Of Mice and Medicine

For the past 17 years I've been taking a medication to help me go nighty night. Unfortunately it's the kind of chronic insomnia that a glass of worm milk (ooo gross worm milk? there's a nasty typo for ya. I may never sleep again.) In any case my meds are old school with none of these bizarre side effects like bleeding from your ears or unusual dreams. (And aren't all dreams unusual? Where do you draw that line? I dreamed my ears were bleeding because I drank worm milk.) Anyway for the past 15 years or so our family doctor has been doing the prescribing for me, during which time we've come to be pretty good friends. We often speak of our mutual ambition to write the great American novel and he's always been a loyal fan of this column. Hence I was more than a little bit surprised, a few weeks back, when he came right out of the blue and asked me whether or not I was selling my sleeping pills on the street!

What? True, I've been wearing my hair a bit longer lately, and since he mostly just writes me refills I only see him every 6 months or so when he has me come in for a look-see, a chat and a blood pressure check. I don't so much mind the co-pay because I enjoy keeping our friendship in good repair, and recommending books and so forth. Still he's been known to pull my leg - so I went along with it and said something like, "hey, a guy's gotta make ends meet one way or another." When I checked his response to my little quip, he didn't seem particularly amused and he mostly just stared at me with the sober countenance of a Manson juror.

At this point I was more than a bit concerned. Was he having one of those Senior Moments that you hear people joke about? Surely he's not helping himself to goodies from the sample closet. Whatever the case, the rest of the visit passed in awkward silence and I left with a creepy vibe that took a while to shake. Then a week later I had to go to a priesthood leadership meeting (pretty much standard stuff where we're offered counsel on ways we might better carry out our respective callings.) As fate would have it a moment after I sat down, the good Doctor walked past and took a seat a short distance away. Our eyes met and we nodded hello and then a noticeable shadow crossed his face. Could it be that his little faux pas was only now dawning upon him? He was noticeably ill at ease as he shifted his girth about his seat. I could tell he was struggling with some way to address it, but I really couldn't think of anything to say and, to be honest, having had a few days to mull it over, I'd worked up a pretty good grudge over what I'd began to consider a reckless personal attack. In retrospect I wish I'd said something like "hey I'm really making a killing selling those pills" something that would've broken the ice and allowed him an easy apology. Later I realized there was really no good way out for him - what's he gonna say? "Hey, listen, sorry I mistook you for a low life." That's okay Doc - I get that a lot.

Speaking of life further down the food chain, a few weeks back my wife found evidence of a mouse in the house. As this is an indignity that she is most profoundly unwilling to suffer, I was dispatched on the spot to put an end to these activities - quick fast and in a hurry. I decided on one of those new-fangled glue traps instead of the medieval cheese-choppers we've all seen. Amazingly enough I snagged the little devil first night out. The problem was that he was still very much alive and still very much cute. I guess ever since Disney taught mice to speak, I've had trouble with cold-blooded mouse-ka-cide. Then again I'm the man of the house and it's my role to spare the womenfolk such unpleasantness. After figuring out the most humane way to put the poor feller down, I wrapped it up but good and put it in our garbage. It was garbage night so by morning this whole nasty affair would be a fast-fading memory.

Expecting to be congratulated for taking care of the whole sordid mess without bothering her about it, I got the wife up to speed on the rat race. To my surprise, not only was she unhappy about being left out of the loop, but she didn't even believe that I'd caught him so quickly and wanted to see the grisly remains. "Unfortunately, my little buttercup the stiffening corpse is long gone, how thoughtless of me. Next time we'll hang his headless carcass from the Quaker Oats box and send a proper message to his paisanos."

I don't always snap into action on household projects like the mouse, in fact sometimes I get in a rut and just allow some crummy thing to go on and on as though I were some kind of helpless little boob. At my place of residence for example, there's a monstrous project abrew that I've been meaning to tackle just as soon as I can muster up the backbone. It seems we've allowed a terribly homely collection of mostly worthless household crap and various and sundry rat-holed rubbish to gravitate toward the computer "area." The problem is that nobody really knows what most of this flotsam and dross is, which makes it tough to just throw away for fear that it might actually be worth something, go to something important, or belong to that vague category of quasi-sentimental holiday, birthday, school, church, or family activity crap that the wife wants to save and scrapbook someday and I just want to wad up and ram into the garbage.

It's become a place that is second only to the junk drawer in the kitchen for being the sad repository of dead batteries, pens that don't work, those plastic drywall screw dealyo's that no one knows how to use, half a deck of Uno cards a smattering of monopoly money, along with Baltic Ave. sea shells and something that's either a petrified fish-stick or an arm that once belonged to a starfish. And of course a sizable Super Glue cluster-ball with small change, thumb tacks, a Barbie head and the charger to the cellphone that went through the washing machine.

It started off innocently enough, everybody needs a computer, right? And this puppy came free with the purchase or our last car. Back in the day when computers came complete with several kits and at least half a dozen kaboodles. And because it was free and resembled a real computer, we went right out and bought one of those enormously ugly fake-wood mega-stations of computer furniture - by way of celebration. Since that golden age, the thing has gradually been accumulating the above-mentioned cornucopia of crap - thus taking on the size and visual appeal of sputnik. To call it unattractive would be about the same as calling Charlie Sheen a little flakey. Not only does the whole shebang function about as well as a PlaySchool computer, it pretty much eats up an entire wing of the house. And with its endless nooks and crannies it's perfect for storing all of our unsightly nookie and crannage.

Meanwhile regular people have computers that are streamlined, sleek and swift. All a computer has to be now is a sexy little monitor, a keyboard and a cord. Where did we go wrong? We just wanted to appear as though we were a family who was with it as far as the information age was concerned. Ironically the only information we're presently putting out there is that we're clueless monkeys who stood in the stupid line and faced the wrong way. A large part of my indifference with regard to the situation rests on the wobbly, feeble shoulders of my internet provider. Still, rather than taking bold, grown-up steps to rectify the issue, I remain a danger to my family and friends as I could, at any moment, fly off the handle and cause bodily harm to the innocent as a result of my bitter, festering hatred toward my internet people. My useless, never-working, but-charge-me-twice-our-original-agreement-for-nothing-but-heartache internet provider.

I really don't like dissing anyone - I don't find it a particularly clever means of getting laughs and just the word diss itself sounds fairly silly. Here's my stance on dissing, if you don't want to be dissed, try to refrain from sucking at whatever it is that you do. At this point I'll drop a name or two, because I was hoping that the change of handle (from Qwest to Century Link) was going to bring about a change for the better where all this sucking was concerned. Thus far, they're still sucking up a storm.