Sick as a Dog

I went to bed last night feeling pretty crap, but figured that I had turned the corner on this illness.

Turns out I had; when I woke up this morning I realized that during the night I took a hard right onto Sh*t St.

I woke up this morning feeling even worse than yesterday, so off to the doctor I went. Turns out I just have a bad cold, but I have to acknowledge it's a hell of a bad cold. My head feels like it will burst, my lungs are proffering copious amounts of stuff that I don't even want to describe, and my stomach is doing flip-flops and just generally feeling too warm for my own good.

But I am surprisingly upbeat in the midst of this, and I am not even sure why. I guess all these ailments are still somewhat bearable. It's not like my throat is really really sore, you know like those times when you are certain that the orange juice you're drinking has battery acid in it? It's not that bad.

But the biggest contributor to my general acceptance of the situation is, unsurprisingly, the medication. Nothing makes me happier than an armload of pills, syrup and powders with which to fend off any and all unpleasant realities.

One thing I indeed love about this insane asylum of a city is that you can walk into any pharmacy ('dispensary') and ask for codeine-laced cough syrup with a straight face (and without a prescription) and they'll sell it to you. Once they get to know you, they'll sell it to you two bottles at a time.

My respiratory health is usually so bad during winter and spring that I can even walk into certain places and they'll just put it on the counter like it's some weird pharmaceutical spinoff of Cheers.

You know you're a hopelessly degenerate dope fiend when you can recognize by sight the different brands and which are the strongest.

Or you know where to go to find the really good stuff that eschews any pretense of being cough syrup and is brazenly labeled Tincture of Opium.

I didn't much care forCity Without Baseball , but I'd slumber in the arms of Morpheus every night if I could. Tell me a bedtime story, Daddy...

So yes, I am sick. I have a bad cold. But I have plenty of medicine, and I am a doctor.

Nothing to do but hole up at home with my guitars, my computer, and my DVD player.Now if I can just find the nipple top for the cough syrup bottle, I won't have to move for the next 48 hours...