Culture
Area Man Physically Cannot Accept That High School Musical Came Out 20 Years Ago
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
Doctors are describing the case of Derek Paulson, 34, of Tucson, Arizona as "a completely foreseeable crisis that we are nonetheless unprepared to treat."
Paulson was found unresponsive on his couch Wednesday evening, holding his phone and staring at a VICE article listing the five best-selling albums of 2006. The albums, which include records by artists he described as "still basically new," are now legally old enough to rent a car in most U.S. states.
"He just kept refreshing the page," said his girlfriend, Mara Solis, 33. "Like maybe the numbers would change. Like the website was wrong about how time works."
The specific trigger, according to witnesses, was seeing Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds listed alongside a release date of September 12, 2006. Paulson reportedly whispered "that's not right" eleven times before going fully silent.
Neurologists say what Paulson experienced is consistent with what they are now calling Temporal Receipt Shock, a condition in which the brain receives accurate calendar information and simply refuses to process it on the grounds that it feels disrespectful.
"The patient understands intellectually that twenty years have passed," said Dr. Felicia Okafor, who was not actually consulted in this case and does not know Derek Paulson. "The problem is that his body experienced 2006 as recent. The body has filed an objection. We are reviewing it."
What makes Paulson's case particularly acute, his friends say, is that he was already in high school when these albums came out, which means he does not have the comfort of saying he was a little kid. He was a person. He was aware. He remembers buying one of these albums at a Best Buy that has since closed, been converted into a Spirit Halloween, and then closed again.
"I had opinions about these albums," Paulson told reporters from beneath a blanket. "I had a ranking system. I sent a group email. I used the word 'seminal.' I was seventeen. None of this is possible."
His mother, Linda Paulson, 61, offered little sympathy. "I was twenty when the Beatles broke up," she said. "Nobody wrote an article about me."
The VICE article itself has been criticized by some readers for deploying the phrase "somehow 20 years old" in the headline, a rhetorical strategy that several therapists described as "journalistic arson."
"The word 'somehow' is doing a lot of work there," said one media critic who asked not to be named because she is also not handling it. "It implies that time passing is a glitch. A mistake. Something that happened to us rather than through us. And then you click the article and it's just a list. There's no help. There's no number to call."
Paulson says he has not yet clicked through to see what the actual five albums are, and that he intends to maintain this position indefinitely.
"I know one of them is by the Chili Peppers," he said. "I'm not ready to confirm that."
As of press time, he had opened Spotify, scrolled to 2006, and closed it again.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/5-best-selling-albums-of-2006-that-are-somehow-20-years-old-this-year/