About four months ago, when my two cats first came home from the city animal shelter, both of the fuzzy little fuckers became sick, sneezing and coughing up shit everywhere. When a veterinarian looked them over, he pronounced them as both having the feline herpes virus , assured me that they would both be fine and proscribed each a bottle of antibiotics.

Now before you start making assumptions that could get me arrested or my little buddies taken away, I had nothing to do with this infection. I used a condom every single time, I swear.

Just kidding…kinda.

When the vet told me this, naturally I began to make excuses about age of consent, my lost childhood and the fact that I was the product of a broken home, etc. The doctor assured me that the virus doesn’t affect humans and that a good 95% of shelter cats carry it, some never exhibiting any symptoms. Outbreaks are usually brought on by stress, such as a new cat in the mix, a change of address, getting molested by their owners (once again…kidding) or any other big change that alters their normal routines.

I noted all this information, went home, squirted some antibiotics down their throats and all was well until about a week ago when Gracie, the six year-old started spewing hunks of phlegm left and right, sitting around the apartment, loudly wheezing and chugging up great clots of lung butter. At times, I found myself tempted to take a pipe cleaner to her. It was pretty disgusting. I mean, who wants to get it on with a overactive walking lung booger? Even some Serious Barry White can’t remedy that one…d’oh, still kidding there, put the phone down.

A second trip to the vet found her to be in the throes of a pretty aggressive outbreak. The vet actually was able to open her mouth and show me a real, live herpes sore. There was no denying it. My fuzzy little buddy was a dirty little whore. I had been wondering what all those midnight phone calls and litter boxes stinking of Old Spice were about. I was about to demand a paternity test and haul her ass onto Springer but the doc managed to calm me down. He proscribed some more antibiotics along with daily doses of vitamins to bolster her immune system, seeing as she seems to be more susceptible to outbreaks, likely due to her age.

So, I’m back to holding her down while I squirt things down her throat. Read into that one all you want, I’m innocent, I swear.

I’ve never been a fan of doctors. They cut you, jab you with needles and sooner or later bring you really fucking bad news. Doctors, seemingly able to smell the fear leaking from my pores, are always a bit unsettled by my decidedly manic presence in their examination room. Naturally, I wasn’t psyched when one evening, having just hosed myself down in my bi-yearly bathing ritual, complete with shaved donkey and a dead Jesuit, I found a lump. A big one.
Not a fun experience, especially considering it’s location. Ladies and gentleman, I had a large growth in my balls. That’s right, swimming around in there like a third testicle was this big fucking thing that I’d not noticed before and after the initial pride and excitement of thinking I’d been so manly as to grow more balls, I freaked the fuck out in true wing-nut, triple-ball fashion and started wondering if I was going take an extended appointment in that tanning salon called Hell a lot sooner than I’d previously thought.

It took a few days before I could get to a doctor, so to kill time I ran through various worst-case scenarios in my mind. Assuming I’m completely fucking headed straight to toast-land, I should probably bite the ball-gag and ride that bull straight into the fucking ground. How I should do this was a big question of my mind and I managed to come up with a few viable options:

1. Grab my gun and start shooting. When I run out of targets, find more. Get shot. Die.
2. Grab my gun and start shooting people I dislike. When I run out of targets, find people I have mild distaste for. Get shot. Die.
3. Get shot. Die
4. Do a King Kong. Grab the nearest blond starlet, climb the Empire State Building. Stand on top, bellowing and beating my chest. Get shot. Die.
5. Find Jesus. Turn my life around and spend my time righting all the wrongs I have done. As soon as people start believing me, start shooting them. Get shot. Die.

Of course, you must understand that I didn’t want to do any of this at all. Shit, I wanted to be free. I wanted to run naked with the bulls of Pamplona. How can I be Pope someday when I’m dead? Fuck that noise!

(more…)

I’ve had one of those generic lousy mornings, complete with the shitty night’s sleep, the late to work action, the forgotten lunch on the kitchen counter and the misplaced cash. So, exhausted, tired and lost amidst wires, ink, chaos and a vague, general malaise, I broke my usual dietary rules and ate a doughnut. Glazed. Two of them, actually. Shh, don’t tell.

I gave up about 90% of the sugar from my diet about five months ago. I stopped putting it in my coffee in the morning. No more candy, except for the occasional piece of dark chocolate. No ice cream, cookies, nothing. Over time, I’ve allowed the occasional exceptions, but for the most part, I’ve been really good about abstaining. It helps that since I’ve cut so much sugar out, my tolerance has dramatically dropped. A few bites of chocolate has me OD’d, sweating, dizzy and feeling I like just did time in a wind tunnel filled with airplane glue. Those days as a child, when I would devour ten to twelve candy bars for a post Halloween breakfast seem like a distant and hazy mirage. I am now a sugar wimp. Call me Mr. Goodbar’s bitch.

So now I’m sitting in my Cubicle of Doom, desperately fighting the effects of two oversized glazed doughnuts, wondering what the hell I could have been thinking to do this to myself. I’m standing square at the crossroads between blowing chunks all over my monitor and passing out, face-down on the keyboard. My brain is contemplating hanging itself from my spinal cord with a suicide note taped to the medulla oblongata. My eyes are fighting a cage match against each other to see who can hold the monitor in focus the longest. For every word my left hand picks out on the keyboard, my right hand’s on the backspace acting like Godzilla in the streets of Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to whole sentences of gibberish and half-formed, semi-drooling thoughts. It’s kind of sad to see.

However pathetic my current situation may be, it can’t hold a candle to last night’s experiment with Kava Kava.

Some time ago, when quitting cigarettes and hitting that frenzied state of withdrawal where you want to rip your skin off, staple your eyeballs backwards and dance the tarantella till you die or someone says it’s okay for you to smoke, I’d tried using Kava Kava to quell or at least lessen the suffering. I picked up a bottle at a health food store and popped something like four or five of the capsules. It helped, I think. Or if it didn’t, I was at the very least too fucking high to notice the difference.

Last night, on a whim, I popped three capsules and sat down to yet another Zatoichi film (someday, somehow, I will have watched them all, dammit) to see if anything would happen.

Very shortly after, I found myself high as fucking hell, head cocked at three o’ clock, with the beginnings of a decent drool as little leprechauns goose-stepped back and forth in my stomach. I had the schizoid desire to jump up and do massive manic jumping-jacks while simultaneously taking a nap. While it was not entirely unpleasant, it was more than a little unnerving and in my advanced age and much more pasteurized lifestyle, I’ll probably refrain from taking it again.