cold sores,

allergies,

CONSTIP

I feel like I live here. I must be one of her most regular customers, but today I am here mainly because I am irregular. God forbid if the Medicaid ever runs out. I'd be fucked then. I'm not a hypochondriac, but I am getting old. Older, anyway. When I was younger, I never went to see a doctor. Maybe I'm paying the price now for some of that exorbitant behavior of my youth.

My body is screaming, "Payback is hell, mother-fucker." What do you think?

As usual, she, The Doctor, says that I am going to live. She listens to my heart. She listens to my stomach. She asks me if I am feeling any pain.

"No," I say, as usual.

She gives me a prescription for cold sores. These huge blue pills that she prescribes knock the unsightly, painful mass of pus-filled shit off of my lip, almost instantaneously.

The Good Doctor also gives me a prescription for a pill that will help my allergies. I'm wondering if I will really need them now that my cat has run away. At the pharmacy, I remark to the man and woman standing there at the counter in white coats that it still cracks me up somehow to hear John Lennon come over the Muzak at the pharmacy or the grocery store. The guy ignores what I say; the girl gets the giggles in agreement.

As I walk away with my pills, I say to her, "Especially when he is singing 'Imagine.'"

She giggles some more and I feel like I have found someone who understands. I leave her stuffing Prozac into smoke-colored plastic containers. There is a weird story about this pharmacy. I used to do LSD. For two years of my life, I did a lot of LSD. Hell, I did all the LSD that I could get my hands on. It was a very unhappy time in my life, a very, very depressed era, and I would do anything to escape from the way that I felt. I didn't know it at the time, but I was undiagnosed bi-polar, trying to self-medicate.

And self-medicate I did.

Well, in order to self-medicate, you have to have someone to buy the medication from, i.e. a drug dealer. RuPaul turned me onto this LSD dealer, who was turning on everyone who wanted to turn onto it and had the five bucks to buy a hit of it. I was as regular a customer to this drug dealer then as I am to the Good Doctor now. I don't think that I ever fully hallucinated, reason being I always threw a horrible amount of alcohol on top of the little bit of blotter acid that I would let sit on my tongue for a while.

Anyway, I'm sober now, no more LSD, no more Jack Daniels, no more Budweiser, no more Long Island Teas, no more shots of this, no more shots of that -- and I'm going into this pharmacy to get my bipolar meds, and who is fucking working at the counter and handing me the pills? The fucking drug lady, the woman who I bought my LSD from for two years. Is that not fucking weird? I got my illegal shit from her and now she is handing me the legal shit.

Is the government watching me? Am I part of some brain chemical experiment that the CIA, the FBI, or the Mafia are conducting? I fucking doubt it, but it is a fucking weird coincidence.

 
Don't you think?

After I leave the pharmacy, I bike to the coffee shop. At the coffee shop, the lady says, "Long time no see." She has a phone glued to her ear. (Have you noticed how three-quarters of Amerika has a phone glued to their ear these days? On the sidewalk. On the job. In traffic. While making fucking love.)

The coffee lady is multi-tasking. She seems to have forgotten that I ALWAYS get a LARGE cup of coffee, room for cream, please.

I've been busy with "WORK," I tell her, and I think back. The three months when I occupied a chair and a table on the patio of the coffee shop nearly everyday, guzzling two large cups of coffee, room for cream, were three months when I wasn't working, three months "between jobs," as they say. I think now that I'm working that I'm cheaper. I don't want to give up the three bucks plus a buck for a tip that this place costs me. Basically, I can buy enough coffee and coffee filters to home-brew for a week with four bucks. When I'm working, I'm trying to squirrel away money for the rainy day when I won't be working, a state of existence that seems to occur semi-frequently or very regularly, depending on how you look at it.

How do you look at it?

This guy sits down at one of the coffee shop patio tables without buying a coffee and pulls out a small drum. He starts tapping on it. "Fuck off," I want to say to him. Take your fucking drum and head into the woods, nature boy. I find nothing soothing about the intrusion of his percussion into my reality. I have come to the coffee shop to write, to think, to drink coffee. The neurotic staccato that he pushes out into the air are, by no means, relaxing. I think to narc him out to the coffee girl, but realize that I can't control the universe. God will take care of this fucker and his drum. I don't have to.

The coffee lady is playing some sort of rhythm-and-blues station over the coffee shop speakers. I find this irritating also.

"Me...and Mrs. Jones...Mrs. Jones..." is a song that I usually like, but I like to like it on my terms, like when I have turned the on and off switch on the radio to on and have tuned the radio to the station that plays that sort of song. I hate when other people have control of the programming that is going into my head.

Can you dig it?

I'm thinking how I need a regular column, a steady writing gig where I can put all this bullshit out there for all you motherfuckers to see. Isn't that a literate way to put it? Do you know of any publications that would want me? Do you know of a publication that would want a daily or weekly column by Mikel K: a space where I can ramble on about whatever comes to mind about God, government, kids, dogs, drugs, "using" and recovering, coffee houses and beyond -- way, way beyond -- and shitheads who bust my tranquility with their motherfucking drums.

Peace. Out.

Can you dig it?

All work is copyrighted property of Mikel K.