My Inner Criminal

Any of you who have read my posts over time will already know that I am a raging asthmatic. I have a number of prescriptions and a regimen that I adhere to strictly in order to keep myself alive. Although I'm under constant monitoring by my docs, over time I have occasionally bought over-the-counter tablets because under certain circumstances they really help clear out excessive mucus in a way that none of my prescriptions do. This improves my overall condition. Furthermore, I always try to have tablets on hand if I travel, because any change in my environment always exacerbates the asthma. That's a 100% reliable given.

So we were finally getting our summer plans in order, and that included vacation. I started thinking about what we might need to take with us this year and whether anything needed to be upgraded. I riffled through the "family hygiene" Ziploc baggie to make note of what was present and what needed adding or replacing. (The Ziploc contains everything anyone might need--bug bite remedy, children's fever reducer, Dramamine, Benadryl, topical anti-itch creme, extra toothpaste, shampoo/conditioner, combs, sunscreen, yadda yadda, yadda). I noticed that the travel Primatene tablets were absent. So while I was out after regular grocery shopping, I stopped at Walgreens to pick up a small box of 12-24 Primatene for the kit.

For months and months, our local Walgreens has been getting a major facelift. Half the store is blocked off and empty, and the other half is completely mixed up; nothing is where it used to be and even the Pharmacy counter is now hidden in the bowels in a far-back corner. After wandering for a while, I found the cold/allergy section and scrutinized the shelves for Primatene. I looked and looked for the familiar package and started to think I would have to go across town to CVS instead. Just before giving up, I saw a spot on the shelf with claim cards in it. It's like the sort of ticket you get at Toys 'R' Us when you want an extra-large item that they have to bring to the cashier station from the warehouse.

I had never seen such a thing before. The card said I had to present it to the pharmacist. Whuuuuttttt?? It's a frigging over-the-counter remedy that's been around for years. Oh, and I might add that it's less effective than it used to be because they took out a good ingredient that used to make it work better (I can't remember the name of that now). I was in a bit of a hurry, and now I was going to have to stand in line at the pharmacy and wait for them to rummage for a single item?

A kid about 17 took the ticket and scanned the shelves behind the counter. When he came back, with the box (the size of which I had no choice about), he had the audacity to ask me for ID. What the Fu$k??? This is a Walgreens, and a kid too young to be an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is asking me for ID? It's not a state liquor store and a jug of moonshine, for goddsakes. It's a box of 60 tablets, and by the way, I never wanted more than 24.

So of course I had to argue. The pharmacist flew out from between the shelves and said menacingly, "If it contains pseudophed it's restricted."

"But I'm not trying to buy pseudophed." She grabbed the box, frowned at me, and looked at the ingredients.

"It contains ephedrine. It's controlled." Oooh, the 'c' word! When I lived in New York state, "controlled" items were certified narcotics (such as a kid's Ritalin or a cancer patient's pain meds). These had to be prescribed on a special, separate pad and signed in triplicate. If every item on the form was not filled out in a very particular way, the pharmacy would send the person presenting the prescription back to the doctor to make the doctor correct the form. Every time I would go to get a bottle of pills, there'd be a mistake on the form and it would take days to straighten out. Days that someone was doing without important medicine.

What, I'm an effing narcotics head now and I have to be checked against the America's Most Wanted list?

I showed the boy my drivers license. I figured he was just looking for the date, the way they would at a liquor store if I weren't ancient enough never to be carded.

But, no.

He was actually taking all the information off of my drivers license! He did not even explain to me what was happening. Had I had half a chance to know what this was about, I would have thrown the box back and stormed out in a huff. Shove your frigging Primatene where the sun don't shine! "Hey, what are you doing there with my personal information?" He didn't answer, just acted as if I weren't there. What was I going to do, leap over the counter and chase him down? The kid was slow as molasses. Don't their high school technology courses teach them how to use a keyboard? He kept squinting and squinting some more, until I decided he needed glasses. He was really milking it, squeezing every last bit of information from my license.

We are not free citizens, people. We are objects to be controlled by our information, a jumble of numbers and mere faceless subjects in a maze of databases waiting to betray the honest.

So that's it. My personal information is now in a database somewhere as a person of interest among those who might have the potential to sell street drugs. Give me a break! After I got the receipt, I read the fine print at the bottom, which says,

Federal law limits the sale of pseudoephedrine products to no more than 3.6 grams per person per day and limits an individual's purchases to 9 grams or less per 30 day period. Some states are more restrictive.

But I wasn't buying pseudo ephedrine. I was buying the real thing. Whoopee! Does that upgrade my criminal status to Addict or Drug Lord Extraordinaire? Next, I looked at the ingredients on the box. "Each tablet contains 12.5 mg of ephedrine HCI, USP and Guaifenesin, USP 200 mg." 'Scuse me if that looks to me like a mere pittance.

Because of this 12.5 mg--and never more than two tablets a day, I might add, since the shaky side-effects are overwhelmingly not worth it--I am now a shining star on the National Do Not Sell Registry. What would do if I go back in tomorrow to get another box? What if I decide to raid CVS? Are there DEA officers hiding behind the counter with cuffs, and a waiting vehicle out back?

If I could do the math, I would figure out how many grams of pure evil I actually bought. In any case, I fail to understand how this further violation and degradation of me as a citizen makes the government feel all better about its sorry self in its continued resounding failure in the "War Against Drugs." The people who legitimately need this medicine, who used to just breeze into the store and pull it off the shelf, now can't get it without interrogation and a fight. But what Big Gubmint didn't consider is that the people who really are making street drugs are not doing it piecemeal, by legally and dutifully purchasing one box a month of Primatene. All they have to do is raid a warehouse or truck or a drugstore and steal it. Much cheaper and more efficient.

That's right! I and all my mom-jeans-wearing housewife cronies have a big ring here in our little town, which I might add is above reproach. We go around buying up all the Primatene and NyQuil in surrounding snooty suburbs--patiently, month by month--and once we have a really good stockpile, we smuggle it down to the basement and scrape out the "good stuff" (which is what? I don't even know). Then we dress up like hookers in Land's End garb and sell it on the street. I wouldn't hold out much hope for what I could glean from a box of 12. But imagine the potential from a box of 60. Uh, maybe not so much.

Oh, yeah. I forgot. I don't have a basement.

The Stupidest Fear Ever

I'm afraid of a lot of things. Almost everything. There's little point in reiterating the same obvious things everyone else is afraid of, too, so I won't beat that dead horse.

I have a special fear. Possibly I'm the only person on earth who's retarded enough to be plagued with it.

This morning I was watching part of the "Today Show" with Al Roker and Ann Curry. The past couple of weeks they have been running a contest in which viewers send in a videotape to try to win a spot as the show's "News Anchor of the Day." Today they eliminated one finalist and now they are down to two. The two remaining guys are kinda funny. Each day the contestants have to participate in some sort of newscasting challenge, and today they were recruited to deliver part of Al's job: weathercasting.

When the two men stood up against the greenscreen which would eventually bear the day's forecast, I started to quake. Suddenly I remembered the series of recurring dreams--nightmares, actually--that I had some years ago.

I dreamed that I had a job at a small TV station in (drumroll, please!) one of the Dakotas. My job involved (what else?) writing and editing and maybe a little graphic design. In the dream I drove a white pickup truck and arrived at the building, which was in the middle of flat dusty nowhere. I was dressed in sloppy casual clothes--since mine was behind-the-scenes work, every day was like a casual Friday.

I walked in the door of the sparse, white and small building and the receptionist practically leapt onto me. "Quick! You have to go in the back and get dressed right now! [Name of normal weathercaster] is sick and can't come in! We're on air in five minutes! You have to do the forecast! Hurry!"

I turn to ice in a panic. This is one of the things I've been most afraid of my entire life. I can't go on air! I will certainly lose my job! Not only have I never been in front of one of those green screens, but I also would have no clue how to point at the right things or how to not turn my back to the camera. I would be mixing up east and west and doing everything backwards. Also, how would I know what to say if I hadn't been studying the material beforehand? I always study and memorize things first! Would I get to be looking at a screen in front of me to help me out, or would I have to wing it? Even worse is the thing that bothers me the most: despite a whole lifetime of watching weathercasts and listening to the jargon, I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD anything in a weather broadcast. Night after night, year after year, I have always felt like one of the dumb cats in a Gary Larson cartoon, who only hears "Blah blah blah, Ginger" when its owner talks to it. What are they actually saying? What language is this? What do all those stupid little arrows mean? What are the green patches? What is that thing that seems to look like half of a cog floating across the US map? What are those moving color blobs, clouds? What are "lows" and "highs"? And, most perplexing to me--what the hell is a "front"? They're always saying, "Here comes a front!" As if someone saw a car coming and said, "Here comes a radiator grille." How do they know it's not just the "back" of something else? Why isn't there such a thing as a "back"?

Anyway in my dream I go change and people in the newsroom are egging me on. They are people who definitely know much more about how to do this than I do, but they won't let me out of it. I put on some dumb skirt outfit that looks like hell, and they crank up the map and put me in front of it. My blood sinks to my feet and I'm sure I'm going to faint.

Then I wake up! Oh, thank God for saving me from having to see myself blow it entirely in front of all the (10) people in one of the Dakotas! The humiliation and failure would be too great.

So on this morning's show, the two gentlemen each had a turn at delivering the weather. I was intensely interested in whether they would be able to pull it off. And, actually, they gave me great solace, because they really didn't do such a good job! Hey, not everyone is a natural at weathercasting, afterall! One guy kept turning his back to the camera and walking across the weather map so viewers couldn't see the map. He was perfectly dyslexic and was trying to read a sheaf of copy at the same time he was demonstrating with his hands (of course, the one hand was busy holding the copy). All of this was further complicated by the practical jokes that the studio was playing--projecting silly stuff on the green screen, such as a smiling animated airplane looking as though it was going to crash into the guy, or a jungle monkey doing a stupid dance. The casters, of course, were required to announce whatever was being broadcast, including the plane and monkey. One of the guys was amusing when he broadcast something else that was featured on the show that day--the world's largest pot of cheese fondue. "Up to the north here in New England, we have a giant pot of cheese. If only we could have some pots of cheese over here in the Rockies."

Anyway, for a split second I felt much better about the dreams I'd had. But in a way, seeing these "applicants" just reinforced my fear. I felt better about the idea that, after all, perhaps I wasn't the only person who would find spontaneous weathercasting challenging and humiliating. On the other hand, it just went to prove that the fear of widely-broadcast failure is indeed realistic.

Strange Phenomena

Many years ago, a petite, eccentric British singer named Kate Bush had an album on which there was a song that went, "We raise our hands to the strange phenomena . . ." (Forgive me if it's really "we raise our hats"; she has a very odd, keening voice, the word is hard to understand, and I don't have the album liner with lyrics anymore. The song talks about coincidences, awesome natural occurrences, and seemingly mystical things that we don't understand.

A couple of weeks ago we were returning from vacation after stopping on the way at the Connecticut shore to visit friends. Just before leaving the beach town to get on the highway, we stopped at a Shell station for gas.

Immediately something looked wrong to me. There were cars all around. We were second in line at a pump; we had pulled in behind a guy in a late-model silver Volvo. Somehow the guy didn't look as though he went with the Volvo, though. Of course I'm typecasting, and he might have just come from boating or something, but he looked very scruffy and too young for that kind of Volvo, unless it was his parents'. Anyway, he was standing outside the back of his car and the trunk was wide open, revealing three HUGE gas cans which he had just filled up. (For a really big yacht? Otherwise, what was that about?)

The minute DH got out of the car to pump our gas, the guy started talking to him. There was nearly an altercation so I rolled down the window to ask DH what was up. Apparently the guy was asking him for a jump. Uh, excuse me? You have three huge gas tanks and you're at a gas station right next to the pumps and you want to get a real good spark going, blowing the whole place and all the people in it sky-high? What, are you nuts??? He asked again, but DH ran into the convenience store to talk to the clerk.

The kids were asking me questions about what was going on and I felt uncomfortable. Besides, the guy was within earshot and I didn't want him to hear me talking about him because intuition was telling me he was creepy, so I hushed the kids and told them to wait for further instructions.

Now I have to tell this a bit out of order in order for it to make sense. Just when he was getting ready to pump, DH locked the car remotely but the locking mechanism was working funny and he had to do it a few times to get it to go. He usually locks the car when he leave the family in it at a gas station because I have told him it makes me feel safer while we're waiting. It's a courtesy thing he does for me. It appeared that DH ran into the shop as soon as he turned Mr. Jump Man down, but that wasn't the cause. DH later reported that when he had lifted the pump, at least a cup of gasoline spewed out all over his sandaled foot (yuck), and he wanted to alert the clerk that the pump was in some way defective.

DH came back, finished the transaction and went back into the shop to pay. While he was momentarily back, Jump Man harrassed him about not helping. He said something like, "What's wrong with you, man? You locked your car a bunch of times and ran away, and you won't give me a jump."

Anyhoo, just as DH was walking back out of the shop, a car pulled up next to Jump Man. The car had been parked somewhere else across the station, and I did not see Jump Man motion to the car or go over to it; it seemed to just appear. This made me extremely nervous. Not only did I not understand how the car appeared, but it had parked in such a way as to completely block us in. I didn't have my car key and DH was not quite back yet to back out of there. The jumper cables came out and the moment DH came back the guys were connecting them to their batteries. I jumped out of the car to see whether there was room behind us, and what did I find but some guy at the pump behind us. We were utterly blocked from behind as well. Not only that, but this asshat was SMOKING while he pumped! Another big red flag.

I was just about to tell the kids to get out of the car and run when DH convinced the guys not to do the jump there. Somehow the car that came up to "help" drove either away enough to let us out, or completely drove off. Whew. We took off out of there like greased lightning.

Maybe everyone will think it is we who are crazy. And because of a traumatic teenage experience, I am an avowed fearer of gas stations and have written about that before.

We were all shook up and soon as we got on the highway, the onramp of which is immediately adjacent to the station, DH and I started talking about how weird it was and both of us suspected it might have been some sort of perfect setup for a robbery. It just didn't look right, and the coincidences of timing, the convenience to the expressway onramp, the spillage, the mysterious car that appeared out of nowhere, the juxtapositions of opportunities for terror (robbery? a guy picking a fight? danger to kids? blowing up everything for a mile around?) , and the boob with the cigarette naturally blocking us in were strange. Thing #2, Tyke, piped up from the back seat, "You should have gotten his license plate number. That's what Officer Kavedon [the school's police community relations officer] says to do." (Pretty smart Tyke.)

I said, "I thought about that, but his trunk was up the whole time, and I couldn't see the license plate."

We talked about it off and on the whole way home. And we sure were happy to get there.

I am NOT a conspiracy theorist. Much. I only play one at home. But this event sure reminded me of the "Strange Phenomena" song, and I had to go play it.