Death By Cholesterol (which is not a bad name for a band, when you think about it...)

Someone in rock’n’roll should write a song about cholesterol. It sounds boring as fuck—trust me, I realize that. But why not? It’s killing people all over the country, all over the world even (although nowhere nearly as much as the United States, home of such fabulous delicacies as the “Cow On A Bun” cheeseburger at Royal Burger or whatever). Rockers LOVE to write about shit that kills people—war, disease, all that good stuff, but dope and/or alcohol seems to be the real favorite. Everybody from the Velvet Underground to Neil Young has written songs about heroin, or songs about legends like Bon Scott and Hank Williams that drank themselves to death—actually, I’m not even sure you ARE a legend in rock or country music until your death certificate says “choked on vomit due to extreme alcohol intoxication” on it, seeing as how it also killed, or played a part in the deaths of, Jimi and Janis and Zep’s Bonzo and the Dead’s Pigpen and the Lizard King and Christ knows who all else. Metallica covered coke addiction with “Master of Puppets,” as did Sabbath with “Snowblind”. The Stones have written brilliantly about every drug known in this quadrant of the universe I think, including some that are probably only known to Keith Richards (Keith’s smart, he knows that if nobody else knows about it then he gets it all to himself). So why NOT cholesterol? I suppose the words “chicken leg” don’t look nearly as cool in a song title as the word “needle” does, as in Young’s bleak classic “The Needle and the Damage Done” but still…

It just made me ponder, that’s all…Long story short, I finally get an EEG tomorrow, which my dildo slope doctor has been telling me for MONTHS hadn’t been approved by the county yet and promising he’d check into what was taking so long. However, when I saw him last Monday he told me that it had been approved since SEPTEMBER—in fact, the little Khmer Rouge prick actually asked me why it hadn’t been done yet. It about took all the restraint I could muster to NOT whip out my pocket knife and start practicing my tracheotomy skills on the asshole. If the EEG comes back negative, which it PROBABLY will—the first AND last one I had, about 8 years ago, was—then I get to choose whether or not I want to try stopping my Tegretol. I say “choose” because, clean EEG or not, there’s always a chance that I could have seizures anyway. If I chose not to risk it, I could just keep on taking the fucking things for the rest of my life, it’s not like they’re going to kill me. But they DO have side effects (like inability to concentrate and falling asleep in the middle of taking a piss and other fun things), and I would hope that they would disappear after a while off the shit. Not to mention 4 less pills a day I have to swallow.

But it still leaves me with 4 OTHER prescriptions to fill every month, and EVERY FUCKING ONE OF THEM is related to diet, really. And that shit sucks. I could get off of one or maybe two of them pretty easily, I suspect: there’s Altace (I ain’t even sure what the fuck it does, all I know is they call it an “ace inhibitor” or “a.c.e. inhibitor” or what the fuck ever), then there’s Adalat, the only one that they said is DIRECTLY meant to lower blood pressure, and it wasn’t too high anyway—ONE number was 5 too high or something, meaning like 130 over 90 was acceptable, if borderline, but I was 135 over 90 or some bullshit (taking all these pills, it’s consistently like 120 over 80 or 85 now, excellent according to Dr. Pol Pot). There’s Lipitor for cholesterol, and starting last week I’ve got Niaspan as well, which is to help block digestion or absorption of fat from your food (or something). And that last one SUCKS, too: the pharmacists I got it from said that a common side effect was a prickly, tingly feeling on the skin and that was all he mentioned. But when my mom learned that I was taking it she said, “Oh, I take that too, my pharmacists said that it could cause prickly skin and flushing (or hot flashes) and if you took an aspirin with it (you’re supposed to take this prescription at bedtime) and ate a low- or no-fat snack with it that would help. And don’t eat anything fatty for a couple of hours before bed.” The first couple of nights I didn’t really bother listening to her, because the pharmacist I talked to is actually a pretty good guy, seems to know his shit and whatnot, and since he didn’t mention either of those things I wasn’t too concerned about it. However, on the second night I woke up about 90 minutes after taking it and felt like I was on fucking fire, as if you could light a cigarette off my bare skin the same way you would off a car cigarette lighter. And just as bad was the prickly, tingly shit—it felt like somebody had taken the world’s most powerful alarm clock, one of those old-timey wind-up bastards with the bells on top you see in TOM AND JERRY cartoons, and shoved it up my ass just as it was going off. Fortunately, it didn’t last too long, maybe 30 minutes, before it died down enough to let me get back to sleep. I’ve been following her pharmacists advice every night since and had no repeat problems, however.

I suspect I could alter the diet a bit, could DEFINITELY stand to exercise (a work-out partner, or personal trainer, would help me IMMENSELY with this one), but I don’t know what else I can do. The unavoidable fact of the matter is, I have a shitty, bordering on unfit-for-human-life kind of diet, and I CAN’T REALLY HELP IT. I HATE 99% of what’s healthy for you, food-wise, and it’s not like I CHOSE to be this way. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to call myself a vegetarian, which surprises me to no end since I find most vegetarians to be unbearable, self-righteous, communist-sympathizing, Satan worshipping pricks (and those are their good qualities, too—don’t get me started on what really makes them insufferable assholes). But basically ALL vegetables are totally unpalatable to me. I like corn fine, particularly on the cob, with a thick juicy steak and garlic bread and all that stuff. But every other vegetable that springs to mind, to me, tastes like dog shit rolled in cat shit and garnished with bird shit. Lettuce, onions, etc…yecch. And the weirdest thing is, everybody tells me that I couldn’t get enough of that shit when I was a baby. My folks tell me that I used to inhale peas like Corey Haim used to inhale OxyContin, to cite just one example. No more; if it ain’t meat and potatoes then I ain’t interested.

And people think you’re just a big, spoiled baby for it, too. You hear shit like, “Boy, I wish I could live on pizza and cheeseburgers and Taco Bell like you do.” But trust me, it ain’t that great—no matter how great something is or how delicious it may be, if you eat it often enough you will get bored sick with it. If you ate lobster for dinner every day starting on Monday, by Friday you’d rather see every fucking lobster on Earth wiped out then eat it again that night.

But who knows? Like I said, I think I could change my diet enough to, at the very least, get off the Niaspan fairly easily. And I guess I’ll just have to work on the other prescriptions after that. If I could get off even 30 pounds (doc would rather I lost 50 to 70) I could probably get off the Adalat, too.

All I can do is try, I suppose…