How much easier it must have been to focus one hundred years ago.

It’s been forty minutes since my last sentence.

The problem isn’t, as so many in the medical and pharmaceutical fields have put forth, a condition called ADD(D) (Adam Doesn’t Do) (Diddly)). The problem plaguing our world today is a much more sinister disorder that has been provisionally labeled (pending Pfizer’s approval of the AMA-suggested designation – you can’t just call diseases and disorders any old thing, you know, you’ve got to have something to work with, something catchy and marketable, a hook, like “Restless Leg Syndrome.” If you leave it to the doctors they’ll come up with some foul and incomprehensible name like “Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever” . . . who wants to be associated with that?) is TMFSS.

And just what, you ask, dear inquisitive reader, does TMFSS stand for? Well, I wish I could remember, but in the time between writing the sentence, “And just what, you ask, dear inquisitive reader, does TMFSS stand for?” and starting the next sentence, I have, while staring at my computer screen with my fingers on the keyboard, embarked upon a twenty three minute journey to the center of the mind which began with the action of Googling “pharmacist salaries.”

Not that I didn’t already know that the median salary for a pharmacist is $108,000. I did. But, I just had to torture myself and Google it so I could say to myself once more, as I have countless times over the years, “Idiot. Why didn’t you go to pharmacy school? 108k working 40 hours a week in a grocery store filling orders from Old Lady McGinty. It’s like working on the other side of the store, in the deli, except that you get paid 80k per year more. Plus, free drugs.”

So after basking in the fantasy of popping the Vicodin that I would be skimming from Old Lady McGinty’s prescription if I were a pharmacist, I returned to reality and Googled, “how to simultaneously live on the 28k per year you make as a writer AND deal with the anxiety of knowing that you have more degrees than any pharmacist. And less Vicodin.”

The results were bleak. Dark and troublesome. So I shivered, before trembling, and then Binged the same search query. Or maybe I Banged it, I’m not sure. In either event, the result was much more cheerful, I think:



This led me to feel good, momentarily, as I thought of Poppa and his ability to appear always in control, to always have an answer, and to consistently provide, protect, heal and womanize. Hawkeye Pierce, my TV Poppa. So I YouTubed “Hawkeye Mash” and watched this video: Hawkeye Singing

The clips made me laugh, which brought my brain back to the moment: the one when I was talking about a disorder called TMFSS. If you are, by some miracle of attentiveness created by a comatose-like state of Ritalin-induced concentration, still reading this post, then you are hereby rewarded with the knowledge that TMFSS stands for “Too Much Fu**ing Sh** Syndrome.” Pfizer is working on a societal enema, to be marketed under the slogan, “We’ll Medicate the Crap Out of You.”

Yet more job security for the pharmacists. Blasted world.

Godspeed,
LJL