On Duane Reade, Left Eye Lopes, And Root Canals

I’m sitting in the Duane Reade pharmacy on 57th & Broadway, bathing in harsh florescent light. Behind me, a couple of computer technicians with Southern accents are making a racket replacing registers. Something’s beeping somewhere, non-stop. A child is crying; his father squeezed his head. An elderly Russian couple just walked pat clutching a half dozen boxes of Vivarin. Marilyn, behind the counter, has only one of the two medications I came for — the current drug of choice for the MTV News Jet Set — Vicodin.

“Vicodin should knock your girlfriend out,” she says. It’s like this:

It was an long day dealing with Left Eye’s tragic death. We put a live show on air, complete with the booking coup of the century — courtesy of Jennifer Sacca — the surviving members of TLC on TRL. We published three stories with multiple updates, suffered a site-wide outage due to overwhelming traffic, published a photo gallery, and pages upon pages of user email.

In there somewhere between 3am and 9pm, I went for a bike ride (to stay awake), and got in one good meal at Ernestos’ Country Grille (to stay awake).

18-hours later, I’m picking up pain killers for Jen who, on top of everything, had a root canal today.

I may have to scam a few from her.