The
Brady Archive
Aspirin
By
Robert Brady, (KJ 32)
You want to know all about aspirin then you just go get yourself a good
case of sciatica, nothing will teach you about aspirin better than a
good case of sciatica, you know, that pain that sings top-volume Wagner
up and down your leg nerve that big leg nerve the sciatic nerve, that
when it decides to hurt gets your attention way better than sitting
on a tack twelve hours a day. Sciatica is when you learn that you, not
the leg, are the appendage. It's a big revelation, and it's free. You
can get sciatica pretty easily, so don't worry about that part. You
can get it like I did, by tossing around a lot of roofbeams like you
were still an undergraduate, which basically takes one of those way
postgraduate spinal discs (pulpus nervosus for the uninitiated or anybody
who might want to talk about this at a higher level, at which point
you can count me out, I have to go lay down) and squashes it like a
semi-truck ran over a jelly donut, and that now very pissed-off disc
just pokes out there where it shouldn't and jabs that extremely touchy
nerve and keeps on jabbing like two kids in church, and all of a sudden
you are, as the preacher says, lying on the ground screaming your fucking
brains out. As I indicated, you can get sciatica any number of ways,
but mine is as exciting as any. Which brings us, more or less, into
the general neighborhood of aspirin. Now sciatica, as you might expect,
is pretty much the same all over the world, I mean you get sciatica
in Wichita, you can compare notes no problem with a sciaticized individual
in Kuala Lumpur, or, in my case, Shiga, Japan, which, believe it or
not, brings us even closer to the subject of aspirin. It should be stated
at this point, so as to debaffle the inattentive, that when you have
sciatica, proximity to aspirin becomes a major interest in life. Which
brings us to money. Because when it comes to aspirin in Japan, money
isn't quite the same thing as it is in Wichita. Well, not only aspirin.
Or Wichita either, for that matter. For example, the price of enough
land to park your car on in central Kyoto is roughly equivalent to the
price of Wichita, or maybe Washington DC, depending on whether it's
1995 or 2002. The other day, to get back to the subject, I was purchasing
aspirin for the new ruler of my existence, before whom I humbly abase
myself and whom I honor with my entire being and to hell with every
other leg in the country, and asked the price of the small box of the
only leading American brand, in fact the only aspirin, for sale in the
pharmacy nearest my leg. The druggist informed me, without the slightest
sign of falling on the floor laughing, that the 24-aspirin box cost
700 yen, the 48-aspirin box cost 1100 yen and the 96-aspirin box cost
1900 yen! I did not let my feelings show as I reflexively calculated
the price in dollars: TWENTY DOLLARS for 96 aspirin!!! And 96 is the
largest size!!! Why, In the US you can buy a bucket of aspirin!!! I
know in some generally unexplored part of my education that aspirin
is cheap to make, you just mix some stuff together that you get for
free out of the ground or off a tree or something, so I know that the
real price of 96 aspirin, in terms of the legal tender nearest my heart
(does one ever abandon one's native currency?), is around 25 cents,
allowing for inflation. So was I going to pay this outrageous price?
YOU BET, said my leg with a voice way lower than Darth Vader's, though
I got the small box, you've got to put your foot down somewhere, each
aspirin costing about 30 yen, or 28.6 cents at the then-current exchange
rate. As I limped home under the added weight of knowing that I had
just paid seven dollars for 24 aspirin (actually I think the packaging,
in which each aspirin has its own hotel room, eats up most of the expense),
my sciaticated mind obsessively traced the uniquely Japanese system
by which aspirin (and countless other products), in an impenetrable
process of premarketing prestidigitation, are sold and resold several
times before reaching the consumer way up there at the top of the pyramid,
a single carton of aspirin thereby generating sufficient income to send
a middleman's kid to college to get rid of a chronic pain. I felt touched,
somehow, and in a place where I must say I don't like being touched.
Later I sent to the US and got 500 aspirin, mailed to me across the
entire American continent and the entire Pacific ocean, or halfway around
the world, for $2.95 (310 yen), about .6 cents (.7 yen) per aspirin.
To the attentive expatriate, the differences between cultures can very
closely resemble sciatica.
First published in slightly different form in Kyoto Journal #32
Copyright
held by the author
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