Friday, June 12, 2009

Love [is] the Drug

Walking to work this morning, actually walking to buy coffee from the cute new barista at Speeder and Earl's, I saw/smelled 3 people getting high on their ways to work. Got me thinking about getting numb before work to make it not as awful.
Maybe if you can't feel anything while you're entering data or doing things at your firm that people at firms do, maybe then it doesn't feel like a waste or a severe compromise.

Or maybe you only feel truly creative when you're high and then you can come up with really good names for files and titles for spreadsheets, meanwhile sketching trippy patterns and phrases that you will later transfer to a canvas and your journal. And then maybe you don't feel bound to anything; you feel free and light and part of the earth and the trees from where the paper in your printer came.

Maybe you've been smoking since you were a freshman in high school, or even in 8th grade, and now you can't function without weed; it feels more like you're on drugs when you're off them. You like the way your head feels and the way that music sounds and the culture and the experiences that you can't always remember.

And you forgot your lighter at home because you weren't stoned first, or else you would have remembered, so you pack your swirly-colored, hand-blown glass piece and use the matches you keep in your car for cases like this. And while you're stuck in traffic and listening to talk radio and news headlines, experiencing the truly tragic on your 15 minute ride to work, you strike the match and burn your essential green and inhale and hold the smoke in your lungs long enough to make you cough--that's the really good high--and now you're ready for work. Ready like having done your hair. Ready like having packed a 32 ounce thermos of strong Starbuck's coffee with low-fat half-and-half. Ready like having masturbated in the shower in the morning. Ready like having shaved your face. Ready like having put on lipstick and then having put the tube in your purse for touch-ups during the day. And you're ready to hold this vestige, this secret from coworkers, which would surely have you on the streets with little chance of being hired anywhere if anyone found out. And God knows, you don't want to end up like people like that.

1 comment:

emily said...

I reallllly like this... kinda crazy how omnipresent weed is in the lives of lots of "fully functioning" people, and as a culture we pretend this relationship doesn't exist.