Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

I’m ill. I don’t mean sniffles ill, I mean fluid-pouring-out-of-most-available-orifices-from-nose-to-horribly-infected-toe ill. Hurts-to-keep-eyes-open ill. Only-thing-preventing-me-from-suicide-is-Playstation-and-an-as-yet-unwatched-season-of-Scrubs ill.

I also just realized that I have not spoken a single word to anyone, including myself, today. I find this oddly reassuring, but I won’t let it distract me from what I intended to ask by writing this post: why why oh fucking why do they not have NyQuil in this miserable sandbox?

Self-medication is a miserable exercise in futility in Israel. The drugs available to consumers without a prescription are as follows:

a) 12 different yet absolutely identical pain relievers/fever reducers ending with “-mol.”
b) Nasal spray so powerful that if you use it for more than three days, your sinuses will melt like a Nazi opening the Ark of the Covenant.
c) Brightly-colored children’s version of above.
d) Ibuprofen (thank God).
e) Flavored lozenges - the glories of capitalism mean that the consumer now has the choice of lemon or cherry.

That’s about it. Anything else, you need a prescription for, or they keep it locked up behind the counter and you have to actually ask the pharmacist for it. That’s right, if let’s say you’ve made a dietary error and your stomach is in open revolt, you can’t discreetly purchase an on-the-shelf bottle of Pepto-Bismol, you have to request the ineffective Israeli tablet-form equivalent (Kalbeten, in case you needed to know) from a pharmacist who is either a barely Hebrew-speaking recent Russian immigrant named “Ludmilla” (Ludmilla was probably chief of radiology back in the Old Country) or a doddering, hard-of-hearing old man given the job by social services - either way, you’ll have to repeat what you need clearly, slowly and loudly enough that everyone jostling you in the line behind you will know exactly why it is you’re pale as a latex glove and doing the bathroom dance.

So the upshot is, when you’re desperately ill and all you want is the sweet release of the drug-induced, mildly hallucinatory sleep that only NyQuil can provide, you’re shit out of luck. Because they don’t have NyQuil here, unless Ludmilla is hoarding it behind the counter for when the sheer indignity of it all just demands a cathartic DXM trip. They don’t have anything effective here, except for that uranium-powered nasal spray. So the only recourse is to improvise, given the limited materials at hand, something that approximates the effect of everyone’s favorite gag-inducing green syrup. Thus, take:

a) Ibuprofen
b) Chernobyl nasal spray
c) Lemon-flavored throat lozenges
e) Liquor

Mix together, and hope you don’t pull a Hendrix during the night, however sweet a release that may seem.

And now for the song of the evening, a selection made ever so appropriate by, yes, lyrics that perfectly describe what I’m feeling right now in my life: “Why why why why why why why? Why why why why why why why why why why?”

Scientist - Gunman