(2013)

Did a rough calculation just now and figured that in the three decades or so since I was diagnosed as epileptic, I’ve taken over 50,000 pills. And that’s low-balling it. I don’t know if that’s cool, or gnarly, or just a helluva lot of pills.

Fifty thousand. Fifty times a thousand. Fifty thousands, really. It would have once been fifty thousands. When it finally got to the point that it was not a plural, not fifty separate thousands, it became the one fifty thousand. There went the plural, no more s, poof. Was that a mathematical poof or just a linguistic one I don’t know. Did some smart guy decide it was one thing, this fifty thousand, or did people just get lazy and drop the s the way people do? People are lazy speakers. I know I am. I can’t be bothered with consonants. Drop them all over the place, especially in the middle of words. D’s in particular. Just hint at the thing, glottalize it softly, can’t be bothered to stretch the tongue all the way to the teeth for that little rush of air off the palate that makes a d. What’s the point. People understand me anyway, mostly. Anyway, maybe that’s why fifty thousands is fifty thousand. Lazy tongues. But let’s say no, it was a mathematician. Some guy in a lab coat, a blackboard covered with x’s and y’s and no social graces whatsoever.

But back to fifty thousand. I know a guy that has fifty thousand records. He has as many records as I’ve taken pills. And I know a guy that has fifty thousand rubber bands in a big ball on his desk. It’s a really stupid hobby, but he has as many rubber bands as I’ve taken pills. And I know a guy that has fifty thousand dollars.

No, I don’t know anybody that has fifty thousand dollars. I mean fifty thousand dollars just hanging around. Fifty thousand dollars in a big fat wad in their pocket, like the Weenie King in The Palm Beach Story who gave a mess of them to Claudette Colbert who was standing in the shower in a skimpy bathrobe and driving the male half of the audience out there silently mad. There are people that have fifty thousand dollars like that, just fifty thousand dollars hanging around, but I don’t know who they are. I don’t know people who have a million dollars, or a billion, or a zillion dollars even. You don’t know these people socially unless you also have a million, billion or even zillion dollars. You can’t eat at the same restaurants, or go on the same vacations, or buy the same companies and lay off the same people. But I do know they have more dollars than I have taken pills, that’s for damn sure. I don’t even have to use my calculator to figure that out.

Then there’s that whole thing about a picture being worth a thousand words. They measured it. It’s a thousand words. I saw a photo album today that held fifty pictures. People pictures, cat pictures, baby pictures. I would rather have seen the fifty thousand word equivalent, as it was a really dull fifty pictures. And that would be as many words as I’ve taken pills. And words are something I can understand. Though I have written way over fifty thousand words. Ten times that easy, five hundred thousand words plus some. I figured that out once. MS Word made it feasible, put all those words together in a huge document. So huge it was cumbersome as a brontosaurus and took forever to open or close or edit even. I did a word search once that crashed my computer. I was afraid I was going to crash the Internet. It didn’t, and the world is safe, but now I’m on WordPress and though I like it, and that’s why you are reading this, it’s all fucked up, word wise counting wise. I just have to guess. I never guess about my pills.

Actually I’ve written way over ten times fifty stupid pictures in a boring photo album’s worth of words. Some are on this blog. Some are still in that brontosaurus of a word document. And there’s a whole mess of words tucked away in columns in the archives of the LA Weekly, maybe five times that stupid photo album’s worth of words. But the rest are hand written in a big box in the closet. Some are typed. Remember typewriters, those big clacking things that dinged? Ancient. Words that came from typewriters are made of ink, though the words you just read are made of electrons. This is the modern world, baby. I found an electric pencil sharpener at work, once. It was hidden in a supply drawer that had been locked up for year and was full of fossils. Carbon paper. White out. Rubber bands by the thousands. Boxes of pencils. Erasers in all shapes and sizes and colors. And that electric pencil sharpener. I took it out and put it on my desk. An intern asked what it was.

There’s also a bunch of words stuck in a hard drive from a computer that died a bad death, sparking and smouldering. Funny they aren’t words right now, just codes or whatever it is that sit in the memory chips, awaiting electrons that make them words again. Actually none of these words are words unless you open the file to look at them. I’ll finish this post finally, save, log out and go look at the news or pictures of ladies or something. None of these words exist then, until someone decides they really need to read what Brick says about pills. Press the link and voila!, words. And there’s all the words sitting in emails I never deleted, plus the ones I deleted are just memories of words, or would be if I remembered them. I don’t mostly.  Who knows how many words disappeared over the years on work email accounts. Then there’s instant messaging and texting and twitter and Facebook. That must come to millions and million of words. I have no idea how many cat or baby pictures that amounts to.The calculator is way over there and I’m here typing, and it’d be just a wasting time exercise anyway. We were here to talk about pills.

My pills usually come in the mail. But sometimes I forget to re-order and have to go to the pharmacy to get more. It’s in Hollywood, the pharmacy. The last time I was there a man in a Santa hat came in, sat down and ate a sandwich. He didn’t want pills, he was just eating a sandwich.The next day I went there again, and there was a man wearing Mickey Mouse ears. He didn’t eat anything. He was in line wearing mouse ears, talked to the pharmacist in mouse ears, paid for his package in mouse ears, and disappeared out the door weaning mouse ears. He probably ate later. And I saw a lady there once who was so beautiful you couldn’t believe she was here in the wrong end of Hollywood. She wore a pink cowgirl hat and had legs for days that ended in cowgirl boots. I don’t think she was a real cowgirl, though. She was just bored, and sighed, and stared. People stared back. Mostly, though, the people waiting there don’t wear Santa hats or mouse ears or any kind of head gear of any sort. They just wait.

OK, time to take my pills.