So I swing by London Drugs this morning and as I’m standing in line with my holy shit I can’t wait to eat you Hardbite Himalayan salt chips, I can’t help but notice the guy at the checkout ahead of me. It wasn’t the flashy black suit jacket paired with the faded black jeans or the shiny black loafers made out of buttery soft looking leather. No, it was none of those things. It was the $487.00 worth of Claritin that he was buying. A stack of little blue boxes piled up so high that oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, least we all fall ill with altitude sickness.
He wasn’t standing there twitching or picking at gaping sores on his face or the imaginary bugs crawling up his arms, but he may as well have been. His unassuming well dressed self was still betrayed by the giant fucking wall of Claritin boxes between him and the checkout lady, so really, even having METH LABS INC. tattooed across his forehead couldn’t have made it any more obvious than it already was.
My deadpan “Real bad allergies, huh?” was followed by him staring at me like you would a basket of kittens. I mean, if the kittens had been put through a sausage grinder then fried up on a George Foreman grill and served with a little lye sauce for dipping.
I guess it’s not totally surprising that no one else seemed to notice or care being that we were in London Drugs at 9:45am therefore me & Mr. McMeth were probably the only ones in the store that didn’t watch the moon landing live on the telly box. I’m sure that more than one of those motorized scooter driving, polyester slack wearing centurions were thinking;
“Oh dear, look at that poor boy. Sure is a sickly little fellow.”
I’d even bet that a few of them are at home right now wishing they knew where he lived so they could bring him over a nice bowl of borscht. How the fuck he’d eat it in a full face mask though I have no idea.
No actually, that stuff is regulated now. When I lived in NYC you had to ask for it behind the counter and sign a register when you purchased anything with pseudo in it. You can stock pile it up here though. Stuff’s the only thing that works for my damn sinus congestion.