July 24, 2003 03:15 PM Rant # 4

At the time of this writing, I am, for lack of a better word, sick. The most mundane kind of sick, too, not the world weariness of the soul sick, nor the disturbing yet oddly fascinating of the mentally sick, no, just plain ol' sick. Flu, I believe. While I feel like shit, I guess it's better than taking the guv'mint's mind control shots, right? Not that I'm exactly a rebel on the fringe of society or anything, or that there's something unique about me that the guv'mint would see as beneficial to control, but why take chances? While I would love to go into how the guv'mint created the flu in a lab on the bottom of the ocean, as well as several other things and how it's all a trick to keep us subservient and all that, I really don't have it in me tonight.

I can't even conjure up the basic, practically-a-reflex paranoia of being careful in front of mirrors, on the off chance someone has a camera behind it and is watching me in some creepy Sliver-esque room somewhere and I don't want to do anything that might embarrass me later. At the moment I'm of the mind that if anyone is being paid to watch me, they're earning their money. Are delusions of grandeur a symptom of the flu?

In order to fight the little things inside me that thought it would be cool to fuck around with stuff for a couple of days, I've enlisted the help of Night-time formula Thera Flu. It is a potent brew of…well, stuff. I believe it's supposed to taste like hot apple cider with cinnamon. However, it tastes more to me like the delightful flavor candy companies identify as apple, mixed with the combined odors of hospitals, vitamin stores and pharmacies distilled into some kind of medicinal wonder drink. Then they added something sour, just for the hell of it. The result tastes TERRIBLE, but it really does help with those pesky flu symptoms. In fact, I'm starting to fear that I might develop a psychological fondness for it, the curative effects lasting longer in my memory than the taste and the goodness of those effects will alter my memory of the taste to the point where I remember it as being particularly tasty and actually look forward to it when I get sick again. Then I'll brew some up, lick my lips, take a big ol' sip and remember it tastes like someone put an apple and a syringe in a blender and made me drink the mix at gun point.

I feel myself starting to get drowsy, no doubt a result of the warm, narcotic Thera Flu gearing up to kick some flu ass and letting me know, ever so gently, that they can do their work a lot better if I'm not sitting bleary eyed in front of a computer, working up a good case of carpal tunnel and bitching about every little thing that bothers me. I'm putting up a good fight, but I'm afraid it's only a matter of time. Before I go, though, I would like to rant a little about modern medicine. I work at a medical center. It's pretty much like a lot of private practices, only all clumped together into one building. There is a section for doctors who specialize in either Cardiology or Pulmonary. Now every Thursday, usually around eleven, pharmaceutical reps come around and cater lunch for them. I work in the medical records department, but they don't know that, so they typically don't question when I inevitably show up for some free grub. Now almost better than the free food is the free shit they bring along. I can say with complete honesty that about 95% of the office supplies where I work bear the logos of free drug swag from these reps.

It jumps to 99.8% if you don't count highlighters. I dunno, for some reason they don't make highlighters. In any given week, you can see anything from coffee mugs to clocks, to those little foam things you can put on soda cans to keep them colder longer, to the mundane stuff of pads and pens. Now normally, I look forward to the free shit I can lift off these people almost more than the free food. But at this moment, I'm really thinking that less money should be spent on swag for the doctors, nurses and bottom-feeding records people and a little bit more spent on curing illnesses. Now I won't deny that I know absolutely nothing about why we get colds or viruses or how to stop them or wipe them out or the inner workings of big money pharmaceutical companies or anything like that, but I really think some priorities are in the wrong place. I mean come on, boner pills? Anti-anxiety pills? Any number of pills that help fight SYMPTOMS or suppress the outbreak of whatever embarrassing STD you happen to have?

I mean, I know actually curing something for good is, in the long run, bad for business, but what with SARS and Monkey Pox and all this other new shit coming up every couple of months, it's not like they're going to go out of business if they cure one or two minor, pesky little things. Maybe I'm being unreasonable, lord knows it wouldn't be the first time, but I'd much rather be sitting here with one less Pfiezer pen than be sweating my balls off one minute, shivering uncontrollably the next while experiencing the peculiar sensation of having a nose that is both stuffed up and running. But that's just my opinion, I might be wrong.

Posted at 03:15 PM | Comments? (1)