Charlotte Bobcats Preview: "Drugstore"

In an effort to gear up for the NBA season, we will view the upcoming season through the eyes of Edward Hopper. Feel free to add your thoughts on the 2010 Bobcats in our comments section.Larry Brown's gut feels heavy as lead. It's been this way for years, and the clogged passages of his lower intestines are juxtaposed against the migratory habits of his feet. From Chapel Hill to Los Angeles, Kansas, San Antonio, Indiana, Philadelphia, and Detroit, Larry Brown travels America's highways like a balloon, propelled solely by his own methane.

Now, Larry is back in North Carolina, where he first picked up his dietary habits, which consist that are now responsible for his constant state of constipation. He eats pulled pork, fried okra, and Cheerwine at every meal, not ever pondering that a break from tradition is exactly what his digestive tract needs.

He visits every doctor in Charlotte to no avail. He finds Dr. Knight to be inept, a slow talker whose medical knowledge consisted of using salt tablets as a cure all. He scratches and sniffs around Dr. Felton's office, but nothing comes of it, except for a few unpaid insurance bills. Larry actually likes Dr. Felton, but he eventually grows tired of the man's insistence on always running more tests. Larry wants results, so he picks up a phone book and rummages through the list of doctors, settling on Dr. Augustin's name, as if he's found something buried underneath the font of the phone number.

His visit to Dr. Augustin is spent in constant waiting for physical and emotional relief. Larry sits in the waiting room, like a soul in purgatory, or a pet in need of an owner. Finally, he gets up and walks to the restroom and sits down on the toilet. The seat's coldness reminds Larry that all his dreams lie in his head, like fish on ice. He's spent his whole life working jobs he never wanted because the one job he always wanted never called, and, now, here he is with his ambition clogging up his whole being.

He begins to paw at the roll of toilet paper, hoping that its spinning might motivate the molecular make up of all that pork in his belly to move as well. Nothing happens. His stomach is made from stone. Larry begins to think, "what am I doing here? I've got to do something." He reaches for quality reading materials, but he finds an outdated issue of Southern Living to be insufficient, causing him to sprint out the front door of Dr. Augustin's with the determination of a canine after the silver bumper of a car. Automobiles screech to a halt as he criss-crosses the pavement.

Propelled solely by his own flagellation, Larry races from an ice cold toilet seat all the way down Main Street and into the corner shop pharmacy, where he stands, panting, eyeing a bottle of Tyson Chandler's Miracle Laxative, which costs more than any other laxative on the shelf, but has no better performance record than Diop's Drop a Deuce or even Okafor's Oat Meal. He paces in the aisle like a dog, longing to mark its territory, fearing it won't even leave behind the shit that causes walkers to curse one's name.