It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

I usually get my best writing ideas in the morning. Because doctors made me part with my thyroid last summer, I have to take medicine to do the work of my furloughed friend. I like to think of his absence as a furlough, though the physicians and I both know that my thyroid is never coming back. He's not like that cartoon heart in the old Prevacid commercials, checking out of the Heartburn Hotel with a tiny suitcase, his ascending and descending aortas flapping in the wind.

Some people with perfectly-working thyroids try to wangle the medication from their doctors for weight-loss purposes. I don't know if that works in reality, but in theory, the medicine would speed up a person's metabolism. All I know it that if I forget to take it each morning, I have to drag myself through the day. It has only happened one time. You wouldn't think it would be so instantaneous, since the levels of that stuff take months to build up or deplete, according to my blood test results.

But I am not here to host a medical symposium on the aftereffects of a thyroidectomy. I am here to give away too much personal health information, and to entertain anybody who drops in. As well as to use prepositions to end sentences with.

My roundabout point is that I take this medicine upon arising, and have to wait an hour before partaking of nourishment. That little pill is like a shot of espresso, I imagine, though I've never sampled the strong brew. Once a topic enters my noggin, thoughts about what to write hurtle rapid-fire through my brain. I'm like the character Henry Steele in the old movie One on One, written by Robby Benson and his dad, Jerry Segal. Sweet, sweet Robby Benson, in his 1977-style little yellow workout shorts, taking a pill proffered by his roommate, Tom, to make him "play better" at practice. Which results in a frenzied one-man-show of naive country-boy attempts at performing Harlem Globetrotter moves.

Note to Self: If you ever go to college on a full-ride basketball scholarship, and discover all the other players are bigger and more talented, and the coach tries to make you give up your scholarship by forcing you to play one-on-one against the meanest dude on the football team, who's at basketball practice for one day only, don't take a pill proffered by your roommate, Tom.

See? I'm actually providing a public service announcement for the proper ingestion of prescription medication.

Disclaimer: I said I get my best ideas in the morning. I didn't say they all pan out by afternoon.