Yeesh, I am bored. They have taken the morning blood, and I am awaiting my next activity- lunch- in three and a half hours.

Hello to readers from Mightygodking.com, where I am guest-blogging for the next few weeks. My name is Dan. I’m in a drug-testing facility in Middlesex, England. It’s kind of like an old folks’ home, but for young folks. There are about twenty-five other guinea pigs in here with me, and we’re not sick, just testing experimental drugs for side effects and interactions with food. The facility is kind of just a really long hallway, with doors on the south-facing side that open to seven different wards. This is where we sleep, six to a room. There’s also what they refer to as a lounge, which is a room with a giant television and a bunch of board games. That’s pretty much the extent of the place. There is supposed to be a cafeteria, but it’s undergoing some home improvements, so instead we eat our meals at bedside or in the TV room.

Mostly it’s boring in here, unless it’s uncomfortable. Those are really the only two options on the menu- days on which you have a lot of procedures are uncomfortable. The procedures are mostly blood collections (where you have the choice of being stuck with a needle or having a canula inserted into your vein so they can bleed you on command, like a faucet), ECGs, which involve sticking electrodes to your chest to map out how your heart moves, and basic stuff like blood pressure and pule monitoring. It wouldn’t be so bad except that you have these procedures about every half an hour, and they take about twenty-five minutes per go-around, so you only get about five minutes every half hour to do anything besides get poked and examined. It isn’t as sexy as it sounds. The boring days are the ones on which you have very few procedures, and you can kill the time online or in the TV room.

Right now, the TV room is overrun with men in their mid-twenties watching a program in which old people buy property in Southern Europe. English TV is awful, but you already knew that. Forget about how much you like the office or dr who or spaced or whatever and focus on the fact that you can likely count the number of British shows worth watching in the past decade on your fingers. This is what happens when you have four channels, and it is a national mandate that at least one of them show a gardening program at all times.

Oh, here’s a funny thing about England and television- when I first moved here, I was watching deadwood, and I was pretty evangelical about how much I liked it. But when I talked to English people about it, they couldn’t take me seriously. This is because of Ian McShane, who played Al Swearengen. Al Swearengen is one of the more remarkable and unique television creations (the real dude upon whom the character is based is less so) and McShane does an amazing job with the character, so this seemed weird to me. The reason English people can’t take Ian McShane seriously, though, is that in the 80’s, he was the star of an insanely popular show where he was sort of their David Hasselhoff- he played an antiques dealer who ran around solving mysteries and foiling the mad escapades of diamond smugglers and stuff. That’s everything you need to know about the English television you haven’t seen. Their idealized male action heroes are antiques dealers.

But today, I would kill for the chance to watch that show (it was called lovejoy). Instead I’ve been watching band of brothers, which was the wrong choice. At least half of the nurses in here are German, and their thick accents make me distrust them immediately. get away from me with that needle, you damn kraut! I want to yell. tell jerry he’s not doing his experiments on this guy! But I do not. I signed up for this.

(if you’re interested in more on this, I published a zine documenting my first drug study a few years ago. It’s available to read free in its entirety.)