Strawberry Pills Forever
by Jim Pickett
Everyone these days is being
asked to think outside the box. Ya know, come up with new
and fresh ways of looking at the same ‘ole thing, see
things from a non-traditional perspective, be creative, inventive.
So I thought, why not me?
I can do that.
And so I’ve a few new
millennium suggestions for the Research and Development arms
of the world’s big drug companies, like, both of them,
or whatever the total is now. I’m aware that R&D
doesn’t get the big funds that Public Relations and Marketing
enjoys, but I feel confident that these ideas, if well-funded
and nurtured along with tender loving care, will make another
trillion, minimum, because they’ll be meeting the needs
and desires of consumers on the front line like me.
I’ll begin with an idea
involving the emotions, and work my way through the five senses
as a means of exploring this issue in a thorough, systematic,
yet imaginative way.
Check this out–“protexan”–pronounced
“pro-tuh-zan.” What is it? It’s my plan for
a new combination drug, a protease inhibitor fused with Xanax.
This new drug will make you feel blissed out, a little loopy
maybe, kinda toasty and giggly, and you won’t really
care that your kidneys are failing, or that you can’t
see your shoes anymore from that paunch. Hey, it’s just
more of you to love! And because you will quickly become addicted
to this innovative new super drug, your 100% perfect compliance
will leave your doctors gasping, the marketing guys creaming,
and the bottom line growing. Everyone wins.
Sight. We like to see beauty,
we don’t like to see ugly, right? According to Vogue,
“beauty is in,” so let’s work on the color
palette here, shall we? My current (dis)array of pharmaceuticals
range from a sterile white, very Helmut Lang on a bad day,
to a rather repulsive shade of beige, a horrific sort of bland.
Let’s make them pretty! Let’s infuse character and
style and life, let’s do like fashion does and create
“color stories” to go along with our HAART. For
those days when I’m feeling nautical, I’ll don a
sailor suit and I’ll pop the pills in seafoam and salt
grey. When I’m feeling bold and confident, I’ll
break out the shoulder pads and have my orbs in fire engine
red, which, by the way, is the new black, and when “tease”
and “tarty” are my watchwords, I’ll throw down
my prescription in sheer, not quite transparent, but almost.
Naughty! Designers interpret the same outfits in different
shades, you can get a toaster in any color you want, why can’t
Glaxo give me Agenerase in paisley? I have so much that would
go perfectly with, and for those of us who are more style-challenged,
we can have a Martha Stewart-style creature do a hit show
educating us all on how to mix and match our meds for a truly
lovely presentation.
Sound. We associate special
times in our lives with songs. Whenever I hear Cher’s
“Half Breed,” I think of the six-year-old me doing
that very number dressed in one of my mother’s slips,
a long towel or blanket wrapped around my head for Cher hair,
lying vampishly atop my dresser and expertly lip syncing “...the
white man always called me Indian squaw...” as my brother
Kevin gamely sat in front of a half-opened drawer and pretended
to be Sonny playing the piano, bless his heart. Let’s
transfer that warm fuzzy to our pill bottles. They could be
programmed somehow (let someone else figure that out) to play
our favorite song when we open the cap. It could be “Half
Breed,” Al Green’s “Love and Happiness,”
“God Bless America,” the Kate Smith version, “Muskrat
Love,” or an instant classic from that scrappy little
pop vixen Britney Spears. And it could be changed ad nauseum,
just like your answering machine message. Ker-ching! Ker-ching!
I think we got a hit on our hands here. Hear! Hear!
Taste and Smell. I don’t
know about you, but my pills stink and they taste bad, like
sewer chemicals. They stink going in and they stink coming
out, and not just in the poopy way, but also in our sweat
and on our breath, as I was horrified to discover when my
boyfriend mentioned he can smell it on my skin, and he can
taste my triple combo when we make out. He says he doesn’t
mind, but how nice would it be if he could smell and taste
something scrumpdiddlyicious, like a double whopper or a pan
pizza, or something minty and refreshing, or even Listeriney
would be okay. There are several ways to go about this one.
The drugs could be bonded with a Tic Tac sorta deal, so they’d
taste wintergreen both going down and when you’re breathing
heavy. Or they could come with nostalgia tastes/smells, like
raw onions atop a grilled burger on a lazy summer afternoon,
or warm Tollhouse cookies. Or they could smell like CK1 or
some sporty fragrance–don’t know how they’d
correspondingly taste, but it could be worked out. The mind
reels with the possibilities. Clean! Fresh! Sexy! Delicious!
Mouth watering!
Touch. The importance of this
sense cannot be underestimated. Again, things either feel
good to us, or they feel bad. I don’t particularly care
for how my horse pills feel, their waxy, gelatinous texture
is high on the ick factor in my palm, going down, and I really
don’t like how they make me feel on the inside either.
Now this recommendation is what they call “really out
of the box,” but I hope you stay with me, as I hope the
R&D goons do as well, because this has the potential to
be real big. I was supping on falafel with another heavily
treated visionary recently when we stumbled upon an inspiration
for a new delivery method for our mounds of meds. Why, we
thought, don’t we take all our pills for the day and
have them formulated into a sort of dildo/suppository kinda
deal. We’d simply insert the dosed dildo in the morning
and the drugs would be time-released throughout the day. Hello!
Please sir, may I have another? Of course, we realized that
we are “versatile” gay men, and our good feelings
may not, in fact, be everyone’s good feelings, but hey,
straight men have prostates too, umkay? Right? Learn to love
them! The gals, who don’t have a prostate, can have nice
times with their booties too I’m sure, so why not? And
just maybe since the drugs won’t be absorbed in the stomach
anymore, we’ll have no more tum tum troubles. Who can
complain?
I don’t know, but I hazard
to predict a lot of happy faces and record-breaking compliance
with this innovation. And with the others of course. Now it’s
time to advance to go and start working on the execution of
these proposals. As a matter of fact, I just happen to be
sitting on a prototype this very moment. That’s me, smiling
all the way to the patent office.
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