AF, he could get someone from his army of flunkies to handle all the reeling, spooling, etc. But you don’t have to worry on that! You just have to make sure that Netflix doesn’t ask you if you want to keep watching after 4 hours, i.e. if you’re dead or not. So rude!
2. MILK AND COOKIES
This is all Hughes subsisted on for years at a time, and it’s SO GOOD. If he could live on this, why not you? Dude even lost weight! When they carried his body out of his creepy mausoleum of paranoid insanity he left his screening room for the last time, he weighed less than 100 pounds! WOW!
3. PARANOIA
They have eyes everywhere, man.
4. DRUGS
Hughes was ABOUT. THAT. LEAN.
Dude used so much codeine that, eventually, he started to shoot it. There were lots of needles snapped off in his arm during his autopsy.
Here’s the really good news: you can get codeine so easy. It’s just cough syrup, bro! You just have to walk through the melting slush to get it.
5. MISOGYNY, RACISM, ETC.
“He was most worried about the two things he had been most afraid of since childhood: germs, and black people. These two were tied together for Hughes, and bundled up with sex, too: if anything horrified Howard more than the idea that a beautiful white woman could be carrying a venereal disease, it was that a beautiful white woman might be sullied by the touch of a black man.
There were business matters he didn’t want to deal with, women with whom he didn’t want to have any real intimacy, but nothing animated Hughes like the twin devils of germophobia and racism.”
Longworth, Karina. Seduction, p. 429
Neat-o!
BTW, that’s from film historian and podcaster extraordinaire Karina Longworth‘s good-ass new book, Seduction. It’s the source of these Great Tips.
