Hey girlfriend! Hey girlfriend! Stop! Just let me put down the rogue brassiere I found on my face. Girlfriend! I gotta come clean here and now. I’m gonna tell you something that will make you feel very vital and street-level, and make me feel real, mighty real. Here it is:
Hey.
No! That’s not what I meant to say. I get distracted easily, girlfriend. One time I went to tie my shoelaces but accidentally wrote a 25,000 word essay about plugging in a toaster instead.
What I really want to tell you is: I am heavy into the drugs, and I love it!
Not street drugs. I’m afraid I just don’t have the expansive sort of sensibility to truly enjoy street drugs such as Grabbers, Galldurn Giggly Pills and Christ, I Miss Doolittle (I learned the names of these substances from the video Loretta Lynn Talks To You About Street Drugs).
I can’t “let go” because when I do let go, I let go of everything. Why, the one and only time I smoked pot, I let go of my chequing account, my bowels and the Ming vase I was precariously balancing on my elbow, keeping me from a firm grip on the roach clip. I miss Gino and Toller.
No, girlfriend, I’ve stopped you on the street and stood in your way on your way to the village florist to say: Forget the flowers and buy yourself a big bouquet of high-end, patented pharmaceuticals instead. Look what they’ve done for me! See how shiny my hair is? I can’t, because I’m blind from drugs. But I do know that I’m smiling, girlfriend!
Here are some of the drugs that either I or my boyfriend happily imbibe daily, our giddy hands shaking the pill bottles, filling our home with narcotic percussion: Lithium, Celexa, Effexor, AZT, 3TC, Lamisil, Sustiva, Risperdal and these opaque little marbles that we don’t know the name of but take religiously because a lady laying in a parking lot told us they really made her “carpe diem and all that shit.”
We don’t feel enslaved by our prescriptions. Far from it. We feel free! With our bodies and minds guided by science, we don’t have to think about them and can focus solely on feeding our souls. Of course, like most drugged-out urbanites, we aren’t familiar with our souls and what they like to eat. Cat food? If Mother Teresa was so good at feeding her soul, why was she such a wizened match stick in a Bi Way bedsheet who always looked pissed off and exhausted?
See, girlfriend! You can never say that I’m running from the big questions by manically popping pills like a big gay gumball machine in reverse.
It’s really only fitting that I should be such a proponent of all the big drug companies. I love vaguely murderous paternalism of any sort. It makes me feel safe and cozy. I hate protest music. In fact, I have written a few, anti-protest protest songs including “(The Cancer, My Friend, Is) Blowin’ In The Wind (Right on!)” and “The Universal Soldier (Gets Free Boots And All The Tormented Brain-Damaged Third World Prostitute Yap He Can Eat).”
Still, it’s taken me awhile to come into my own as a beneficiary of these capsulized chalk shards that make my shits look like pre-historic popsicles and taste like them, too. (What do you feed your soul?)
I took Zoloft for a spell when I was 21. I lost 175 pounds and would burst into laughter at the drop of a hat – Asthma! The last days of Anne Sexton! Ha, ha, ha – doubling over backwards like a fold-up lawnchair. Clearly, my haughty body was still too callow to know what was good for it. My body thought it could meet grief and poverty and loneliness head-on and still go out for drinks and dancing afterward, all without the help of pills. Who did my body think it was?
It sure does burn my ass, girlfriend, when some of my more Gypsy Co-opish friends chastise my man and I for turning to western medicine to help with our psychic and bodily ills. There’s nothing that a little Pilates and a late-period Dead Can Dance CD can’t cure, my (second-best after you, girlfriend) girlfriend Sanka said to me last week, struggling to extract a bendable drinking straw from one of her dreads.
Why, that’s almost as thoughtless as when I (pre-pills, of course) told my cancer-ridden mother, whose only Christmas wish was to be able to wipe her own ass again, to ditch the chemo and maybe take a jazz dance class.
Sometimes, when I open up our medicine chest and see all the pill bottles nestled against the sparkly eyeshadow and the novelty condoms, I do feel sad. Stark chemical administration will always have to come before unfettered fun for my man and I, girlfriend. But maybe caution and regiment are forms of fun for my man and me.
Maybe unfettered fun is the very malignant thing that we’re trying to daily-dose away.
Hey, girlfriend? Girlfriend? Girlfriend? Girlfriend? Girlfriend? Girlfriend? Hey?
Why you can trust Xtra
