AM/PM
Friday, 7 April 2006AM/PM is the Californian answer to Albuquerque’s Circle K, and Northern New Mexico’s All Sups. (7/11 is a white trash wet dream category all its own). At 5:30 am I woke up with an exaggerated version of the splitting headache I had somehow gone to bed with. Thankfully I only remember a couple of the times I woke up between going to bed and 5:30 am, or I might’ve felt even more desperate than I did.
I called Sarah for some reason. I guess I was half hoping that she’d come home early and I could ask her to pick something up on the way, and maybe more just because she was the only person I could call and I was so miserable that I felt someone in the world should know about it. She of course wasn’t coming home from her night shift early so when I got back from All Sups I called her again with a slightly larger capacity for rational thinking at my disposal, this time to inform her that I would be knocking myself out with a Tylenol PM, and she ought to leave some indication of when I would be picking her son up before she left the house again.
Anyway, as for the package of PM pain killers, I immediately regretted purchasing it because the doses were designed for a full night’s rest, and I would only have a few hours before I had to get up and pick the boy up from a half day at school. This left me with a difficult decision — to invade my coming day with rubbery drowsiness, or cheat myself out of a little bit of the pain killing element of the substance, which was mostly why I had scraped my fucking windshield off (which had no fucking business being frosty, this many weeks into spring) in the first fucking place.
I took half a dose, one pill. It took too fucking long to kick in, granted, but did knock me out and when the alarm went off I had no head-ache, a minor case of the rubberies and was able to carry on as full a conversation about Zac’s school day as he can ever tolerate anyway.
Modern life makes 24 hour stores seem increasingly necessary. Now just imagine what kind of headache I might’ve been facing if I were working at a 24 hour store.
Ba Dum Bum.
The End.