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.