My Life as an Undercover Normal Person

OK. when I said when I take hyper drugs (so I can be calm and focused, just like when I mainline *caffeine) I said the worst thing was that laughter was superfluous, then decided I’d make you wait till this chapter to explain why that’s such a screaming tragedy for me. Nice segue, huh? Here goes!

*Caffeine. Y’know, when I was little, I never knew what anyone meant when they said caffeine “makes them hyper”. I never heard of that word before. So after extensive research as a young child, drinking coffee and coke and jolt, I decided that “hyper” meant “calm and focused”. When I got older, and heard people say caffeine “made them hyper” I’d wonder why they needed it then! They are walking portraits of calm and focused! Gimme a break, I’m the one that needs that!! Now back to the rest of this chapter.

By nature, I’m happy and excited most of the time, doesn’t that sound fun? Can you imagine how excellent life is for me? Every second of every day I just scamper around, all day long, happy and excited, like a little bunny rabbit hopping around, not in any danger from predators or from sex that only lasts 4 seconds. By nature, I gravitate toward stuff that makes me laugh, cuz it’s SO fun to be happy!
All the sudden, I take a pill in the morning, and not only am I unable to eat cuz I’m not interested AND now all the food tastes yucky, but the world is weird, and dirtier than I realized! Oh my stars! I actually have cabinet doors that need to be scrubbed! There is right now as I write this, actual garbage laying in my yard. Garbage! Can you believe it?!? A torn up milk container, an empty grape juice box. That stuff used to be invisible to me! I’m serious! If it’s not hurting anyone, or crawling with maggots, who cares, why is it even important? I literally couldn’t even see any of that stuff when I was a happy and excited little bunny rabbit! Now that I’m a grown up mama rabbit on Concerta, the world just sucks! The food all tastes like a combination of cardboard and mud, it is shockingly, horrifically filthy, there is so much to do here, it’s freakin’ overwhelming, no wonder so many normal people have ulcers!

Normal people pills elevate the trivial to heights of unparalleled importance. To a normal person, keeping the yard scrupulously clean is far more significant and rewarding an endeavor than something frivolous, like laughing. Laughter is something normal people roll out on special occasions, maybe.
Laughter doesn’t even fit into the space of normal people world. Do normal people go to concerts and comedy clubs and read funny stuff? How and when do they have the time or desire? When I went undercover as a normal person, I learned that I was incapable of anything but being serious and grim all the time.

On the drugs that made me normal, I could no longer multitask well enough to preserve my life. That’s why texting while THEY drive kills THEM. I can program my GPS to find me a gas station while I’m driving 75 miles an hour on an interstate about to change lanes to get in front of a semi in the pouring rain. Now see that? A normal person would read that and not only would they fail to see the humor in it, they’d actually be horrified by the danger and the possible illegality of such a thing.

They’re probably rooting through their phone book right now, looking up the non emergency number for their city’s police department so they can report me. MAKE SURE YOU SPELL MY FAKE NAME RIGHT TO THE PIG THAT ANSWERS THE PHONE, YOU UPTIGHT NORMAL PERSON! I WAS ON I- 294 HEADING TOWARD THE SUBURBS, SO YOU MIGHT AS WELL CALL THE COPS IN THE STATE OF ILLINOIS TOO, SO THEY CAN BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR ME! I DRIVE A 2007 SILVER TOYOTA COROLLA WITH INVISIBLE MUD THAT I’M NEVER GOING TO WASH OFF SMEARED ON ONE OF THE DOORS…I THINK THE DRIVER DOOR!

Shoot, that’s no fun. I forgot all of the normal people hate me for my anti college bias and they stopped reading early on. Ok, back to whatever I was talking about. Hate when that happens, gotta reread all this and see what my next logical topic for the next paragraph is going to be, for the benefit of all you ‘mentally ill’ people reading this that are not quite as hyper as me so it flows in a semi logical order. Yeah, that’s how I like to read stuff too, but I’m telling you; it is overwhelming getting the stuff I write into a sequence like that.

I wish I could leave this lengthy word maze I lovingly constructed to some normal editor to fish through and put in an order a normal person likes; that’s a skill I have to work too hard at to wanna mess with. There are far more interesting things going on in my head than moving paragraphs around! I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that has a computer!

You know what I’m gonna buy if I ever make money selling what I write? I’m gonna buy me a normal person who is going to sit down with my rough draft and make it all go from one logical step to the next. Huh, guess I’m gonna hafta take out all the anti college stuff first, so they don’t get revenge sabotaging me inserting mean stuff in my masterpieces, like extra prepositions and semi colons I won’t even see and other sneaky things like that.

You see what I mean? I’m supposed to be writing about my life as an undercover normal person, and here I am, rambling on about whatever pops into my head. S’fun being a hopping little bunny rabbit!

OK, gotta write more words to make this thing long enough. What else did I learn during my time in the trenches?

Y’know what I thought the first time I took Concerta? (I’ll skip the sappy, weepy part when I was driving along a country road and I just started crying cuz I finally got experience an excellent, normal people life and wasn’t cynical enough to be shocked by how grubby and yucky things actually are here. That must have been a shopping day when that happened. When I first started doing Concerta it took quite a while for me to go right to my car in the parking lot and not sob gratefully; astonished that such a thing is even possible.) Ok, so after all that crying, chick stuff. (statistically, more guys than girls are as off the chart hyper as I am, so that makes me twice as awesome, in case you were keeping score!)
Dang it, forgot what I was gonna tell you about. Oh well, time for a short story!!
When I first took Concerta, I thought either I was SO hyper it just didn’t work for me, or that I was too old and my brain was so dug in the rut of not fitting into this normal people universe.

The reason I knee jerk concluded I was too far gone for drugs to be any help was cuz one day on drugs I was doing stuff like I’d do on a normal day without drugs. I was breaking up a fight between my kids while I dug through the shoe bucket we keep cuz 6 kids, they outgrow stuff fast and we save it for the next kid in line, cuz one kid needed “new” shoes while I was directing a stream of traffic of my other kids to put junk in the car cuz we had to go to Menard’s and return some PVC and my mom’s to give her back some thing I can’t remember what and the library to return some books, and food cuz someone in church just had a baby and they wanted some of Dolly’s special delicate inedibles though I can’t cook to save my life and the dog was barking cuz one of the kids was knocking on the table making him nuts and just then the phone rang and it was my mom and she was all like, (she’s more hyper than me, if you can believe that!) “when are you coming? What are you doing? What’s taking you so long? Are you bringing back my thing? What time will you be here?” And I was soooooooooo…

Man I can’t even tell ya.

When I’m not on drugs, I can do all that fine! But suddenly on drugs, I though my head was going to explode. No. that’s a cliché. I’ll try harder. I mean “frustrated” isn’t even a strong enough word. It was intensely, rippingly, grippingly beyond brain squeezingly homicidally pissed off aggravating; nah, that’s not strong enough either. I dunno. You know how it is if you’re focused on something, almost done, then someone comes along and throws a rabid skunk eating an onion on your project and blows a fan on you both just to see what you’d do? Yeah…it was kinda like that.

I just couldn’t take it, I shoved the phone at one of my kids, pushing him out the door with it and growled at him through gritted teeth “Talk to your grandma; answer every single question for her with out consulting me, then hang up and if anyone else calls I’m not here!” And then I had to start practicing this detestable new skill called, “only doing one thing at a time”

HEY, NORMAL PEOPLE! HOW IS YOUR SYSTEM SUPERIOR TO MINE?!?! Yeah, and I’m the crazy one…

All that stress for nothing! It turned out my doctor is one of those “experts” afraid I’ll get “addicted” cuz all the sudden in the middle of my life I show up with my hand out wanting stimulants. So he didn’t prescribe me a therapeutic level, but a cautious one instead. But don’t worry! I did my own experimentation and found out the dose I need.
Heh, heh, heh….