Medicated, baby

I've been nursing a bottle of off-brand dayquil since 5am this morning. The stuff tastes absolutely terrible. Think liquid orange Jolly Ranchers with a menthol twist. It's horrific, the stuff of gag reflex and daymares. But, it leaves me with a sense of peace... not to mention a false sense of reality. I somehow made it through an entire work week thanks to self-medication. I heard on the radio last week that Americans spend over three billion each year on cold medicine alone, both over the counter and by prescription. I don't know for a fact, but that's gotta be in the ballpark of some nations' GDP.

A sum of years back I remember having the most horrible date. It really was. I actually had to kick her out of my house. She was drunk and it brought all of her crazy out, all 110 pounds of it and she was hollering about something and I just had to wrap a coat around her shoulders and usher her down the stairs past the midnight eyes of my neighbors. My embarrassment was raging and I felt perfectly murderous. I took her keys and drove her home across town on one of those brutal cold winter nights in the northeast. You could hear tree limbs cracking beneath the weight of ice and snow, that kind of cold. Anyway, I tossed her the keys at the doorstep and started the trek home. I managed to pick up some pneumonia on the way home, walking those two long miles across town, but I did catch some flickering of the aurora which may have made it worth it. Say, how do you catch pneumonia? I should look that up.

Anyway, the point of the story is I felt pretty awful the following morning but managed to work my three jobs for two weeks until I finally just couldn't take it anymore. At which point I took myself to the hospital for a brisk $500 billing and a few pills to cure me. Thinking back, somehow I'd managed to function on a steady combination of phenyl and pseudoephedrine, with copious amounts of acetaminophen and dextromethorphan to balance out the highs. We're a medicated people. The type of people that don't think about rest but think about lost wages. I'm guilty too. And, I'm sleeping in tomorrow.

A new year.

I have a friend who deletes his Facebook account every few months. A week or two will pass and you can find him again re-upped to the network. It's interesting being a primate and seeing how a social animal reacts to the strange anonymity carried by technology and our expanding metropolis. It's cold out there. And, sometimes the greatest sense of loneliness comes in the company of others.

He’s been out in the world for some time now, going crazy in different rooms in different cities and states. It makes me think there's some needless shame in our modes of being, in knowing what brings us joy and a sense of ever-important connection, and the avenues of communication and distraction we choose. I think we all deserve the easier breath of a lowered bar and a little absolution for the high price of sanity.

It’s a new year and I have a good feeling about this whole 2011 thing. There's a song...

And all the bridges are burnin' that we might've crossed
But I feel so close to everything that we lost
We'll never, we'll never have to lose it again

I like that. I like that way of thinking. And that was 2010. Everything burned and my deepest loves and strongest supports to the structure crumbled around me.

I've been thinking about the concept of falling apart to come back together and coming back together better than before. I'm hoping it's a somewhat elegant process of restructuring and, perhaps rearranging of pieces to better suited spaces.

Here we go...