HACKING UP ONE FOR WARHOL

I have a chest cold.  It hasn't gripped me completely yet, but for the last three nights I've made many impromptu visits to the cough syrup.  As a matter of fact, we're on such close terms that I keep the bottle next to the bathroom sink along with a spoon I rinse off several times over the few fitful hours I attempt to sleep.  Believe me, very little tastes as unpleasant as cherry syrupy medicine fresh after a fluoride rinse.

There is one good thing about having a cold, though, and that would be SOUP.  Soup, the only four-letter word that one can speak happily when not feeling well.  Soup, soup, soup.

Tonight I decide to skip the chicken noodle soup in favor of the tomato soup.  The only thing better than making tomato soup is making tomato soup with milk.  And the only thing better than tomato soup with milk is tomato soup with milk and crackers (saltines or oyster crackers).  If I added a grilled cheese sandwich, I'd be in heaven, but this cold just makes me want soup, only soup, and nothing but soup.

Okay, and maybe tea; I also want tea, but I'm too lazy to boil the water.  I mean, I just tuckered myself out opening the Campbell's can.

Campbell's soup reminds me of my childhood, including the time I wanted it even though I knew I'd throw it right back up again because I had the flu.  My mother made it anyway, and I ate it, and I re-puked it, and damnit if it didn't taste almost as good coming back up as it had going down.  Soup is like that sometimes -- doubly comforting.  Unlike fluoride and cough syrup mixing on their way down, regurgitated soup really isn't half bad making its way back up.

Speaking of soup, I saw Warhol's Campbell's soup can painting (print) when I was in Washington, DC., or at least I saw one or two or three of them.  It was at the National Gallery of Art, one of my favorite places in the world.  If only the Institute of Contemporary Art had comforting pieces like Warhol's (instead of disturbing shit like Mary Reid Kelley's work), it might be worth visiting more than once in a nightmare.  And when other than in this blog has anyone ever used the words Warhol and comforting in the same sentence?

Anyway, the soup has digested, and now it's time to brush teeth, and double-shot the fluoride and cough syrup.  With any luck at all I'll sleep for at least two hours straight before I hack my head off and wake the entire neighborhood, which is difficult to accomplish since half my neighborhood consists of two cemeteries.

No matter how I feel, though, I'll probably have to hit the store again soon.  You see, I'm running low on soup, and that will never do.