Mother Benjamin’s No-Fail Cold Cure

Seeing as I was apparently in wont, life decided to give me a high five.  Oh, excuse me, I meant a cold.  Sweet.  Fortunately, though, my weekends are usually spent hidden away in my bedroom watching television and being a lazy ass, so this was no serious change of plans, save for the incessant hacking and sexy frog voice.  

Added to that, it got me thinking about my fool-proof, no-fail cold cure.  Seeing as I wasn’t a harbinger of the plague, and seeing as I prefer to save my special recipe for insta-health for the most brutal of colds, I didn’t actually resort to using it this weekend; nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I can’t blog about it.  Call it preventative blogging.  Or “Somebody’s clearly shit out of ideas this Monday morning.”  Either or is fine by me.

Anyways, my remedy is as easy as one, two, disease-free!  Seriously, step one:

What’s simpler than popping open a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup so you can start down your road to wellville?  NOTHING.  Though make sure to note that, in accordance with the above illustration, you get Chicken & Stars.  I’m not saying that the only soup that will effectively work is Chicken & Stars.  I’d imagine that the curative power of chicken soup transcends the shape of the noodle, but–like white diamonds for Elizabeth Taylor–Chicken & Stars has always brought me luck.  And, really, why then mess with success?

The real secret, however, lies in what you watch while consuming said Chicken & Stars while huddled under a mass of covers only to throw them off ten minutes later because you’re suddenly overcome with a nasty case of the fever sweats.  In these dark hours when your body feels as though it’s on a nightmarish crusade against your physical and emotional well-being, it’s important to have a cinematic experience that reminds you that you could in much worse shape.  Much, much worse (and grosser as well, so faint-of-heart and my mother beware):

Yes, that’s right, John Carpenter’s The Thing is THE must-watch sick day staple.  There’s something curiously cathartic about a movie devoted to the visualizing the ultimate disease anxiety that is the body in violent rebellion.  For starters, it’s a Jerry-Springer-esque panacea: A feel-better reminder that your body’s not the worst because someone else’s body already lays claim to that title.  We can all agree that any cold, no matter how rough, is 100% more favorable than playing host to shape-shifting alien organism.  Mostly, though, The Thing is just a damn fine movie.  

The tension is skin-crawlingly sublime, the narrative a finely tuned exercise in B-movie straight-forward simplicity, and the special effects remain consistently impressive to this day.  Maybe I lose all better judgment when my brain is cooking at 100° (and, to be sure, I never had much to begin with), but I find myself embracing the body aches and waves of nausea whenever I watch The Thing.  After all, better those symptoms over a monster-mouth chest or your head detaching itself from my body and sprouting spider legs.  

And that, ladies and gents, is Mother Benjamin’s No-Fail Cold Cure.  Just a cup o’ soup and the cinematic dose of get-the-hell-over-it-you-big-baby, and you’ll be right as rain.  

Maternal instinct, y’all: I’ve got it in spades.