Pollinating via Subliminally Expressed Rage

Topic: Vic Jameson
Back! Here I am, with my #200 keyboard. Biscuit bits hoovered, and everything.



Every year since I moved to London in 1990 and began having to inhale seven tons of diesel fume each morning, I've gotten hayfever. It only lasts through June and early July, so I generally figure it's not too much of a problem. Since I learnt to drive in 2002, though, the snuffling and nose-drools and red-eyed weeping have increased.
Now I notice four hayfever periods a day - two coinciding exactly with rush hour, and two that occur within any enclosed airless space (ie, work, my flat, my car, a bus, a tube) about two hours after rush hour. Combine that with the fun experience of trying out a different anti-histamine every year, to see which one is going to work this time, and it all gets a little time consuming.

It's public knowledge that the pollution has added to the allergy load this year. (hence, I voted for Ken - anyone at all who reduces pollution in the capital has my vote forever - and hypocritically, there's no way I'm not using my damn car unless you force me out by hitting my pocket.) Most of the chemists are actually selling out of anti-histamines, as people are beginning to double and triple their doses to get the same effect.
What they tend not to bark on about is how hayfever affects your ability to see when you're driving. When I get a hayfever surge, my eyes go crimson red and boiled looking, they stream tears, and they itch like goddamn billy-oh, as if grit had gotten caught under a contact. Then, if you watch it in a hand mirror, the eyeball whites merge into a yellowish pink, with a bloodshot warning streak, and it actually starts to swell up.
I sat in my parents' garden once and watched it happen - a bulge about three millimetres deep slowly appeared.
If you're driving at the time, it's quite scary, because fifteen minutes into this weird flesh-swelling, and you lose the ability to focus, and around one minute after that, you pretty much can't see anything at all until either the air clears (meaning you get out of the car), or your anti histamine kicks in.
Happened to me on the M25. Heart thumping to a speed-beat, I swerved left and made the car kerb-crawl along the hard shoulder to the nearest exit, with about the same level of visibility as those tv camera effects when they try to show you the world from the point of view of the partially sighted (usually involves murdering someone who used to be on Melrose Place) (unless the bling person used to be on Melrose Place, in which case: DUCK! they're coming to get you).

The other thing they don't tell you is how a bad year's worth of hayfever lowers your tolerance to other allergens. Mozzie bites start hivng and looking weird. You start reacting to (or craving) food differently (no, it's not a virgin birth, thanks), and animals make your skin crawl.
Great opportunity for SkinnyCat to decide that my pillow is her personal territory, and wage a three month war to claim it, then. I'm sure unwitting hours of sleep with my face in a cat's crusty arse, inhaling fish fat, fluff, and dander are just what the doctor ordered.

So, you can imagine (or actually, it's probably better not to) how I'm looking at the moment. Rabid loud sneezing at unexpected moments. Snuffling like a junkie. And these bulging, prominent, boiled and weeping eyes, that every now and then turn yellow and swell to massive proportions. You can't dress it up with make-up, cos it's four minutes till you scratch the stuff off, in a desperate clawing frenzy.
Lovely.

Today, out of every anti-histamine (bar the useless herbal ones that so obviously don't work I dont even stress about taking eight times the daily dose), I went in to Superdrug to see which pills the pharmacist would recommend this time.
The swollen, painful, weeping itchiness which spreads over your entire skin surface, (including such hard to publicly cratch areas as pubes, arsehole, scalp, pits, gooey yellow eyeballs) means I can't stop myself from having enraged mental battles with any passing conversationalist, which so far, I've mostly been able to keep inside my head.

Pharmacist who looks like Jean-Luc Picard: Madam, how can I help you?
[Eh? Look at me. Look at me! Are you really in any state of confusion about what I want? Would I really be walking around with a crimson eyeball popping out of my tear strewn face on the offchance that you had some cough syrup?]
Gullible Twat: I want [heavy sigh] hayfever pills.
Jean-Luc: Aha!
[Oh right, the facial deformity clued you in, at last?]
Jean-Luc: This week we are recommending this product... [presents own brand packet from shelf]
[Oh, the own brand useless packet of shite right in front of my face, you mean? The crud that's so insipid you don't even need to stack it up behind the pharmacist, you put it right out on display for any five year old to tea-leaf? Shyah, yeah, rrrrrrrrrrright, I think that will work simply because you get a 0.000001% store commission on it. I mean, it's not like there's a FUCKING HUGE GROWTH on my GODDAMN EYEBALL, is it? Not like there's a PROBLEM here?]
GT: I've tried that, it's no good.
Jean-Luc: Ahhh, then maybe ..... [gestures expansively across the front display cabinet]
[JUST FUCKING CURE MY EYE YOU WEASELLY FUCKING NEWT OF A DOG-SIRED CUNT-PLASTER]
GT: Tried that.
[Are you blind?]
GT: And that.
[Do you think perhaps people really look like this?]
GT: And that.
[Stop palming me off with placebo relief - my eyeball is hanging out of its socket, and bouncing off my bloodied cheek, gently.]
GT: None of those work.
[And you ask me do I want the useless brand, have I really tried ALL the useless brands? Isn't there some sort of Hippocratic Oath that says pharmacists have to not be INCOMPETENT FUCKWITS?]
Jean-Luc: Are you sure? This is the market leader.
GT: [in floods of unbidden weeping, sure by now that the moisture is blood, not tears] Just give me the packet, okay. Quick!
[You bastard: I'm standing in front of you in obvious pain, and you're faffing about as if I were selecting a tie. Bastard. Bastardbastardbastardbastardbastard.]
GT: Thank you so much. Good bye.
[ I shall find you. I don't know how, but I shall find you, and all your little Picard children, and I shall infect you with the bulging eye, till you too feel like you just took off the wrong swimming goggles. I shall wait till you wake with yellow crust floating across the burning violent red of your distended eyeballs, and I shall laugh.
Until we meet again, "Picard".
And we shall meet again. Bwhahhahahahaha!]
Jean-Luc: Goodbye, Madam.

When did pharmacists turn into the bloody maitre d'?

By the way, free cash, endless perverted sex and unlimited supplies of Haribo for the one hundredth caller: 09011 21 44 02

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: ScreamingSeed
"So here I am surrounded by all these little girls in frilly party frocks, all smelling of cheap bubble bath and talcum powder, humming theme tunes to kid's TV shows and making their cheap rip-offs of Barbie dolls dance on the table between the sausage rolls. I've got my eye on the mouthwateringly sickly looking butterfly buns but I've been told I have to eat some salad first.
I don't really know why I put this whole tomato in my mouth. I guess I was just trying to be entertaining, but the other party guests look far from entertained. There's just no pleasing some people."