My daughter just got hammered by the flu. 102 temp, projectile vomit—poor kid was a hot boiled mess. A few things cross your mind when you see your little kitten wrestling the toilet-bowl like a truck-driver:
1. Poor little angel.
2. Jesus, I don’t want the flu.
The flu is bad. If you haven’t been bitch-slapped by it lately, pick up a six-pack, check it out. Reminds you why old people die from it. A cold is a bunch of unruly little germs having Spring Break in your system.
The Flu is Hitler.
Colds are impersonal, they’re frisky teenagers copping a feel with some of your white blood cells. The flu knows you by name, and wants you dead. And it will slowly raise your temperature until you lay in bed curled into fetal submission weeping like a special needs student who lost his juice-box.
My wife and I woke up the next morning and tore through the medicine cabinet. Funny how with a cold, I’m Mr. Natural. Sore throat? Sniffles? Here, try the latest organic, naturopathic remedy I just picked up—an herbal-psychic potpourri of Echinacea, Golden Seal, the imprint of Baby Jesus’ tiny handprint and the rainbow-aura of magic dolphins. Um, yummy. Taste the love.
But man, you say ‘flu’ and I break out the big guns. I’ll buy shit off the pharmacy shelves that guarantees pancreatic cancer in 4 out of 5 users, has no FDA approval, has clinically killed half of its trial-patients and carries a Govt warning label with a picture of a man’s head exploding after taking.
But if it says it’ll ward off the onset of flu, I’ll push you into traffic to get my box of it faster than you can say placebo. So as my wife and I sort through half-bottles of fairy-potions I’ve amassed over the years, we find a box of Zicam tablets.
“Oh…”, Ann says—like she just found my porn stash and doesn’t know how to broach the topic. “I forgot we had these…well, they’re pretty strong…”. That’s about the last thing I remember her saying before I awoke in a Latvian clinic with my spleen missing. More on that later.
Before she can stop me, and she tried, I popped a Zicam tablet in my mouth and started chewing. Chewing hard, to show my level of commitment. Chewing like my life depended on it, visions of little Nazi-uniformed flu cells raping my immune system.
And then, I stopped chewing. Because I was both crying, and gagging. ‘Cause what Zicam’s label doesn’t say is “Warning: Product Tastes Like Ass”. Point of clarification, I don’t mean ass in the college-kid, drunk, naughty way, like “check out that chick’s ass”. I mean ass, as in the working end of the noun.
Have I ever eaten ass? No, and I’ve never been poked in the eye with a sharp stick either, but I get the idea. I’m sufficiently knowledgeable with the general theory—sharp stick; hard, spear-like, capable of inflicting damage. Eye: soft-tissue, vulnerable, protect at all costs.
And to my latest vocab entry—Zicam. As in, it tastes like a full-blown, uncooked and pungent hunk of ass-meat. In your mouth. And though it’s a gum, its not really gum. It’s a weird alien hybrid. It starts like gum, kinda chewy and soft.
That’s just a ploy so you keep chewing. Cause you’re tasting butt, except the gum consistency makes you think “Gum can’t taste like rear-end, I’ll keep chewing…”. And then the tablet kind of breaks apart into fragmented mini-chunks of butt, each small chunk as fully potent as the whole.
Like those monsters, you cut their hand off, but the hand stays alive, separate from the body, right? Zicam’s the same. The tablet’s just a delivery system of sorts. The total assification of the tablet occurs upon breakage. Each fragment blooms into an orchestra-rich flavor symphony of sweaty ass-crack. And even if you gag, it doesn’t matter.
Zicam’s flavor-chunks kind of leech butt-flavor as you chew, coating your tongue and throat, and teeth and so-god-help-me, your life really, with ass. And then, like a drunken college grope-fest, it’s over as soon as it began. The tablets gone, broken up, dissolved and swallowed.
I’m standing there, kind of teary. I feel violated, like, I just woke up in someone else’s dorm room and can’t find my panties. I’m blinking, trying to find true North on my life-compass. My wife says “Chew one every four hours…”.
The last part echoes in my head like I’m on a ‘shroom trip “every…..four….hours….”. Now I’m feeling kind of nauseous. I have a stomach full of the flu Anti-Christ. My body feels really light and airy, like I’m lint just kind of floating around in space. I’m having an out-of-body experience. I’m Zicaming. My wife is really, really tiny now, because I’m floating at Space Shuttle altitudes.
Entire cities are like Lego-block projects below me, cars and people the size of a comma ending the sentence in which they live. And there, yes there—I can see little laboratories, and teeny-weeny little scientists in pristine white lab coats making Zicam.
They’re making billions of little Zicam tablets, and…and they’re laughing. The tiny scientists so far below me are, laughing. Because they’ve managed, after decades of frustration to finally get the upper hand on the flu virus?
No, they’re laughing because after years of frustration, they’ve finally managed to market a product that tastes like ass.
Does Zicam work?
Yes, it does.
Does it taste like ass?
You be the judge. Next time you feel the telltale signs of some plague-like virus slowly goose-stepping over your immune system, pick up some Zicam. Now, in all fairness you should know Zicam also makes a nasal swab.
And you wonder, ‘hmmm, nasal swab? Well, if the tablet tastes like colon, does the swab smell like butt-gutter, too?”.
I’ve tried the nasal swab too.
But I’m not telling.
I’m floating high above it all, and like my little scientist pals—I’m laughing.
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