…So I venture the fluorescent lighting & near single-file aisles of Wallyworld to grab up a box of Sudafed because…for a couple decades they’ve relieved infrequent sinus pressure with exactness and no drowsiness, & because the box of little red pills that has been in the cupboard for several months was found empty. Scanning the shelves…I find no Sudafed in the little red box. What I do find are cardboard slips that say…take this to the pharmacy …warning…warning…federal…federal…yada-yada. Okay…itchy feeling in the USA. …But fine, I figure…fine…keep out of reach of…well…whomever. It’s become a twenty-one thing now; that’s what I thought anyway. So I take it to the stoic & bored looking heavyset lady at the counter and hand her the card with a smile. She asks me for my driver’s license. …Okay, …age check…even though I look nearly every one of my 42 years…no big deal…but I’m inquiring by nature so I ask: What’s the haps here? While logging my driver’s license info into her computer, she monotones that my drivers license will be filed…and a record of all of my Sudafed purchases will be kept…eeesh…itchy feeling growing…& now she wants me to fill out a digital form that speaks of federal crimes against humanity and prompts me to sign my name [to buy an over-the-counter sinus medicine that has been my option to obtain for occasional sinus pressure for decades!]. So…now I am slightly more inquisitive, as this is my pseudo-personal information that is being leaked out another hole in the flimsy reality I like to call my bit of space…& she is looking at me like I’m a bad guy because of an earnest citizen’s inquiry into the use of my information. I’m there to buy some sinus meds & I’m now wrongheaded somehow…&, although I’ve been polite and even kinda charismatic in my interest, …this ……..impassionate, narrow-minded, unfriendly fast-food stuffed…broad is giving me the stink eye……FOR buying a time-proven over-the-counter antihistamine. …………….Sheez……..
[Brave new world] …I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree…
…Spiraling surrealistically down into the rabbit hole…now two goofy gray-coated Wallyworld porters amble up and show me to a stainless steel door around the corner beyond the condoms & lubricants display, then down about 13 flights of corrugated stairs into a beast of an industrial looking subterranean crypt with copper pipes and robotic boughs and vacuum tubes & air vents and ductwork from wall to wall above. Then through another door marked Authorized Personnel Only into a dark & seedy office space of stuffy paperwork packed cubicles & an ill-omened & vomitous Orwellian air. They lead me up a long aisle way to the last cubicle, where a mouse of a man in a cheap suit, with the half drone/half paranoid look of a dog that’s been beat too much, behind stacks of paper on a rusty metal desk, asks me to have a seat. Jonathan Pryce, as Sam Lowry, is printed on a desk placard. Without a warm greeting…or even a hello, he hands me a plastic bottle, asks me to roll my sleeve up…& injects me with a burning substance……….. I’m spinning again, & now there are two or three white labcoats with balding heads and one real tall…chick all around me. They ask for my urine in the cup…right there in the cubicle, they take my blood, my stool (my favorite one too, the one I like to sit on when I play guitar), my spit, my hope & my spirit; they thumb print me, footprint me, & do a retinal scan & a strip search & a DNA swab. Then the sterile-eyed red haired & pasty-faced ex WNBA looking female-like nurse creature walks me into another cubby where some mustachioed federali interrogates me until I finally break & fess-up to experiencing occasional sinus pressure behind my eyes. Then, with a crash and some psychedelic strobe light effects, Archibald 'Harry' Tuttle (being played aptly by Robert De Niro) rappels down from the bric-a-brac ceiling & snatches me outa this nightmare Brazil freak out……...& I snap back from a momentary anxiety attack, eyes blinking under rows of Wallyworld fluorescents and little yellow smiley dots…and the meaningless beige face of the pharmacy lady.
…
ACTUALLY after paying for the antihistamines I thanked the gal & left the store. After some looking into this issue a bit, I understand the point of the legislation. I understand that the wrong fckheads, not the right fckheads, are apparently making speed outa the pseudoephedrine in the little red pills that I’ve used for a very different reason; fcks that aren’t certified by the FDA to string folks out on drugs and such ~ & that’s bad. & big bro has legislated another means to protect me from me. Groovy, I get it…but it doesn’t make it right. It makes humanity more & more homogenous, sterile, drone-like, and…marginalized of spirit and self-realization and many of the good & fundamental energies of free will & human development. …Oh well. &…oh well.
But I’ve had due time to cool-off about it over a coupla enchiladas & a Modelo Especial in the perfect vital company of my son, & I’ve made 95% peace with the inevitability of this one more loss of liberty. …But [initially] I definitely felt very…umm…sticky…& just a little raped…after leaving the pharmacy counter today. I do understand it's just a little thing. & yet....
It’s a brave new world indeed.
…coulda been another way….
Like a really smart cat once wrote (& I paraphrase the lyric):
”…We needed this….”
:o)o:
