What a funny feeling in my eyes and ears and throat

[austin_dern]

I'm sick. It's a cold, or something functionally equivalent, in that I feel achy and as I try to sleep my brain keeps hearing someone repeat, in a steady tone, as if practicing for a further lyric from the Beatles' Revolution 9, the phrase ``Sponge Or Brain''. My mother got this, possibly with a different phrase, ahead of me. She sent me to buy Contac, ``the strongest that can possibly be purchased''. I went to the store. They didn't have Contac. Nor did they have a hole in the shelves where it might logically go, nor did they have anything store-name generic with labels like ``Compare To Contac''. I asked the pharmacy desk and they realized they had no idea when they last saw Contac, but they certainly didn't know it was missing.

Did you know Supermarket pharmacy departments have a roster of the key ingredients for their cold medicines, including those which apparently have discontinued production without anyone being told about it? I didn't, and I'm surprised and intrigued by this. Well, the pharmacy department was able to find something else with equal amounts of the key ingredients but less of the stuff that goes into Tylenol. I figured that was probably good enough and my mother accepted it happily. Also per my father's instruction I got the stuff I'd figure to need when I got it; that amounted to bagels, Fritos, and 7-Up. I haven't been taking the cold medicine myself because the only stuff that I've ever found that works has been mysterious medicines of a provenance uncertain to me that I got from the convenience store at my Singapore apartment, and I doubt they could be found in the United States on purpose. They didn't really make me feel better; they just left me so dazed I couldn't get out the door, and so slept in, anyway.

So through the aches and pains I've reached a tacit understanding with my father about the living room television: he won't put it on the Screaming Vapid Idiots Passed Off As News Channel at roughly 8.3 on the Richter scale, and I won't stagger out of bed to change the channel to Turner Classic Movies, turn the volume down to ``well-maintained drinking fountain water stream'', and return to bed. For most of the day we settled on the Food network at normal conversational tones, and I heard about how Real Freedom was an Iraqi guy who came to the United States and now bakes. True liberty is, after all, expressed in apple turnovers.

Trivia: Gemini IV was the first NASA launch to have live international press coverage, with broadcasting to twelve European nations provided by the Early Bird satellite. Source: On The Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, Barton C Hacker, James M Grimwood. NASA SP-4203.

Currently Reading: The Right Hand of Dextra, David J Lake. It's a very 1970s DAW Paperback premise: humans settle, perhaps unwisely, on a planet where the compounds of life have the opposite chirality, and mutter about biology and the synthesized religion the First Fleet set up so women would be baby factories and they could outbreed the locals, and, oh, the native ecosystem is breeding right back at them.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

As I recall, the people who went to Dextra didn't have a lot of choice, since the Lunar colonies that had survived the nuclear destruction of the Earth either were about to or were in the process of exploring whether communities entirely dependent on artificial life support systems could fight a general war.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, the colonists once there had pretty much no choice but to stay and try breeding. But the colonization ship was sent out without any landing party actually setting foot on the planet and testing whether any of the native life was edible (or could eat us), which is the sort of criminal lack of preparation or colonization-fraud vast enough that if Larry Niven didn't use it in Known Space he should have.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

You haven't been able to get real Contac since about 1980 or so. It used to be scopalamine, hyoscine, and hyoscyamine - now it's just some sorry decongestant that doesn't work.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I used the time-release version in the 1990s and it worked OK for me, although I had to be careful not to consume caffeine with it. I haven't seen it in any form in ages, though.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The Contac web site, amusingly, insists they still exist despite one of those drug recalls in 2006 when, I don't know, it was discovered they accidentally used printer's ink as a key ingredient or something. They don't give any examples of where to buy it, other than that at good supermarkets and grocery stores, but at least someone's paying for domain name renewal.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Doesn't matter; nothing has ever really made my colds substantially different in feeling. I'd attribute that to my body mass being about twenty times the Ideal Human Figure that dosages are intended for, since they do seem to help non-bulky people like my mother.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Feel better soon, Austin.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I am getting better day by day.

[skylerbunny.livejournal.com]

Colds seem to have a bad habit of hitting you hard. I hope today finds you on the way out of this one.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't think they really hit me harder than they hit anyone. I just talk about them at greater length.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

They keep the good stuff behind the counter now. You have to show them your drivers license, fill out a form and sign it, and leave a DNA sample just to buy some. And you're limited to buying just enough for yourself for one cold, any more and the DEA breaks down your front door.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Eh, they can keep it. It's just a cold. It's an unbeatable reason to spend more time sleeping, which I need to do anyway.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

'Contac' on Wikipedia redirects to 'Pseudoephedrine', which I think is overbearing for redirects. Especially as according to the latest information, they replaced that ingredient with Pseudosomethingelse, and it's getting rather Psilly.

Apparently you can use Pseudoephedrine as an ingredient in Meth, which is why it's growing rather restricted.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That seems like it's overdoing the redirecting, given that Contac is not synonymous with pseudoephedrine.