A Love Letter to Advil

As a loud and proud member of Generation Y

I’ve got pain in my back and tears in my eyes

There’s a war going on in the base of my spine

Flamethrower marines screaming, “Your ass is mine!”

Battle axe barbarians chopping down the tree

Razor claw demons going on a killing spree

Can’t wait for the bone-cracker to fix me up

I need instant healing before I fucking erupt

They call it Advil, I call it magic in tablets

For when I can’t move without yelling, “Damn it!”

A bottle of water cold enough to freeze hell

Swallow the pills and the pain takes the L

Why go cold turkey when it feels so good?

It’s not like I’m floating through the neighborhood

It’s not like I’m a space cadet calling Major Tom

Or drunkenly fucking on Porn Hub dot com

Doesn’t have the same energy as cooking crack

Booger sugar wouldn’t do shit for my back

Don’t have a meth lab on the bottom floor

Not making poison pills out of a nuclear core

The magic medicine works, I’m off to bed

Maybe one day it’ll unfuck my head

I wrote a love letter to Advil liquid gels

More like a commercial with intent to sell

A drug deal without the DEA

Just a fucking parade from the FDA

Maximum 3

When I was a kid, long before I figured out what the fuck I wanted to do with my life, my first option was to just invent new things. New videogames, new movies, new TV shows, but in this instance alone, new medicines. And because my mind was thoroughly power-washed by TV advertisements back then, I was convinced that Advil was better than Tylenol and Bayer, Tylenol was better than Bayer, and Bayer was better than nothing. “It takes two Tylenols and three Bayers to match the strength of one Advil liquid gel”. If that wasn’t enough to get my creative wheels turning, there was yet another commercial on TV to wash my brain some more. It was for a medicine that combined Nyquil and Advil into one capsule. The message I received had nothing to do with falling asleep and resting easy. The message I got out of this was that more medicines equal faster healing. So…my genius idea for an all-purpose medicine…was a pill called Maximum 3. Why? Because it was maximum-strength and three medicines combined into one. The leading pills only had one medicine and were minimum strength. Three is obviously better because in America, more is always better. But as an adult with a better understanding of how pharmaceuticals work, I realize what would happen if a normal-sized adult took one swallow of Maximum 3: they would drop dead! There wouldn’t be enough Pulp Fiction needle juice in the world to wake up somebody from that kind of overkill. Come to think of it, there actually might be something similar to Maximum 3 out in the world. The Sackler family made a killing off of it in the blue-collar market. I might as well give my customers a bag of cocaine at this point.