I get to his house and let myself in through the basement door. The stale air inside immediately takes me. James sits on a couch. He looks at me and nods and mutters something but I don’t want to talk to him so much as get a glass of water, yet he seems happy to see me or at least to see somebody, as he is often desperate for human interaction, which I doubt that I can provide for him at the moment. He pulls a pill bottle out his left cargo pocket and tells me that he has more than what I was expecting, and at that point I was willing to talk, but I desperately needed a glass of water.

He shows me an eighty milligram pill of OxyContin, the old kind, one that you can grind into powder, which I hadn’t seen for weeks and as he hands it to me I am instantly overcome by how well I am able to breathe through my nose at the time, how strong and healthy my body has become as of late. And in a way, I could feel myself dissolve on the inside. I sit down next to him on the couch and pull the coffee table closer so I have a good surface to work on.

“Come on, Matt,” James says. “You’re going to tear up the carpet doing that. Fucking be careful.”

“Sorry. I didn’t think of that.” As I say this I wonder why anyone would install carpet in a basement, although this is where he lives. I suppose he wants to make it as comfortable as possible. James hands me a hose clamp and I bend it into an arc so I can grate the pill into a pile of powder, and the simple act of grinding, the scraping sound of it, induces a euphoria in me and I think about the past month or so, how hellish it was, the anguish, the way that my body sickens without this substance in my system.

And all the while, James is ranting about something that he thinks people don’t understand: “I’ll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and…and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies and the bodies and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds of young men who give what they have to it and give everything they have to it and it’s a… it’s a term that’s based on contempt, it’s a term that’s based on fashion, style, elitism, Satanism and everything that’s rotten about rock’ n’ roll. Of course, I can’t say that I ever knew Johnny Rotten, but I’m sure… I’m sure he put as much blood and sweat into what he did as Sigmund Freud did.”

I look him in his half-shut eyes as long as I can and ask him how much of this shit he’s done, jokingly. And for some reason, I can’t help but picture him re-shingling his grandfather’s roof, and also the effort he puts in to his job at the Honda dealership. He tells me about his family sometimes, about his father’s success. He says he’s on his way to his father’s efficiency. A practical man, a Jack-of-all-Trades, so to speak. A useful friend.

“I think it sounds like trash,” I say.

“Well, okay,” he says, leaning closer to me. “You see, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genius, myself. And that music is so powerful that it’s quite beyond my control and when I’m in the grips of it I don’t feel pleasure and I don’t feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Have you ever felt like that? When you just couldn’t feel anything and you didn’t want to either. You know? Like that? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I don’t say anything. Eventually I tell him that I’m meeting her later and he acts like this is typical, as if he knew I was going to say this or that I already had, which doesn’t make sense to me because I have not spoken to her in some time and he tells me to get out, possibly for ignoring him. As I walk out, I promise him I will pay him for helping me out probably in a few days.

“Fine.” He lets out a sigh the sound of Central Air, leans his head back, and closes his eyes.

…

The last dream I had involved Sarah. I don’t remember much of it. It had something to do with myself sitting up on my side of the bed, moving my feet to the floor and rubbing my oily face with the palms of my hands, sleep smearing my vision. Dazed from waking, I looked behind me and saw her lying there, deeply sleeping and serene, the curls of her auburn hair splashed over half of her face and on the pillow under her head. I can’t tell if it’s the trickery of my blurred vision of waking or something leftover from the night before, but I tried to focus on the living curls of her hair, coiling around her face and around the pillow, tickling her nose. There was another part that had to do with something I have already forgotten. I’m not sure when this dream occurred. Last night I dreamt of nothing.

…

I meet Sarah at a local diner over coffee and to talk because we haven’t talked in a while and I’m certain that it bothers her. I pull open the door to the diner and motion for her to go in first. We take a seat at a booth next to a family of a mother and two young boys. I watch one of the boys pour into his mouth a couple packets of sugar I was hoping he wouldn’t. Under the table, I pull out a bar of Xanax from a pack of cigarettes in my pocket that I took from James and squeeze it between my fingers.

“Can I get you anything, dear,” says Margie, the waitress, standing over the two of us as if she just sprouted out of the ground. I order a cup of coffee, as black as she can make it. Sarah asks for water with as much politeness as she can muster up.

“We should have gone to a coffee shop.” Sarah says. When she speaks all her teeth show, and I can’t help but think about how much we have in common and how she is so far out of reach. A warm sea apart. Earlier, she called me and I thought about letting this one go, but I brought my phone to my ear and said hello. Her voice the tone of a lovely violin. I imagined her breath smelled like sweet fruit. She always seemed like a stranger, more or less, but there was something between us, something that felt tender but uncertain. I felt like we both wanted to figure that out.

“This place is fine. I like it here. Don’t you think it’s comfortable, welcoming at least?” I want her to understand my sentiments.

“They don’t serve tea here.”

“It doesn’t matter because we need to talk.”

“You haven’t spoken to me much.”

I pause. “I haven’t been myself lately.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

I don’t say anything. Margie comes back with a mug of coffee and places it in front of me along with a small bowl of half and half creamers and sets Sarah’s glass of water in front of her and walks away without giving her a straw. I stare at my coffee, watch the steam rise and the thickness of it swirl like a puddle of oil, and as I fix my eyes on my drink that I have utterly lost interest in I know that Sarah is staring at me, trying to extract some kind of value from my face. I try to stay stern.

After about a minute of silence, Sarah repeats what she said.

I do not say anything.

And at this moment, a man that I’ve never seen before walks into the diner and recognizes Sarah sitting with me, and he takes a step towards our booth, a giddy smile stretching across his face, ready to greet her, but when he notices that she’s crying, his grin dissipates and he turns away, and as she wipes the tears from her eyes I eat the entire pill as fast as I can, washing it down with scalding coffee. She stands up, maneuvering out of the booth.

“Never mind. I might call you later.”

“Okay. Call me if you want.”

…

James tells me I owe so many people money, and so I’m losing friends, then he tells me that he likes my shirt and asks me if I liked a certain band, but I had never heard of them. James and I are a lot alike. His back is fairly straight. We walk the same stride. Our friendship has always involved the utility of drugs, and it’s not easy to readjust, so we try to distract and sedate and plug up the holes that belong to us.

Someone else sits in the room that wasn’t there earlier. He seems rough, with two lit cigarettes between chapped, peeling lips. “I’m holding this one for a friend,” he says.

A flash of stillness occurs. A balloon in the conversation. Everyone falls voiceless. We stop talking for a while and listen to the basement breathe through radiators, seemingly moving, almost alive.

The sun comes up, unwanted, and I am irritated. As I get high, I realize I am afraid of something I wasn’t considering before or maybe I just didn’t understand, and so I decide to leave. But the truth is there is no coming and no going. I stand up and do not look at the stranger or James, who was busy shuffling a deck of cards.

“This was a bad idea.” I told him, knowing that he might misunderstand such a vague statement.

“Yeah,” he said without saying goodbye or looking at me, and so I eventually made my way through his door and that was that. That moment was a failure. The next may be better.

I have heard some striking stories on the effects of LSD on a person’s rationality and logic from people that I know. These are people whose minds have been slightly warped due to a thriving market and culture. Consumers crippled by the products they demand so fervently. It is fairly well known today that marijuana smoke is extensively more harmful than tobacco smoke, yet I frequently come across flyers around campus suggesting an organized effort to legalize marijuana. The conflict seems to be amusement vs. health. But civilization has been infused with passion and excitement with the rise of intoxicants. Risky impulses have been fulfilled with the rise of intoxicants. Every day life isn’t such a droning, bitter and bland routine when we disintegrate and disorganize. We hold infinite perspective in the palms of our hands. Recreational drug use is a way of life among the curious youth that cannot be willingly resigned. How can we give it up?

The perceptions of the effects of drugs on people today are radically different than they were in the 1960s. Back then, the psychedelic van strolled down the American road full of loving animals. Psychedelia first became a lifestyle and a major component for the intellectual type. Drugs were the right way to increase creativity and mental power. They were imbued with a spiritual nature and were not illicit. Drugs were innocent. An entire culture of people tightened its affectionate bear hug around mind alteration and kissed the pipe. Hippies weren’t even the first counterculture to compete with mainstream structure; the Beat Generation embraced marijuana and mescaline, among other drugs, as a means of perspective as well.

Drugs have now become, for the most part, a venture of escapism much like our beloved television, video game console, and fantasy novel. Maybe it has always been that way. I cannot say that this is either good or bad. Most classrooms are too dull, most jobs are too repetitive, most lines are too straight, and most people are too bored. This is a matter of simple pleasure. It is the cold numb space that I drift in when I’m high. The self-inflicted glitch in my machine. It paints the walls with intense technicolor, adds action to my stable life. I close my eyes and watch strands of radiance swirling like a screensaver. And as it wears off, I get dragged down to the solid world. Indole alkaloids, such as acid and psychedelic mushrooms, have more than once left me as a sickly sewer rat in the dull grasp of The Ordinary by the end of the day. My throat dries up. The nutrients in my body get depleted. Everything that could be considered good about it is entirely fleeting. We soon regain strength, replenish. Wait a few weeks and you figure out that the feeling is so utterly temporary and all you want to do is buy more products. Maybe the impermanence doesn’t even cross your mind, but either way you still want more. Sometimes I don’t know if I need it more than I want it, or vice versa, but it feels good and that’s what really matters. The key word is hedonism.

Aside from abusing drugs for the sake of amusement, we self-medicate with them to muddle through cruel emotional troubles. Alcohol is one, if not the only socially acceptable means of self-medication. Drugs are a coping mechanism. Those prone to fear tend to lift off in illicit shuttles. Depression rises from our fiery bodies for the street merchants to extinguish. Sometimes we feel guilty when in a stressful state, as if depression and rage are simply the wrong emotions to feel. We could blame this societal approach on a frustrating dependency upon demanding institutions, vague and deceptive advertising, public relations scams, fake primetime comedies, etc. Commercials for fresh medication tell us how to function and offer their pricy comforting solutions. In a consumerist society, we as average citizens are given a small number of options in life and are persuaded to buy supplies for bliss. If we are not fully aware of what we’re hearing and why we’re hearing it, we end up convincing ourselves of how we should think and feel based on what snake-tongued profiteers say. Thus, we resort to self-medication in order to obey and fit like puzzle pieces within typical human organization. Many drugs are stress relievers, but the fact is that some are legal and some are not.

But there is more than one type of salesman: the above mentioned Street Merchant. I’ve heard the argument that drugs are first and foremost a financial institution. Cocaine is powdered cash and marijuana is as green as the dollar bills that may or may not be in your wallet or bank account. Criminal organizations all over the world are fueled by feel-good toxins. Street gangs in dirty urban areas frequently release blood over drugs. It is a thriving, violent market. A dealer once told me he is a businessman before a junkie. I’m almost surprised that marijuana is still illegal when considering our capitalistic society and all the pill commercials on TV and all the stocked medicine cabinets across the nation.

Many components of popular culture have and will always embrace marijuana as the safest jail breaker. In the 60s, a kid could tune in to any radio station and hear lyrics of drug romance: the Grateful Dead, The Doors, etc. Weed still emanates from the words of hip hop and reggae, and there is a following in the genre of stoner metal. In any case, censorship has taken these references off of the airwaves. High Times is a strong proponent for recreational drug use, though it can be difficult to take this magazine seriously. Hollywood targets smokers with the outwardly delightful stoner movie, such as Half Baked and Friday. Reefer Madness, a film from the 1930s, is an anti-drug film yet it is regularly grouped in with stoner movies as ridiculous entertainment. In this sense, popular culture and the media can be subtly expressive and indirect of what is acceptable in the world when regarding recreational drugs.

Still, society is torn on how to handle drug abuse. Vast amounts of research have been conducted on all types of drugs since the late 60s. Physical addiction is the cold essence that our blood envelopes. Therefore, cocaine and heroine will never detach from a hard stigma. Our entire population is fully aware of the harmful possibilities of recreational drug use.  Information like this can be accessed all over the media. There are anti-drug websites with archives full of personal drug narratives. One could simply open a magazine or turn on his or her television and see an anti-marijuana public service announcement. These PSAs are also on posters and billboards across the country as well as all over the Internet. Media claims like these spit in the bloodshot eyes of drug inspired entertainment. Everyday we are subject to so many mixed messages on the topic of drugs through popular culture and popular news media by separate organizations with separate agendas. The key word is contradiction.

I’ll leave you with one last thought: consider the groups of people who flock together and assert themselves as “straight edge”. This basically means they take no part in substance abuse of any kind. They represent a conflicting subculture, coinciding with the punk music scene, to that of drug junkies. Thus, sobriety has become more of a definition, a lifestyle rather than something natural. It seems that society sleeps in constricting cabinets as we begin to dichotomize the natural aspects of our lives. This may signify how permanent drug culture has become and how it will continue to solidify over time.