I went out of town for work and came back with a horrible chest cold. Or maybe the plague. I don’t know, this was New York. Even their advertising campaigns announce that “anything is possible in New York,” so maybe it’s possible to catch a disease that wiped out millions some five hundred years ago.
Head colds are really annoying because they give you all the same phlegmy symptoms as other colds, but there are so many more ways to treat them including just knocking yourself unconscious until it’s all over. Chest colds are tricky: you still have to be breathing to make it through and the last thing you want to do when you have a chest cold is breath.
I’ve been falling back on a remedy as old as the hills (insert random Southern colloquialism here): whiskey. No, not straight from the bottle, this isn’t 1928.
My dear friend Trace (shoutout!) told me about a good remedy for when you still have to be able to go to work and drive your car and stuff like that, so I’ve been falling back on that during the hours of the day when I still need to know how to tie my shoes or reach them without falling over. But once I get home from work and change into a fluffy bathrobe despite the Sahara temperatures outside, I grab up the whiskey bottle like a man drinking formaldehyde during Prohibition.
The copious amounts of whiskey will either kill any germ in my system or just make me not care when the germs finally organize a union and take over the place. I’m good either way. I just hate that I’m getting this much alcohol into my body and there is not a beach umbrella or cabana boy in sight. If I’m going to drink this much, I really should be having a much better time and I probably should come out of it more tanned than I am, instead of this kind of off-green color.
Just wake me when it’s over…
Lorca Damon 
The only good thing about being so late to the blog post is the chance that you’re feeling better by now… Are you? I hope so. I live in the California Central Valley. It’s like a giant bowl, trapping everything bad that no one should breath. When my allergies kick in it sucks real bad. I usually end up sick for three weeks, bringing up all sorts of nasty stuff. This past Christmas I ended up coughing Christmas Eve and being sick for the entirety of my two week vacation. I stayed away from booze during this time, but only because I apparently didn’t know any better. Right? Lol. I won’t do that again. Whiskey, it is.
Seriously, feel better.
-Jimmy
It’s practically listed in the Physician’s Desk Reference. Under “awesome.”
I have Chinese remedies that look like something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe after trekking in the jungle. You add water and boil the hell out of it and it cures everything. I’ll bring some your way when I’m in your neck of woods. Hope you feel better soon xoxo
eden
Lemme think this through…the longer I stay sick, the more whiskey I get to drink. I don’t know that I want to be cured soon, by foot gunk or anything else! But come by my neck of the woods and we’ll both drink whiskey and foot gunk!
I think I just posted a comment about Daddy’s Hot Toddies on your ‘About’ page! Oh well, I’m on the teeny weenie IPhone– things don’t always go right on this thing!
With enough hot toddies, I can’t work a regular telephone, let alone an iPhone! We’ll drink to your phone together!
Whisky is poison, much as I love it. In my twenties I could drink a bottle of whisky and stay reasonably coherent and did so many times; I spent some time in Scotland and the bars there are awash with the stuff, it’s practically compulsory to drink the stuff. In my thirties I drank a whole bottle just once, climbed a lamp post, opened it up and cut the wires to switch it off… impressive, but stupid. My whisky drinking days are done now and I avoid the stuff. If I get a cold or flu I wrap up in loads of clothes, drink iced water and burn the microbes out with body temperature.
Hmmm…ice water. Hmmm. That doesn’t sound nearly as soothing as warmed whiskey! With ice cream! (I just made that up, but that’s what I want right now.)
I have a better one, although my mom was big on giving us tea with lemon, honey and whiskey for colds when we were kids. I still use the remedy. Drink unfiltered, raw apple cider vinegar. Gets rid of colds in 24 hours, if you can stand the cure!
My mom swears that her grandfather survived the 1918 influenza pandemic because when he started showing symptoms, his wife put him in bed and kept him drunk on whiskey for two weeks. Of course, they were Canadian so that’s not terribly different from their normal behavior.