Roadside Dialysis

Frothy

Today [I wrote this yesterday] has been a rough day. First I wake up with sickness. No biggie, I’ve been sick before and will likely be sick again. What sucked about being sick was the fact that I tried to take a Vitamin C tablet while driving down the old Steele Gap Road. This road, you see, is the kind of road whose name could only be done justice by an old rural man (women need not apply) wearing vaguely fisherman’s attire and sounding vaguely worried and suspicious, as in the following:

COMMUTER: I’ll be taking the old Steele Gap road to work today, even though it’s very icy and snowy out there and I have to pop a Vitamin C table in my mouth while I’m hugging its curves.

RURAL FISH-MAN: Not Steele Gap Road!

COMMUTER: Yeah.

Well, I guess I could have waited until I was on the more conservative and not nearly as mythic Foothill Rd., but I didn’t really think there would be any problem with unscrewing the cap with a skilled right set of fingers and placing one on my tongue. The only barrier, it turned out, between me and a flawless gesture in the direction of my good health is a little thing I like to call effervescence. That’s right. My mouth started fizzing and frothing like no tomorrow and the taste, my god the taste. Frightened, I swallowed it all down, then remembered what happened to sea gulls on these very sorts of occasions. And though in the smart part of my brain I was pretty sure my stomach wouldn’t blow up, I reached around frantically for something to dilute the billowing and expanding gas bubbles in my stomach, but when I took a sip of the water bottle on the passenger’s seat, it was frozen solid. But then there was this other water under the seat that was fine because there was a lot more of it, and so I averted the greatest exploding-stomach related crisis that’s ever been thrown my way. And all on STEELE…GAP…ROAD! I know. Take a minute.

The thing I don’t understand about effervescent Vitamin C tablets is that, Isn’t the whole point of Vitamin C tablets to save the time and energy it would have taken to pour yourself a glass of orange juice? And isn’t it more of a pain in the ass to take the necessary steps to make this bubbly drink possible? Especially if you haven’t taken the necessary steps at all and instead pop one in your mouth on the old Steele Gap Road? I’m pretty sure I’ve been told often that you can only have so much of the vitamin, that after a certain point, a point OJ bravely meets and exceeds, it just gets flushed out of your system. So there’s no point in opting for the Alka Seltzer method just because it has 1,666% of your RDwhatever of Vitamin C (that really is how much it has, I checked on the bottle. You know there’s some rockin’ high school kid whose summer job it was to put a certain amount of C into the tablets).

The reason I’m sick is because Jesus still hates me and keeps putting snow on the ground. The last snowfall was yesterday, enough for a snow day at the school where I work. I keep thinking about why I’m being tested, what I could possibly have yet to learn. I already discovered weeks ago that walking through a fresh blanket of snow in the sunlight makes you feel uncannily like a cigarette butt in a gigantic restaurant ashtray, the kind with that sparkly sand. What more is there left to understand!? And the question on everyone’s mind is, What about St. Patrick’s Day? Will the parade just be cancelled if it continues this way? I think if the festivities do get cancelled, they should call it the Great Par-tay (No) Blight.