You Don’t Have to Tell Me You’re on Drugs

Illustrated with part 4 of How Funky Is Your Chicken

Initial caveat here: there is nothing funny about methadone. I’ve a good friend whose son, Tyler, died of a drug overdose. At several times as part of his recovery he tried to take methadone, and his local clinic made it difficult. The fact that I can get a prescription and pick up several weeks’ worth of it at a time for pennies just by showing my ID to my pharmacist is something I do not take lightly. Tyler’s mom, Shana, wrote a powerful post about him and the pharmaceutical company responsible for his death for this blog, here.

Tracy and I have been in a serious stage of transition in every freaking aspect of our lives.

What we do during the day is different: We’re always working on the house now. How we interact with Banjo is different: I’m walking her some each day now, so she’s started looking to me as the alpha. What we do at night is different: We watch TV now instead of sitting outside playing games. What we listen to is different: There’s a local radio station we enjoy, so we’re listing to new music. How we go to the bathroom at night is different: I have to put my hands out to feel the walls so I don’t slide down the slanted floor. How we look is different: I gained ten pounds, then lost ten pounds. Some of my new clothes fit, some don’t. I cut off my hair. How we interact is different: Some days I don’t see Tracy until the afternoon, even though we’re both in the house. It’s strange, I tell you. 

Nothing has been more strange than my meds changes, and the change in my demeanor as a result. My restlessness has been severe ever since Thanksgiving, and while my new meds help, they also make me very sleepy. As in, if I don’t catch myself, I’ll fall asleep while I’m standing up. I slept for 11 hours yesterday. That’s half the danged day!

I’ve been tinkering with doses and timing trying to find a balance, and that means that, once, I had to double up on the methadone for about 12 hours so I could catch up to where I should be. Normally, I can’t really feel the methadone because its action on me is to counterbalance my restlessness. This time, I could feel it. It slowed down this hummingbird so I felt more like a heron. A heron on methadone.

That day I went with Tracy to buy groceries, which normally I also don’t do. Tracy likes to cook, and because, normally, we’re at a new grocery store every time we shop, that’s confusing enough, but add in that I get overwhelmed by trying to remember what prices are best for what products (which drives Tracy bonkers), so he just goes and I stay home. This means when I did go with him the other day, the grocery store was a foreign land to me.

Here are a few observations from that one hour in the grocery store.

Swicy! 

In the ramen aisle (there’s a ramen aisle now?) I saw a new word that’s the best word ever. Spicy + sweet = swicy! I, of course, had to say that word aloud over and over while I trailed behind Tracy. Swicy! I said it in as many accents as I could think of, trying to find the right one. Swicy!

So Much Tea 

All I wanted was chai, so Tracy sent me to the tea aisle alone. There are so many choices, just with chai! Extra spice roobius, so no caffeine. Well, that’s good! But, will it still taste like tea? Regular spice, extra spice. Is there a scary spice? Vanilla chia. Black chai. Man, this is deep. I wanted them all and wanted only one box. What a great metaphor for something. But, I need to shop!

That Lady Cooks Well

A lady in the veggies section wearing some kind of traditional dress for a religion I don’t know much about had a grocery cart so full of veggies that she either must have a huge family she cooks for, or all her family are vegetarians, or maybe she cooks for the church? Or maybe she cooks for neighbors? I really wanted to peer at her groceries and think about her life. What kinds of shoes does she wear? Where are her children? Why do I have only seconds in the veggie section?

That Guy Looks Pained

There was a very, very talk guy wearing a leg brace, pushing his cart by bending over and bending his arms out to the sides. He limped, and I wondered if he was in pain? Or if his limp was congenital? What did he have in his grocery cart? The woman with a cart walking slowly behind him: Did she need to buy something that he was blocking, or was she being polite? Or was she curious about his body like I was? How am I supposed to be choosing tea like this?

Tortilla Chips, WTF?

There’s only one brand of tortilla chips in Wisconsin grocery stores, but several aisles of frozen pizzas? I’ve heard Tracy talk about grocery store stock variations across the country, but come on. Finally, I found another brand of tortilla chips, but they weren’t anywhere near the first brand. How is a person supposed to pick out tortilla chips if the types are scattered throughout the store? Is this worse than the chai situation? Or is it better?

Greeting Cards Cost How Much?

I got lost in the greeting card aisle (surprise surprise), trying to pick out two bereavement cards. What a variety! I could buy a card just for someone who’d lost their mother. Or their dog. Funny ones, even. When, finally I had picked two, under the time pressure of knowing Tracy was waiting on me somewhere I looked on the back just to glance at the prices. Nine dollars a card? Really? Back to square one. Tracy might have given up on me and left the store, but I’m not spending $20 on greeting cards.

There’s an App for That?

There is so, so, so much food to choose from. When I found Tracy, that’s all I could report. So. Much. Food. Turns out, he has an app for various grocery store chains throughout the country. Each store provides an aisle map, plus a search feature.  Dude. And Tracy’s mind, how it works! He knows how much cilantro costs at like four different local stores, and that’s just one ingredient. How many numbers can he hold in his brain at once and pull out at will? Can he do calculations like that, too? Egads, his talents are not being used buying cilantro, I can see that, at least.

Perfect.

That’s the word of choice amount Wisconsinites when it coms to ending a transaction.

“That’ll be $162.67.”

Tracy swipes his card.

“Perfect.”

“Would you like help bagging?”

“No.”

“Perfect.”

People can even have an entire interchange using that one word. Imagine one person hands another a bag. The first person is saying, “Here’s what you asked for.” And the second person is saying, “Thanks, I have it now.” They differentiate the meaning of “perfect” with their accents.

“Perfeccct.”

”Perrrfect.”

Of course, I’m telling Tracy about all of these observations the entire time we’re buying groceries. At the end of the trip, as we’re walking out to the truck,

Me: “Did I mention I’m on a lot of drugs?”

Tracy: “You didn’t need to tell me.”

You can find previous installments of How Funky Is Your Chicken here, here, and in the post with a similar theme, called, The World Has Changed, Shelly.