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I’m Watching the News Tonight

Dylan Gilbert

    My Oxycodone pill is a wide white wafer, chalky and thick on the back of my tongue. There’s a fleeting fear that it’ll get lodged in my throat, like the penny I ate when I was three. But I push that thought away because I have to take it. You see, I’m watching the news tonight.
    I take a gulp of Bud and feel the Oxycodone pill rub against the inside of my throat as it glides toward my belly. Now I’m safe. I pick up the remote and aim it at the flat screen and there’s Wolf Blitzer, life-sized and earnest, telling me that Wisconsin has fallen. Decades of human progress obliterated. Unions are dead. And I think—always a mistake, but I do it anyway—how can we give 700 billion to outright crooks, like JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs, yet vilify teachers, firemen and even home health care workers who spend their days wiping other people’s asses and barely live above the poverty line? My heart pounds, my shoulders tighten and I begin to grind my elbows into the back of the sofa. So I pop another Oxy to calm myself, to get numb and stupid. Because if I tried to watch the news without my Oxy, I wouldn’t be watching it, I’d be on it.
    My Bud is finished, so I go to the fridge to get another, fearful the numbness isn’t hitting me quick enough. I shove my wife’s Amstel Lights aside and grab another Bud. I sit back on the couch, holding the cold can on my knee. Wolf’s talking about the meltdown at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. They’re pouring seawater on it and sending workers with families into it to try to make repairs. I start to get weepy and feel, so I chug half my beer because I need to stay numb to get through this hour. But I just don’t understand, can’t understand why the place that gets the most earthquakes on the planet, a little sliver of an island, would build 55 nuclear power plants. It defies all logic. And this is what really messes with my head: the Japanese are smart. You hear about they’re amazing schools, all their technological advances over the years. So if the smart people are building nuclear power plants in earthquake alley, what the fuck does that say about the chances for the rest of the world? I’m just some dude who did 19 credits at community college, full of beer and Oxycodone, and I see how suicidal it is. But that’s the purpose of the Oxy, and the Bud, the internet, World of Warcraft, the iPhone, trendy martinis, and big bags of Pringles—keep us occupied and stupid as cows. They say we only use 10% of our brains, but that’s 9% too much. Because if you really used your brain, thinking about this shit would make your head implode. I bring the Bud to my lips, tip my head back and chug like a college freshman at his first frat party. Don’t think, don’t think.
    Now Wolf’s talking about Gadhafi and Libya and the invasion. His voice is getting a little blurry, the crusty baritone starting to bend a bit, thank God. We’re bombing Libya. And we’re part of a coalition with lots of other countries, yet all the leaders are American and in a few months or a few years, it’ll just be America, always is. And our bitch, England. I kind of feel like I’m being rocked in the ocean, and there’s a softness between my temples. Thank you, Oxy, thank you.
    I watch Wolf, and realize I’m not even against this attack. I mean, of course I’m in favor of humanitarian efforts, but I just can’t quite understand how we’re in three wars during a time of peace, how every time I turn on the news we’re bombing another country full of dark skinned people—sending our poor and dark skinned to kill theirs. I try to think of all the countries we’ve invaded since I was born, but lose track after Grenada, the Oxy making my synapses misfire.
    I feel dreamy, watching Wolf’s lips move, his 2D figure wavy and father-like, the words caught in the wind, sometimes blowing into my thoughts, sometimes away. Incoherent, thank God. Finally, incoherent.



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