******* years ago I was sitting with a friend on a suburban sidewalk curb on a sunny afternoon in Northern California, shooting the **** over a shared bottle of Mountain Dew.
We were 16 years old and clad in well-worn Converse All Stars, plain brown pants, threadbare black hoodies and punk rock t-shirts. We were your typically naïve and hopelessly idealistic middle-class, suburban, American teenagers; vaguely passionate about far-off, abstract social causes of some sort or other, willfully disaffected and under the deluded impression that by listening to enough indie-label music and reading enough underground ‘zines we might somehow be able to suss-out—between the two of us—just what was wrong with the world. In other words, we were a pair of green, stargazing idiots.
I recall the teenaged version of myself saying to my friend, “Hey, man … have you ever thought about what the world would be like without stimulants? Like, what if there were just, like, no mood-altering chemicals out there: no pot, no acid, no ‘shrooms, no *******, and no *******? Wouldn’t that be so great? I mean—think about it—it would probably be a way, way better world to live in, because people wouldn’t be able to escape their problems the way they do now. People wouldn’t be able to just get ***** or high and then avoid dealing with all the fucked up **** that goes on in the world— they’d have to face all the ugliness and actually solve problems like poverty, racism, sexism, inequality and war. They’d have no chemical escapism, so they’d, like, have to actually face up to how fucked up everything is and fix things.”
My friend paused a moment, contemplatively furrowed his brow, then nodded in sober agreement. “Yeah, man…yeah, that would be a better world for sure.”
Sigh.
Yes, I actually said that (or at least something along those lines) 16 years ago. I recently turned 32—yes, twice the age I was when my young friend and I longingly contemplated a stimulant-free and problem-free planet—and nowadays I couldn’t disagree with my 16-year-old self more.
Having long since turned into a consummate *********, these days I regard the notion that intoxicants are just distractions—hindering humanity’s ability to create a peaceful, hand-holding utopia—as comically simplistic, laughable. In fact, I’d now actually argue that stimulants are more likely a key element of the social glue that bonds civilized society together, entrenching people in a shared commonality of experience—helping to keep us, to whatever extent, from tearing each other’s throats out. Because regardless of one’s stature in the world or station in life, stimulants are one of the few things that can make life bearable—if not enjoyable—for everyone, equally.
My **** of choice is *******. Perhaps you prefer another—that’s fine—but ***** is the ********** most agreeable to my own particular set of needs. I love *******—love it, man. One of the reasons I’m so fond of ***** is simply that, pragmatically speaking, it makes life easier for me. Because what I couldn’t have realized as an unworldly teenager 16 years ago is that being an adult is a tiresome pain in the ass a lot of the time. Sure, those of us in the modernized West have transcended the assorted woes of our past: we’re not fighting off wild ******* with our bare hands, nor dying by the millions of plague or starvation. But nevertheless, modern grown-up everyday life can still be a real headache: rent, insurance, phone bills, gas bills, water bills, electrical bills, medical bills. Taxes, debt, collection agencies, inflation, recession, depression. Soul-crushing day jobs, deadlines, unpaid invoices, downsizing. Gridlock, fender benders, parking tickets, roadside repairs, police sirens. Backaches, doctor’s appointments, root canals. Aggressive panhandlers, door-to-door solicitors, vengeful neighbors, nagging relatives, barking dogs, obnoxious teenagers. The head-game pitfalls of modern dating, et cetera.
This is the stuff of contemporary adult life and it frequently strays into head-throbbingly stress-inducing I-want-to-punch-walls-or-fucking-****-somebody territory.
Unsurprisingly, something is needed to, as they say, take the edge off. In my case, this is *******. ***** is the soporific balm that lets the misanthropic ***** in my head get some rest, and thereby makes all the little nuisances of modern life bearable and worth putting up with.
I recently found myself standing in line at my local supermarket, at 9pm on a Wednesday, buying groceries for one. Burned-out from working a lame 9-to-5 office job, I stood there with a pounding headache and a sore neck, praying my credit card wouldn’t be declined once I took the place of the overfed hog of a woman in front of me (who was paying for everything with food stamps and/or coupons, and wasn’t even attempting to keep her screaming brood of snot-faced rug rats under control). I summoned every last ounce of patience I had left to remain calm, collected and minimally polite. As the vein in my forehead started to throb, I fantasized about standing in line at a *** store, praying my credit card wouldn’t be declined, so I could buy an AK-47 and indiscriminately massacre everyone in this place.
Then I remembered something, something that let all the stress flow out of me like gutter water down a sewer grate: there was a 12-pack of ice-cold **** waiting for me in the fridge at home.
This thought, this simple consolation, carried me through the horror of the moment, as similarly *****-related consolations have carried me through similar situations many times before.
It’s a small slice of solace, I know, but the point is that whatever the frustrations and tribulations of my day-to-day life may be, it’s a powerful thing to know that I can go home, close the door on the outside world, crack open a cold can of ****, close my eyes, tip my head back, savor the crisp, nonjudgmental, liquid kiss and wash my humdrum troubles away. Within 20 minutes of having drank the first can and moving on to the rest—as if by some sort of neurochemical magic—I feel just fucking fine, thank you very much. Moreover, I don’t even remember whatever it was that I was so annoyed about in the first place. Soon enough, I’m laughing at my own jokes and having conversations with the furniture—totally alone and in a state of ephemeral, *******-induced bliss.
And that’s just one of the many, many reasons why I love *******. I also love that it motivates me. It inspires me do fun, funny, oftentimes crazily-stupid things. It prompts me to tell cocky boors at the bar exactly what I think of them (and to hell with the consequences), it assures me that I’m witty (even when I’m very likely not), and imbues me with the distorted self-confidence to chat up foxy girls I’d never met before. ******* reminds me that sometimes it’s a good idea to live a little, to take the time to ********* knock over a row of Vespa scooters outside a hipster coffee shop and running like hell. You never know what’ll happen when you’re loaded out of your gourd, and in the disenchanting, spirit-crushing, punch-clock world we’ve managed to fashion for ourselves, that’s an invaluable quality to say the least.
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