Collective Dissonance

When I think about life, I often think of the things that I’d absolutely love to do, but I’m not allowed to do, or I cannot allow myself to do.

I have very few real addictions in life. I classify a real addiction as something I need to survive, something I go out of my way to make sure I have whenever I need it, and something I cannot live without but can humanly survive without. If I do go without, I freak out and cannot function as a normal human being. For me, those things are medicated lip balm, tetrahydrozoline eyedrops, caffeine, and ibuprofen.

I’ve been addicted to medicated lip balm ever since I was in middle school, so it’s been a very long time. I usually went without any kind of lip balm and rocked chapped lips at the time, but then I read an article on the internet…and this was back in my AOHell days, about how girls didn’t like to kiss chapped lips. Since I was a lonely, desperate twelve year old at the time, I immediately needed some lip balm, even though I logically knew that I would not be kissing anyone for a very long time. I’ve had this burning desire for medicated lip balm ever since, and I cannot leave home without it. If I do, my lips start to hurt and I get panicky, but luckily it seems like a faily common addiction to have, and if nothing else it serves as a conversation starter. Plus, when I did kiss a girl for the first time when I was 14, you can be damn sure that I had nice, soft lips.

My addiction to tetrahydrozoline eyedrops started around the same time as my lip balm addiction, although I think I was younger. I kept having constant eye irritation, which was stressful because I had already worn glasses for a year in the third grade, and had since graduated to contacts in the fourth grade, and being the vein person I was at the time, I didn’t want to wear my glasses back to that horrible place that was public school. So, after many eye doctor visits that ended in steroidal eye drops, my parents up and bought me wonderful Visine. It took the redness out, and soothed my eyes like you wouldn’t believe. After that, I learned I could put it in my eyes every morning before I put my contacts on to keep the burning out, and with that, I discovered what every pothead knew before myself: Visine is a wonderful thing. Now I struggle to put on my contacts without it, and I’ve been told to stop by my eye doctor, but alas, every morning I succumb to the Visine monster.

I think very few people in this country lack a caffeine addiction. It is our stimulant of choice, making every day possible and more bearable. I remember my first experience with coffee in particular, I was around 4 or 5 at the time. My mum was at a tire dealership having the brakes replaced on her Volvo sedan, and I saw this wonderful pot of black goodness sitting on the counter in the waiting room against an array of styrofoam cups and cylinders of powdered non-dairy creamer and sugar set next to the iconic red and white stir sticks. As I was a wee boy, I demanded to try this goodness that I saw sitting there, and my mum, in her infinite wisdom or infinite stupidity doctored up a cup of coffee and it was the most wonderful thing I ever tasted. I’ve loved coffee and caffeine ever since, and I even remember waking up for elementary school at 7 in the morning to turn on the coffee maker and watch the original Power Rangers. Yeah, I’m that old. Everyone told me it would stunt my growth, but it didn’t. I grew up to a six foot two behemoth, or so I’ve always been made to feel, although I always feel like everyone is taller than me.

I don’t recall what started my ibuprofen addiction, but it rages within me every day. When I wake up, I immediately pop ibuprofen to keep the rebound headaches away, and the other body aches that will occur throughout the day. I haven’t aged well, and even in my 20’s I have a hell of a lot of pain. I even have sciatica for fucks sake. My doctor says I don’t take enough ibuprofen a day to do any harm, and so I keep on. I’ve even gotten others addicted to the stuff. My last girlfriend refused to take painkillers when she first met me, but I changed that, and to this day she still subscribes to my ibuprofen philosophy of why be in pain when you can just take something.  She’s a good kid, I’m glad in the midst of ruining her life that I gave her magical insight.

Those things however, are relatively benign. They’re socially acceptable addictions, addictions that it’s okay to talk about out in the real world without fear that you’re being blacklisted by the listmakers of society. Those things I do everyday, but I don’t think about everyday. I don’t think about what it would be like to have some or do something involving them, I just do it. No, it’s the other things that get to me.

I often think about the joys of smoking a cigarette. I’ve smoked very little in my lifetime, no more than 10 packs in my entire life, but the feeling of that burn of smoke and nicotine and tobacco is wonderful. Smoking for me is so incredibly calming, and I’ve used it during rather piss poor times in my life to completely unwind, and it does the trick. There is absolutely nothing better than standing outside in the dark, listening to an introspective song on the mp3 player, and just having a burn. Whenever I start smoking again, I eventually get bored or I force myself to stop because of the fear of death and the sheer fact that I can’t afford to spend six dollars for a pack of cigarettes. I enjoy the cigarette more than the cigar too, the cigarette is much less refined, much more personal. A cigar is bulky and enjoyable. A cigarette is rough and deeply personal.

I used to try to avoid alcohol as much as possible, but as is normal in society, I think to myself anytime I see someone drinking alcohol or I’m having a bad time that god, I could use a drink. I really do enjoy alcohol in all different forms, but when I drink it, especially when I am alone, I am driven to the darkest corners of excess, past the target of the buzz and straight into the hells of drunkenly stumbling back to bed. Alcohol is one of those drugs that I crave, but I never feel particularly good about it afterward, no matter how much I drink. I feel like such a stigma has been placed against alcohol in my head that I’m afraid of it, and I don’t know how to use it properly, and when I do use it, I don’t feel like I want it to. Alcohol is both inspiring and disappointing at the same time.

All of those things though, those things are perfectly legal. What comes next blurs that line.

I’ve not done many drugs in my life, I haven’t even smoked pot because I just never knew the right stoners to acquire some, but I had a rousing desire to get wasted, so I resorted to other, primarily teenagerish methods of escape..

My first foray into aspects like this included taking 1400mg of diphenhydramine, or benedryl. The experience, as it was my first time to truly “trip balls”, was absolutely terrible. I had taken so much that the walls were breathing, and I saw red and green bridges being built by invisible fingers to different reaches within the room, and I just sat there staring stupidity at things that didn’t really exist, not knowing what as going on. My most distinct memory of the trip was the clock. It casted a shadow on the wall, and as I watched it, it would peel itself off the wall, almost melting as if Salivdor Dali was controlling my mind into a persistence of memory. Things went okay until I panicked, and then I had a bad time. I don’t remember most of the end, but I remember saying things to people even though I couldn’t hear them or see them. My drug induced mind would have conversations that my conscious mind couldn’t ascertain. I finally got through it with the help of my trip sitter and best friend, even though the experience thoroughly freaked her the fuck out. My hands shook for about a week after that too.

Next, I moved onto DXM. I was having a really bad time of things in life, and one night at about midnight, I needed to escape. I went down the street to the CVS and the Walgreens and purchased enough cough syrup based on my calculations to get me to the upper second plateau. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my drug life, the first plateau of feeling the joy and utter euphoria of movement and the upper second plateau where I could lay in bed, put on the right music and truly believe that I was flying. I’ve done it twice since, and I’ve never gotten back to where I was that night, which leaves me with great disappointment.

The next thing I ever did was inhalants, primarily inhaling the contents of the gas duster you buy to clean out your electronics. I’d had friends who did it, but ultimately I was afraid to try it. One night, I finally worked up the courage to get after it, and I sat in the bathroom, stuck the straw in my mouth, and pulled the trigger. The high itself is one of the worst I’ve ever had. All you feel is your mind making this high pitched skipping noise as your brain cells waste away from lack of oxygen. There is no euphoria, nothing to feel good about, but still it was a new experience. The most troubling thing about gas duster is my propensity to redose to the point where I don’t even know I’m doing it. I think that’s how most people die from it, you fade so far away that you keep redosing without logic, and the next thing you know you’re waking up in a pool of vomit happy to be alive.

Lorazepam, or Ativan is quite the interesting experience. I happened onto a bunch of it after my mum had ordered some from Mexico, but then circumstances got in the way and my ex-girlfriend Natasha and I intercepted the box. We acquired a collection of 60 tablets of lorazepam, which lent itself to many interesting experiences. It in and of itself exists to relax you, and at first we took it as such. I took it before giving a presentation in freshman psychology, and then I took another one when I got my tongue pierced because I was so utterly terrified but I wanted to do something completely bad ass. My girlfriend at the time took three of them when we went out for her 20th birthday to relax, and consequently she doesn’t remember much about the night, but I do.

We went to go eat at TGI Fridays, and before long, I knew I was in trouble. Natasha first got up to go to the bathroom, and I watched her walk to the entrance of the bathroom, stop for a bit, and then come back to the table pretending she had just been to the bathroom. After we finished our obviously frozen and defrosted appetizer, she looked up to the waitress and with the most straight and sincere face, said slurredly “Tell the chef the chicken was excellent”, and she meant it. We got through dinner without the waitress calling the cops on me for drugging my date, and then it was off to the mall. We walked into Hot Topic, and my ex-girlfriend grabbed a corset off the wall and then proceeded to the dressing room for 30 minutes. These were some of the longest 30 minutes in my life, as I was terribly worried about what had happened, and when she finally emerged, my anger couldn’t be suppressed, and she bought the corset, and we went to the car to have a crying argument, which was the norm since we were having a lot of trouble at the time. I remember spending the rest of the night driving around town looking for a playstation 2 game as she slept in the front seat. She still doesn’t remember most of that night, and I’m glad.

One night I took four lorazepam for myself, and I don’t remember much of what happened either. I do remember saying a lot of things I didn’t mean to people I really care about, though I don’t know what, and they won’t tell me to this day. I also remember getting an e-mail from the university about how someone molested a female resident in my apartment complex that night (I lived on campus), and I was terribly afraid I had done something terrible because I couldn’t remember that night. Finally they sent out a picture taken from the security camera, and when it wasn’t me, I was so terribly glad that I threw away the rest of the lorazepam and I’ve never touched any since.

Finally, lady vicodin. When I was in high school, my mother was addicted to vicodin, though I didn’t really make the connection at the time. It wasn’t until my early college years and the collaspe of a long term relationship that I started experimenting with hydrocodone. At first it was one here, one there, just to get the feeling of ease and relax, but then as I started to procure a stash of my own, I began to play around a bit more, and with higher quantities. I absolutely adore hydrocodone. I love how you get such a rush of bliss and euphoria if you take enough, a feeling to close of what I’m told is a low dose of heroin. I love the feeling I have on hydrocodone that the world truly is a good place, with good people, and I just want to completely wrap my arms around the world and give it a hug because it needs one. Hydrocodone turns the world from the horrible place it really is to the world I wish I lived in. On hydrocodone, I believe anything is possible, and my faults and fears and discrepancies fade away.

I’m not a habitual user of any of the less legal things I discussed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about them often. I think about lady vicodin, how it would be so wonderful to feel like that all the time. I understand addiction, I really do. I understand how easy it is to get addicted, but so far I’ve stopped myself from getting there because I have no logical alternative once I get there. I know I walk a slippery slope, and I know I’m one step from falling apart into blissful addiction, but I do the best I can.

I know drugs are things you shouldn’t do everyday, especially the ones like lady vicodin that make life so amazing. I know that if I did those everyday, life would lose all meaning. I go through life right now knowing that behind all the misery and all the suffering, that something exists that can make life so wonderful and so amazing that it feels like your heart might explode. Drugs are probably the closest we’ll ever get to experiencing the modern idealogical idea of “heaven”, and I guess you could say drugs like hydrocodone are my god, because I have no other god.

I don’t pray to her everyday, every month, or even every year, but when I do, I truly feel alive.

That’s enough for me.