I caught a wicked cold from a cuddlebuddy earlier this week, and have been fighting it for the past couple of days.  We have to pay for everything, as my old friend Csaba says.  I had Wednesday off, but I was so logy I couldn't do anything properly.  I couldn't sleep soundly but was only half-awake all day. 

I tried to read a little bit of Dean Hamer's The God Gene, but kept having to read the same passages over and over —"intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness are unrelated; the correlation between the two scales is zero"— and still wasn't getting it. 

I watched several movies on Netflix... 

The Protocols of Zion, Marc Levin's idiosyncratic documentary on those who blame Jews for 9-11, starts out on point, but sort of dissolves midway through into Marc and his father confronting anti-Semites on the streets of New York.  They're nice about it.  It's heartfelt but was a little too much of a home movie for me.

Choking Man was next, an indie film with some interesting bits but a sort of golem for a protagonist, whose inner life and transformation were too obscure to get emotionally involved with.  But Mandy Patinkin's in it, with a Greek accent, and I still think he's dishy. 

After that I watched another documentary, Red Without Blue, about identical twins Alex and Mark Farley, one of whom is transgendered, the other gay.  The film is remarkable on a number of levels, though Alex/Claire, Mark, and their parents are surprisingly ordinary people. 

Watching it recalled to my mind Tolystoy's observation that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  I suspect that all families harbor some unhappiness.   We're never quite clear about what the source of the Farley's is.  Families have these strange interior landscapes based more on emotional dynamics and the interplay of personalities than on any specific incidents intelligible to outsiders. 

One example was when Mark, now in his mid-twenties, was talking about how his father had lost his job when Mark and Alex were in junior high.  For three months, Mark recalled, palpably bitter, his father had pretended to go to work every morning.  Mark seemed positively disgusted by this, but it's not immediately clear that pity would not be a better reaction ten years on. 

Alex/Claire's mother sees her son's transformation into a woman as "a big 'fuck you!'" A way to "get back at" her.  For what is never clear.  Mark suspects revenge at times, too.  But that's often how it is with families.  Ultimately, Claire and her mother reconcile, long after her father has fully embraced her as his daughter.  Mark concludes, "no matter what happens, Claire and I will always be identical twins."

Through most of the first half of the film, Claire is struggling, and often comes off as whiny and unsympathetic.  But in the end her transformation is what's most compelling about the picture.  By the time the credits roll, she's a strong, self-realized person.  Throughout, Mark seems to harbor some hope that she'll return to twinhood, and her wrenching herself from her double for reasons no one of them fully grasps, is at once painful and exhilarating to watch. 

The film is a testament to a family's resilience.  Here's a family that could easily have been utterly torn apart by all of this, and yet somehow (although they are all living separate lives) realized the challenge of "evolving toward each other," as Claire puts it.  Ordinary people with the extraordinary courage to evolve toward each other, as painful as that process is. 

The last movie on my roster was Mean Creek.  The premise — a group of kids seeking revenge against a bully end up killing him by accident — was kind of interesting.  And I had read that it was interestingly handled.  But the film was pretty blah, except for the revelation of Scott Mechlowicz, who reminded me of a Gen-Next version of Colin Farrell in this.  Still, I viewed everything through a snotty haze, drifting in and out of it. 

I'm not big on popping pills, but this morning — day three — I figured it was time to run to CVS and get something for the congestion.  I remembered that the last time I had a cold I had run out to get something and didn't have any ID on me, so all I could get were sugar pills, basically.  I am too skeptical for placebos to work on me.  In fact, my experiences with prescription drug abuse has been, on the whole, disappointing.

When I was back in Indiana looking after my dad I helped myself to his leftover Percocet and Vicodin (stuff he wasn't using anymore at that point and would never have any use for again). You just hate for perfectly good Schedule II controlled substances to go to waste.  Ironically, I had been dating a gerontological oncologist here in Boston when my dad was diagnosed (and even weirder — his first name was the same as my dad's, which was, itself, not a very common one). To his credit, he warned me against taking my dad's prescription drugs. He was happy to prescribe me some of my own.

The Percocet didn't do much for me, I have to say.  Things felt a little warmer and fuzzier than usual, but that was about it.  Can't see taking the trouble to get hooked on it.  My gerontological oncologist told me the Vicodin would make me itch, and it did a little, but it could have been the power of suggestion (I'm not as skeptical about side effects).  Other than that, nada. 

So anyway, back at CVS this morning.  I still haven't bothered to get a new drivers license to replace the one that was stolen along with my wallet from my gym locker something like three years ago.  I don't drive, so why brave the BMV?  But I have had problems with my passport, which was issued by the American Embassy in Budapest where I happened to be when my old one was mangled beyond repair.

I like my old passport photo, somehow...


...looks like something from a bygone era, doesn't it?  If I only knew now what I knew then.

Getting a new passport abroad is not easy.  But it's nothing compared to trying to get bank tellers and store clerks to accept it as a legitimate form of ID back home. 

The problem is, while the new photo looks more like I do these days, the passport they issue you abroad is a little old-fashioned. It's not laminated.  There are no fancy holographs.  The photo is stuck on and then pressed with the seal of the United States.  Nonetheless, since I got it I have never once had the least problem gaining entrance to any nation of my choice, including my own.  But try and get twenty bucks from my checking account from a bank teller, or a frakin $8.99 box of Advil Cold & Sinus from a CVS clerk, and it's an international incident.

The thing I don't understand is the zealousness of these tellers and clerks when it comes to what really amounts to a petty transaction.  They seem to go way above and beyond the call of duty. Just take down the number.  You've covered your ass.  That's all you're required to do.  I don't need to be renditioned.  I mean, crikey, I've spent less time at Communist border crossings than I did at the counter at CVS this morning trying to get my Advil.

Seriously, do I look like a twelve year-old who's elaborately forged a passport so I can get my Robitussin fix? Or do I look like the guy in the passport picture, except very tired and stuffed-up, and in need of some Advil Cold & Sinus to get through the day? 

It's bad enough that the rest of us have to be so insistently and incessantly inconvenienced on account of too stringent and ridiculously counterintuitive laws designed to save some of us from ourselves.  It's like how they card you at liquor stores nowadays, regardless of how old and wizened, broken and defeated you are. I mean, do you know how young twenty-one is?  It's not hard to tell the difference between that and nearly forty.  I'm sick of being carded at liquor stores. 

But what's worse is when you actually do have a legitimate and legal form of ID, and the clerk takes it to the next level.  It is first of all obvious that I am of legal age.  No one would dispute it.  I'm sorry, there are just things that gravity does to you over time.  I have been using my face for nearly twice as long as the barely legal set, and it looks used.  I don't look twenty by any stretch of the imagination, and I have a legal ID.  End of story.  Why drag this out?  What are we going to do, call Immigration?  How far are you willing to take this? 

I guess all I'm asking is that bank tellers and store clerks understand that it's not their job to verify beyond a shadow of a doubt the authenticity of a customer's ID.  Especially when the reason you're taking ID is to verify that they're of age, and they obviously are. 

This morning It was a quarter of an hour before I could get a box of frakin Advil.  I mean, it's not medical marijuana.  I not only had to hand over my ID, but my name and address were entered into a database, and I had to sign an electronic form, under penalty of perjury.  TO GET A BOX OF 20 CAPLETS OF ADVIL COLD & SINUS.

FECK OFF.

After signing away my rights to habeas corpus and waiving my claim to counsel, I was finally given my ibuprofen and pseudoephedrine (it's not even REAL ephedrine, for Pete's sake).

Now if I can only figure out how to get them out of the child-proof wrapper, I'll be set.