A Pilgrim’s Digression

I got up this morning with a pain in my neck. I must have slept crooked in the night. After taking Brendan to school this morning, I stopped by CVS for some Aleve.

I ended up buying ibuprofen because it came with a “free” Mr. Potato Head. The pharmaceutical companies must have finally figured out that a parent will feel compelled to buy any product that includes a toy.

Although I admit that selling ibuprofen with a toy makes limited sense, since presumably parents need medication more than non-parents, I still can’t quite wrap my mind around the meetings that must have taken place at the pharmaceutical company prior to the decision to market a drug with a Mr. Potato Head.

And is this only a test case? What other odd toy/pharmaceutical combinations might we see in the future? Will other companies take notice?

As a parent, I might buy a bottle of Jack Daniels if it came with a plush Elmo.

Also, I can envision a Teletubby being sold with packages of KY jelly.

Of course, marketing food to kids has been a staple of our society for decades. Go down the cereal aisle at the Supermarket sometime. Every children’s movie, from Nemo to the Cat in the Hat, has a cereal tie in. At least the companies are trying to make these cereals more healthful today. When I was a kid, a movie cereal was bound to be the sugariest, unnutritious cereal one could buy, which was part of the reason kids liked it. Now such cereal is wheaty and vitamin fortified, though it is also still plenty sweet enough and chock full of marshmallows.

In other news, Hunter Thompson suicided today, or yesterday. Thompson is one of those “Writers I Always Mean to Read,” but never get around to it. I am probably no more likely to read him now than before. “Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson”…it must be a bit tiresome to have a tag line permanently attached to your name. “Gonzo journalism” sounds kind of silly anyway. If he was any kind of writer he probably repudiated that expression, or at least made known his displeasure with it at some point.

My neck is feeling somewhat better now, finally. I can turn it side to side, at long last, which helps when driving. Since I came home from dropping Brendan at school and buying my Mr. Potato Head ibuprofen, I have been sitting on the couch blogging all morning and reading the news. At some point, I’ll have to do some housework, so when my wife gets home from work she doesn’t think that on my day off, I sat on the couch all day blogging. Keeping up the appearance of usefulness is important in a marriage!

I hate getting up sore and creaky in the morning. It’s a reminder of age. Even ten years ago, I could sleep anywhere and get up the next morning with nary a pain. I remember the first drunk I went on in college, I woke up on my bathroom floor bright and early the next morning, barely afflicted with anything more serious than cotton mouth. Now, I’d be incapacitated for a couple days, probably, if I did anything like that.

What else is there to write about…

While sitting here on my butt, I watched on MSNBC as the President delivered another of his “freedom is on the march” speeches in Brussels. All this Republican optimism only alienates me further from a party with which I once thought I had some things in common: a deep distrust of human nature and a denial of historical progress. It was all a lie, all that mid-nineteen-nineties stuff about Conservatives being rationalists and Liberals being starry-eyed idealists. One terrorist attack and our Republican President becomes Woodrow Fucking Wilson reincarnated.

Good luck to you, Mr. President; but keep in mind, no one ever went broke betting on things to fall apart.

Must be that pain in my neck making me so pessimistic today. I’m going to have to take a couple more ibuprofens; my neck is starting to tighten up again. And it is after eleven o’clock. Time to have some lunch and get to work. There is laundry to do, as every day.

Oh, I almost forgot. Our landlady came by yesterday. Our neighbor complained to her last Monday that she thinks we are making noise now just to be vindictive. The landlady waited until the weekend to talk to us so that she could visit us all and conduct some experiments.

She went next door to Charlotte’s while we walked up and down the stairs and Brendan jumped up and down in the living room floor. It all felt very foolish. In the end, her experiments proved only that when someone is silent and concentrated upon hearing noise, one can hear it.

We talked for about an hour afterwards, and we reached no conclusion. She said she was stumped as to what to do, and we had no suggestions for her either, except that she ignore our neighbor’s complaints. She seemed disinclined to do the latter. We did extract from her the information that she had no intention of asking us to leave.

Damn, my neck is sore again. Maybe it’s sore now because for the past couple hours, my head has been bent downward so I can look at a laptop computer screen. I think I’ll take a break and some ibuprofen.