Twelve years ago I was on a prescribed drug that caused me to veer, in hard to foresee ways, toward street curbs while walking.  Forgetting to blink was another symptom.  A friend brought up Alex, the criminal played by Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.  During his rehabilitation into a straight law-abiding member of society, behavioral scientists make him watch reel after reel of violent images, coupled with relentless nauseating treatments so that he can't think of violence or commit a violent act without becoming ill.  During the movie shows, a man in a white lab coat administers eye drops to Alex, whose eyelids are pried open during the procedure.
     I would stop myself before stepping onto the street.  The mechanical survival instinct switched on to stop the drug-induced mechanical push to make my feet, accustomed to the sidewalk, want to avoid the other concrete of the street.  This locomotion made no sense to me at the time, and still doesn't.  That a legal drug would have such a potentially dangerous side effect only reinforces my view that our society, allowing such a drug's use, practices irresponsibility with the regularity of clockwork.
     Listen to TV advertisements for prescription drugs, ranging from mental health treatments to Baby Boomer cock problems:
     "Side effects may include nausea, pain in the uterus, heart palpitations, suicidal thoughts, depression, abdominal pains, angst, ulcers, blackouts, racing thoughts, laziness, flatulence, death..."
     While narrators of these ads list these indignities to the human spirit, images continue to show the couple at the baseball game, smiling at each other, presumably preparing for a fuck, or a woman with bipolar disorder looking serenely at wildflowers.  Sound in severe contrast to image. 
     Considering the degree to which legal drugs produced by the gargantuan pharmaceutical industry affect us, it's fair to claim that that profit machine controls a piece of most Americans' daily lives.  I have five prescriptions.  Due to my insurance plan, I get the drugs without financial hurt, but only twenty-two years ago I had no prescriptions.  I aged, various conditions needed addressing with pharmaceuticals--I don't resent swallowing these legal drugs.  I do, however, think sometimes about my need.  Wherever I go I need to be connected to a continuous supply.  A global catastrophe, presuming I survive it, will find me spending much of my time searching for my drugs, like a vampire requiring the nightly red fix.  Other survivors would do the same, although Viagra may, in the event of an apocalypse, be recognized for what it is: a drug of secondary or tertiary importance.
     I'm stuck, though, like humanity, in a cocoon of drugs.  President George Bush, (1989-1993)--we never called him George H.W. Bush because we didn't know about the H.W. and we didn't know he had a son named George--took Halcion during his administration.  An anti-insomnia drug, it no doubt helped Poppy sleep between long hours of plotting the destruction of dictators he used to do business with. 
     Fast walking, over-medicated, veering to the curb.  Why did I do it?  Was I in charge of my body?  Was Merck, or Eli Lilly, or some vast factory in the mountains of Switzerland moving me around, zigzagging me that summer?  A god eating drug profits like the Old Testament Moloch, an idol with a furnace inside, devouring children like chicken tenders?
     Now I blink, I can stay on the sidewalk.  This orange wears the clock and isn't run by it.

                                                                       Vic Neptune