Drugs
The man closely examining a mango in your local supermarket is on sixty milligrams of slow release Adderol, taken twice daily. When he was ten he’d act out in class and so a psychiatrist who’d read lots of books about dealing with troubled children prescribed him five milligrams of Ritalin within five minutes of meeting him. He stopped acting out but after school he’d curl up on the couch and cry and refuse dinner, even spaghetti, which was his favorite, and so his dose was upped and seven years later he matriculated at Harvard. You should have seen his yearbook photo, he wasn’t smiling, it was like he wanted to win at yearbook picture taking.
Your father has been on a half milligram of Guanfacine for about a month now. Ostensibly it’s a blood pressure medication, but enterprising psychiatrists have found it works wonders for ADHD and OCD—not, curiously, both. Turns out those involved nose-and-throat clearing noises you always thought were symptomatic of some severe and hopefully not genetic sinus problems were really the gross-sounding outward manifestations of a psyche whose most heinous, uncontrollable thoughts—many of them involving that dog you loved so, and a set of artisanal knives—could only be kept out of his mind at the expense of, for one, his co-workers’ sanity, because seriously if that dude snorts just one more time I’m going to have at him with this industrial stapler (they’d say). The medication’s been helpful, although he’s been kind of constipated lately, because the medication’s kind of killed his appetite, in part because ever since washing down the first pill he’s been thinking a lot about how he’ll eventually go—not in a particularly sad way, but he’s sixty three, you know—this maybe being because the medication’s caused him to lose most of his hair and develop some severe eczema on his right leg, his favorite leg, he mutters to himself, and doesn’t even realize he’s muttering, another side effect. But mostly he’s okay.
The man who just made your tomato and mozzarella panini has been in a K-hole since last September, but don’t tell him that!
The woman across from you on the bus is on twenty milligrams of Oxycontin, which she bought illegally off a sweet kid who (unbeknownst to her) was indirectly involved with the murder of a local pharmacist during a botched robbery last Tuesday. She knows she sounds dumber when she’s on it but doesn’t care, because the Oxy high far outweighs the high she used to get from impressing people with her intellect and wit, and doing that always made her feel pathetic anyway, like her sole motive in entertaining others was to be liked by them, so now she’s content to just get really fucking high and entertain ‘numero uno,’ as her friend who loves ironically employing Spanish slang might say.
