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April 4, 2006
The Green Fairy
Last week's cherry blossom mania turned the otherwise grey, staid Tokyo into a wild pink affair, and like a hangover to our merry reveling, many of us are now suffering from allergic reactions to the acute increase of flower pollen in the environment. Kafunsho is like a pseudo-grippe, dizzily speeding through ailments in double-time: I've moved from sore throat to sneezing to stuffy head in the course of three days, so Friday looks all clear.
At times like this, I fantasize about going to a bar for the flu-weary that serves up shots of the Green Fairy: Nyquil, Original Flavor.
On Saturday, I went to Aoyama Fai for the first time in ages and spied a bottle of Pernod Absinthe up in the top shelves of the bar. This is not your mother's pastis, friends. At 68% alcohol, the drink literally burns a hole in your esophagus - but with a fresh, clean kick... like swigging a Listerine martini. I also dare any of you to name another bottled beverage that leaves such a nasty-looking residue in the glass.
Thanks to the good people of the Internet, we should all now be aware that absinthe has never been a psychoactive agent, but it is about as fun as that Degas painting. I find it hard to believe that Nyquil does not have some fundamental genetic relationship to absinthe - the over-the-top green hues, anise flavors, and high alcohol contents. I also can't imagine Nyquil being that much worse for you.
By the way: I originally planned on using April First as my ironically-real Blog Dismantling Day, but I changed my mind and will stick it out for a while. Now being a shakaijin with real employment, I have to warn you that there are several classic Marxy problematics I will no longer be tackling for various reasons. Also, I am aiming to take my activities into new media and new directions. Stagnation is boring. Stay aboard for awhile: it's a free ride.
Posted by marxy at April 4, 2006 9:22 PM
Comments
What about documenting the food you eat every day? That wouldn't be incompatible with the discretion required by your new job, would it? And you could make a blook eventually.
Posted by: Momus at April 5, 2006 12:50 AM
頑張って下さいな。
Posted by: ls at April 5, 2006 2:31 AM
Funny you mention the food diary idea, because I am writing out my daily meals for as a guest on another site at the moment. I think you would all be appalled by what I eat. I'm not particularly anti-food, but I'm not a culinary maniac. I feel like food is the ultimate consumptive activity with (at least in my non-chef case) no productive facets.
Posted by: marxy at April 5, 2006 9:05 AM
Hey, nicely turned sentences in that opening paragraph, Marxy. A couple months ago you lamented what you regarded as a certain sameness in your prose, but here we see the hallmarks of a writer putting a little extra lovin' into his phraseology.
Posted by: David at April 5, 2006 11:44 AM
I feel like food is the ultimate consumptive activity with no productive facets.
elvis ate america before america ate him.
Posted by: alin at April 5, 2006 11:25 PM
I would have to say that I find Nyquil to be a much viler substance than absynthe ever is/was...how on earth a common cold remedy can affect one worse than a licorice fuel additive beats me, but still.
How are your experiences with the apothe...drug stores? I was there over the holidays proposing to my girlfriend (and sick as hell). I needed something that wouldn't crack me out OR knock me out. When I asked the clerk he shoved a bottle of コバン in front of me.
Me: "What the fuck IS this?!"
Store Clerk: "だいじょうぶだよ！"
Ummm. Yeah.
Posted by: Lex at April 6, 2006 5:30 AM
What's KOBAN, Lex? That stuff Van Gogh drank?
Posted by: Rory P. Wavekrest at April 6, 2006 3:26 PM
Haha typo on my part. I meant to write kanpo, not koban! The first sign of having been back stateside for too long :)
Posted by: Lex at April 6, 2006 11:11 PM