Breakfast and NyQuil: A Love Story

My parents are out of town for the week. Then for some reason, they’re coming back for one day, then going out again for another week. I don’t understand the reason for the one day homecoming, but whatever. I’m loving the empty house, but the shitty thing is I’m sick and there’s no one here to coddle me.

I don’t even know what I have, as the symptoms seem to keep changing. At first I thought it was strep throat, even though I’ve NEVER gotten it before. It felt like someone took a razor blade to the back of my throat. It was bleeding from all my throat clearing, it hurt like a motherfucker, I had a fever, and I was more delirious than usual. The next day, my throat was better, but now I had a lung-rattling cough, hacking up various colored gobs of shit, a horrible headache, and cold sweats. Now, it’s my throat again, and the fever’s coming back with a vengeance. Son of a bitch.

I’m doing my usual “I have a cold” medicinal routine: bottle of NyQuil a day, two gallons of orange juice a day, Echinacea and Vitamin C pills every day, and half-assed attempts to cut back on smoking. I’ve got everything under control except for my vitamin-overload shock that’s making me shake like a junkie two days away from his next fix. Not that I’m a junkie, and not that it’s two days from my next fix.

If I had to pick the worst thing about being sick, I’d have to say it would be trying to sleep when one of your nostrils is completely stuffed up and the other is SO FUCKING CLEAR that it burns to inhale. Jesus Christ, I woke up this morning feeling like I was doing lines of ammonia the night before. It fucking blows. I need to get some surrogate parents to take care of me when mine are away on vacation, hiding from their responsibilities and traffic tickets. Those fucks.

It’s nice having the house to myself. It’s weird not having a dog here anymore, but I’m dealing with it well in every aspect except for cooking and cleaning. For example, I’ve never done laundry in my life. I’ve often asked my mother to teach me so she would shut up about it, but she “never has time.” Somehow, she finds the time every other fucking day to hassle me about how I need to learn how to do laundry, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m avoiding having to do laundry right now by putting all my dirty clothes in a pile and hoping that they somehow clean themselves, which seems to be working out pretty well since I haven’t done any laundry yet. I think on the one day my parents come back, I’ll make them clean the house.

But on to cooking… ok, I can cook some things. I can make eggs in two or three different ways, I make a pretty solid piece of toast, and I’ve got milk and cereal down to a science, but that’s about it. I mean, I can deal with frozen meals and shit like that, but I’ve been itching to actually cook something, you know? So this morning, I decided to make some egg McMuffins with bacon, since that contains several elements I know how to make (eggs, a type of toast), and something new but simple: bacon. I was confident and ready to dazzle the audience with my mad cooking skillz (the “z” at the end of “skill” proves beyond all doubts that I’m awesome).

So I assembled all the pots and pans and plates that I thought I’d need, stacking them on the counters and strategically positioning them on the oven. It looked like I was building airplanes in my kitchen, so I put back all of them but two skillets and two plates. How a colander figured into bacon and eggs, I’ll never know. So I read the instructions on the back of the bacon, and it seemed simple enough. I decided to cook three pieces of bacon, so I grabbed one and pulled. It ripped in half.

“That one was practice!” I shouted to no one in particular. I talk to myself a lot when the house is empty. I grab another one, and shriek in dismay as it starts to tear as well. I’m feeling a huge amount of embarrassment for some reason, and I try to inconspicuously pull the piece up, angling my body to hide what I’m doing. I still don’t know why I’m acting as if there are people in the house. I can only assume the gallon of NyQuil I’ve drank over the past four days has finally caught up to me. Seriously, I drank like half a bottle this morning before I started cooking, so I felt a little loopy and was acting more goofy than normal.

I flip the packet of bacon over and read it again, noticing a paragraph I hadn’t noticed and thus had skipped over before. It recommended using a plastic spatula to separate the bacon pieces. “Spatula?” I thought to myself…. I rummaged around in a drawer, and yanked out a big wooden spoon. I held it aloft like it was Excaliber and screamed, “Now is the winter of your discontent, Herr Bacon!” Then I put it down and took out a spatula.

Of course I know what a spatula is; I’m not a fucking idiot.

So I manage to get three pieces of bacon separated from the main mound of bacon, and throw it on the skillet. Let’s fast forward, since nothing interesting happens for a little while.

The eggs are done, the English muffins are toasted, I’m just waiting on the bacon. And waiting. And waiting. “When does it get crispy?” I thought to myself. “Soon,” I reassured myself seconds later. Then a thought came into my head: “Oh, shit… maybe it gets crispy when it dries and cools… what if it’s going to be burned?” This terrified me, and with a weird yelping sound, I turned off the gas on the oven and leapt back, lest the skillet explode. After a minute, I crawled out from under the table and checked on the bacon. It smelled good, so I put it all on a paper towel and dumped out the grease.

Assembling the sandwiches was interesting, because I didn’t want to break the yolks of the eggs open until I was ready to eat them (I always make my eggs over-easy). So, how to get them onto the English muffins? I snapped my fingers and held my hands aloft, humming peaceful and tranquil meditation music. So I picked up the cooked eggs and bacon and assembled my sandwiches with my hands, like some sort of hunger-starved raccoon.

The one thing about working in a coffee shop is that your fingers and hands kind of get desensitized to heat, since you’re holding scalding milk and coffee all day. This can be a benefit in some ways, but what it really boils down to is that when I actually do burn my hands, the burns are always much, much worse than they would be for a normal person, since I have to hold the burning item much longer than other mere mortals.

So I notice the burns, and rush to the refrigerator to get the aloe. After smearing it all over my hands and over a good portion of my forearms (I squirted too much into my palms and didn’t want to waste it), I went to pick up my food. “Ah, fuck!” I shouted, looking at my hands, still dripping with aloe. My cold-medicine-addled brain came up with a solution, and I rushed from the room. After a few minutes of scrounging, I found my father’s supply of surgical gloves that he uses when he wants to commit crimes. Then, I return to my sandwich and I feed.

Bottom line, all I could smell was the aloe, the bacon was burned, the English muffins weren’t toasted enough, and the eggs were sort of runny, but it tasted like sweet, sweet victory.


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