Drugs

I had to add to my drug collection this morning. I carry around a battered Altoids tin full of drugs at all times: aspirin, ibuprofen, sudafed, some green pill in foil that I think is an antacid or something and one lone Clonopin that I probably will never take, but its presence alone relieves my panic attacks. For years I had two Xanax in there serving the same purpose but I finally had to give them away; fortunately, before I got busted for possession of Xanax that I was afraid to actually take. Altoids tins are not hermetically sealed and are no match for the tobacco flakes and fuzz that live in the bottom of my purse, so eventually, all the pills in there begin to look the same and take on the same dusty, faintly menacing air. This morning, I was out of ibuprofen and down to a few aspirin tablets that started out life pearly white and now are a sort of unsettling gray. If your headache is bad enough, though, you don't care about the crumbling black aspirin. Hell, a bad enough headache can make you snort a Goody's powder, although I personally have not done this since high school and, while I lived through it, I don't recommend the experience. Which, come to think of it, applies to a whole hell of a lot of my high school experiences. It's probably for the best that I don't ask young M for too many details.

I have a big jar of ibuprofen in my bathroom, thanks to my mother's neighbor who, alas, seems to be succumbing to the same evil, horrible disease that's going to take Terry Pratchett away from us. She came out one day when I was over at my mom's and solemnly handed me a brown paper shopping bag full of half empty toiletries & medicine bottles. "Um, thanks?" I said, since I'm never sure what to say when elderly people you don't know all that well are handing you extremely strange gifts. "They keep leaving them around my house," she solemnly confided, "I'm sure they mean well, but I don't need these things! I thought you should have them!" Yeah. Totally. That would follow.

Turns out that I got half a big bottle of generic ibuprofen, some toothpaste and a mega jar of Ponds cold cream, slightly scooped. There may have been some other things in there but I've fortunately managed to burn that specific memory linked brain cell with an aspirin overdose or something. I haven't touched the cold cream yet and the ibuprofen, I found out this morning, is blue. Yes, blue. All other ibuprofen in the world is brick red and round, but this ibuprofen is blue and translucent and I don't believe in it. Maybe they really did leave it in her house and I mean that in the worst sense of the word they that there is, as in, you know, them.

In other news, young M tried to use the microwave at the same time as the dishwasher last night, which inevitably sends the house into hysterics that it demonstrates by promptly turning off half - and a fairly random half at that - of the electricity. We got it working again, after two candle lit (the dog ate all the flashlights, of course. Why do you even ask?) trips to the scary cellar. I got a bit upset by the whole process, including the rediscovery of the sad fate of the flashlights and after it was over, young M said to me, "That wasn't that bad. God, Mom, I bet you've done way worse things than that in your life. The way you were acting, you'd think going to the basement was a trip to Mordor or something. Geeze." Yeah, okay, kid has a point. But the basement has a lot in common with Mordor, I swear.