Sunday, October 5, 2008

serious questions

Things have been quite serious lately, because Mom was in town last weekend, and Little Brother just left about an hour ago. Serious Family Time. I've also kicked it into high gear lately with $chool, and using $chool as a distraction from the boys who are driving me insane. My brain has been chugging, tweaking, exploding, and twisting itself into uncomfortable knots that make me think that it's working, that I'm learning, which is both exciting and overwhelming.

My three dates in three nights a week ago was a little intense-o, and the exchange I wanted to have with John didn't work out Tuesday. It did, however, work out that way with Joe, who ended up spending the night Wednesday, and in the midst of our heart-to-heart/reunion, I sent a text out to three friends saying that I couldn't tell if I was in love or just drunk. Their three responses were: (1)Drunk! (2) Different! and (3) I think they are somehow related.

All three of these responses were true, which leads me to some serious questions. When I drink, I am flooded with intense feelings of love, particularly for other drunk people. Although when I drank with Moms and Little Brother these past two weekends, I definitely loved them too. But why is it that lately my level of love/engagement seems directly related to my BAC?

Thursday night I had a couple birthday drinks and bumps with John before going to meet up with Little Brother. John in my mind is intertwined with cocaine, and this is somewhat troubling and begs more questions. Like why does he do so much coke? And why do I love coke so much too? And why is it such a bad thing? Are all of us who (ab)use substances just inherently unhappy people who just don't know any other way to make ourselves feel better? Because that's why I think I do drugs. (This kind of endears John to me in a way. I know that's fucked up, but I never claimed to be anything else.) Or maybe inherently unhappy isn't wholly accurate. We desperately want to feel a certain way, and we know that drugs will allow us to feel this way. I've realized that when I talk about stability, I'm not talking about a form of life, I'm talking about a form of feeling. Some people do things with their lives to effect certain structural and interpersonal changes with careers, locations, and relationships. Other people take a more chemist-like approach to their happiness through a combination of drugs, complex carbohydrates, and fried cheeses. I know that I definitely fall into this latter category, and whenever something feels amiss, I have several tried-and-true ingestives to which I can turn without many negative consequences. In moments of extreme sobriety, however, I can't escape the thought that I am slowly killing myself, but I don't know any other way to live. Attempts at self-preservation seem so fruitless and misguided.

Friends, lovers, and strangers, please tell me something: Why do we do drugs? Is drug use indicative of unhappiness and immaturity, a lack of a developed manner of handling all the rough spots in life?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hmm, i think i do drugs for similar reasons as you, but i wouldn't separate the "interpersonal" from the "chemist/emotive" sources of happiness (i would, if i could, and i do try, separate the "career" from the "happy" -- easier said of course.)

i think some pragmatism is good here, within reason, ("whatever gets you through the night, it's alright."), but i do think we (meaning human beings since time immemorial) like euphoria-inducing drugs for *both* individual, visceral pleasures, *and* how these pleasures increase in the company of others, knowing, in that great mobius strippy way, that they're also deriving glee cuz they know we're gleeful, and so on and so on...

so i think the ritual aspect of the drug is just as important as the chemical, and this i think is a good thing, given all the usual disclaimers.

let's smoke a joint!