Americans offer Medicine at cheap, cheap prices

August 24th 2009

I woke up this morning feeling more ill then I could have possibly imagined the night before. As a non-drinker this was probably the closest thing to the “God-of-all-hangovers” I was ever going to experience. If it weren’t for the fact that I was sleeping on someone else’s couch, I would most definitely have stayed there and felt sorry for myself. But alas, no one else was feeling sorry for me. The first thing I did was look in the mirror shining a small torch down my open gob so I could stare at all the flem and gunk that had appeared to start collecting there. I then spent the next half hour trying to rid my mouth of it.

As I was swept out of the apartment I knew the day was gonna be difficult, and my newfound pessimism was not let down. Most of the morning I spent floating around doing my best to follow Keiran (the Aussie) and Jamie. Eventually it got down to the point where Keiran turned to me, noticed my cold sweat and wide open pupils and stated “you look like S*@%” and had Jamie take me to a pharmacy so I could by something to bring me back to the world of the living. Whatever it was I took it seemed to work-ish. I kind of remember looking down upon ground zero, sitting on “Wonder Wheel” at Coney island, and rocking “la Grange” on a guitar hero arcade game. Most of this though has been blurred together by my memory. It starts to become clearer on the ferry we took to Staten Island, so that we could get a good view of lady liberty. I remember us getting on the ferry without paying and feeling like complete bandits for breaking the law. It took us a half hour after getting off the other side to realise that the ferry was probably free.

Then of course there is the beloved subway system that I took to retrieve my Greyhound discovery pass. What should have been a ten-minute trip was horrifically morphed into an hour-long adventure from station to station, getting different coordinates of my destination from different help desks. It was a homeless guy that sent me in the right direction in the end. By the time I had my stuff sorted out and returned to the apartment to pick up my bags, that Jamie had decided I might as well stay another night. I wasn’t about to disappoint.

By the way I felt much better by the end of the day, turns out that what I feared to be a severe case of swine flu, was simply a severe case of man flu.