Saturday, March 05, 2005

Q: What’s your favorite drug?

A: Minoxidil

OK, I admit it. I am a prima donna. I have never met a mirror that I didn’t like. In addition, I am a Leo, for those of you who have more than a passing interest in the Astrological Sciences. Leos like to go into the jungle, roar a lot and get as much attention as the environment will provide. If the Leo is a male, he likes to lie around in the sun all day while the female does all the heavy lifting. Also, he needs his mane fondled and his ears rubbed. A little, no, a lot of procreative activity is good too.

Such is the lot of the lion.

In terms of one's lot in life, I am a lion stuck in the body of a fifty year old man.

The male human body goes through a particularly distressing set of changes as it ages. My feet are a size bigger now than they were tweny years ago. My head is beginning to shrink giving the illusion that my nose and ears are growing. The hair on my head, which I keep comparatively long, has turned gray and is beginning to thin. My ever growing ears and nose have begun to sprout strands of hair, which I shave off. My lower back hurts which makes running difficult. I can still make children, but probably not as many as I could years ago. (Well, if you really must know, I cannot make any children, any more....snip, snip.)

About three years ago I noticed that I was beginning to develop a bald spot on the crown of my head. Yikes! I feared that within a year I would have a head that looks like a cross between Friar Tuck and Steven Wright.

Vanity, thy name is Bob Reselman.

I went to Woodstock-- THE Woodstock, three days of fun and music and nothing but fun and music. (And a lot of mind altering controlled substances. There was sex too, but not for me. At the time it seems that I was not that sexually interesting to unknown females, even though I had a mane of long, dark hair, down to the back of my ass. However my short-haired friend, Henry, who accompanied me to the event, did get some manual stimulation from an unfamiliar young woman in the back of the Greyhound bus on the way up to White Lake. Go figure.)

I come from a generation that has absolutely no hesitancy to address any issue or solve any problem, whether it is personal, institutional, perceptional, educational, hygienic, domestic, foreign or militaristic, through the use of drugs, preferably ones that are legal, pharmaceutical and FDA approved. We are the drug solution society, all the way from Prozac to Extra Stength Tylenol to Sarin.

Anyway, lately I have been watching a little more TV than is good for me. Thus, my subconscious has an overabundance of commercial images, many that have been embedded by the Pharmaceutical Companies. (I tend watch shows that are of interest to people like me, the baby-boomer/AARP generation, a generation of people that are not uncoincidentially part of the demographic target of said Pharmaceutical Companies). These images were not embedded maliciously mind you, but with my complete and utter consent. I mean, if you sit in the barber shop long enough, eventually you will get a haircut, no allusion intended.

So I am losing my hair and I am scared. The first thing that comes to mind to alleviate my fear is Rogaine. I went down to Walgreen’s and inspected a package. The price, which now escapes me, was expensive. So I read the label and noticed that the active ingredient is Minoxidil, 5% for the men’s treatment, 2% for the women’s treatment. (Jeepers, I didn’t know that hair loss in women was a profitable ailment. I guess that you learn something new every day.)

(PS: The active ingredient in Prozac is fluoxentine hydrochloride. The formal name for cocaine is cocaine hydrochloride. I wonder....)

Being that I know that generic drugs are just as effective and in most cases less expensive than the brand name counterpart, I borrowed my most excellent girlfriend’s Costco card and drove on over to the Washington Blvd store, near Marina Del Rey. I trudged my way through the warehouse-like environment, past pallets of tires, bins of blue jeans and institution size cans of Heinz baked beans and there it was perched on a shelf above my balding, angst ridden head: industrial pack Monixidil, two months worth of treatment for $20.00, a bargain at twice the price.

So for two months, twice a day, once in the morning, once at night, I have been taking two eyedroppers full of the topical elixir and dropping it on to my scalp, one eye dropper full over my receding hairline and one dropper full on my thinning crown. And you know what? I feel like a mindless American consumer, hell bent on material acquisition and the promotion of capitalism, but……it works! The hair above my forehead is bushier and my emerging bald spot has been sent back from whence it came. I am once again lion-like!

I guess Dupont was right: better living is possible through chemistry.

Now, if I can only do something about my yellowing teeth, because you know, you don't get a second chance to make a good first impression.

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