I am one sick puppy.

Literally! Well, almost literally. I am sick, but I am not a juvenile canine. What I'm saying is that I look and feel like hammered shit, laid up with some kind of horrible sinus-y/upper respiratory/cold thingie with all the usual trimmings: a disgusting phlegm-y cough, achy muscles, and a pounding head. (It's not COVID. I checked.) At the moment I am "bed-rotting" as the kids say, chugging water and OJ and popping Zicam (proven to shorten colds...but we'll see) every two hours. 

At least it's given me a chance to binge all four seasons of Mr. Show--the entire series is now streaming on HBO Max!--because weird comedy is my comfort food. And one of my all-time favorite Mr. Show sketches is the whacked out, spot-on H.R. Pufnstuf parody "The Altered State of Drugachusetts," where instead of Freddy the Flute they got Gurgle the Bong, costumed characters who are either tripping balls or trying to come down from tripping balls, and David Cross sporting a bad pageboy wig and doing a brilliant Jack Wild, complete with those weird, jerky dance kicks he used to bust out during the musical numbers. 

Bonus: a little-known version of the HR Pufnstuf song, recorded by The Murmurs and featured on the 1995 compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits, an album with mid-90s mainstays like Liz Phair, Matthew Sweet, Juliana Hatfield, and Collective Soul covering theme songs from 1970's kids' shows. It's a lot of fun, and probably one of the best things to come out of the nineties' obsession with seventies pop culture.

And with that, I think it's time for me to down some Nyquil and pass out.