just words

Drugs. What's there not to love about drugs?

Other than the whole crippling chemical dependence thing, which raises serious questions about free will, and all the heinous life-changing side effects like your heart permanently doubling in size from all the steroids and your nose collapsing into your face from years of snorting various powders and your teeth turning into little baked beans that fall out because of all the meth and your memory becoming so shot that you often can’t remember where you stashed your dope and of course the risk of permanent psychosis and all the twitching and sweating and jaw clenching and liver transplants and insomnia, and we can’t forget about the exorbitant costs, not just to your wallet but also to your life, because sometimes, if you smoke the wrong stuff, like if it's laced with fentanyl or whatever, you can just die instantly, which kind of sucks.

But other than all that, drugs are a whole lotta fun.

At least that's what I thought back in high school, when I was consuming illegal narcotics on the regular. I don’t claim to be an expert or anything, however. In fact, I’ve probably done less, on average, than other people my age, even though drugs were pretty much all around me in the early 2000s, especially amongst the kids-with-no-motivation-but-their-parents-have-shit-tons-of-money-so-they’ll-probably-still-end-up-unfairly-better-off-than-most crowd, which was somewhere in the middle section of the teenage-stereotypes Venn diagram, right between the I-dyed-my-hair-bright-red-to-piss-off-my-stepdad-and-I-watch-anime-religiously circle and the my-band-is-really-going-somewhere circle, both of which I loosely bordered, and I say “loosely” because, back then, I was pretty antisocial, even among the antisocial, seeing people with similar interests as a threat to the sanctity of my individuality.

Anyway, back to the drugs. I’ve done many different types of drugs, so I thought it would be a fun writing exercise to describe how each of those drugs made me feel, so that’s what I’m going to do, write about my experience with illegal narcotics, one drug at a time, one journal entry at a time. And I’m going to start with the most common, the one drug we all know so well, the one that chronic users insist is “totally harmless” and “just a plant, man.”

Of course, I’m talking about gigglebush, also known as jazz cabbage, or dinkie dow, Bob Hope, catnip, devil’s lettuce, wacky tobacky, magical leaf, dude-it’s-totally-not-oregano, or just plain old dank ass weed.

I’ve smoked a lot of gigglebush in my time, even after high school, and let me tell you, there was pretty much no giggling going on whatsoever, just a whole lot of intense self-critical introspection and existential dread, which is why I no longer smoke the quote-unquote “totally harmless plant bro,” because when I do, it usually goes a little something like this,

“Time to sit down and play some Daggerfall, surely this high will help me become more immersed in the game. It’s nice to just relax and take a break every once in a while. Escapism is good sometimes, I think. But is it, really? Don’t I have more important things to do? Couldn't I be writing, or spending time with my family? Do I even love my family? Like, truly? What is love, actually? Am I even capable of love, considering I spend so much time alone, in my office, so focused on myself? Is that all I really care about? Myself? Maybe I only really love myself. Maybe my family only puts up with me because I make a decent amount of money at work, like a breadwinner instead of a total mooch? Maybe that’s why anyone at all takes me seriously, because I have a decent-paying job. That last email I sent at work, I wonder if it was too aggressive. It probably came off the wrong way. I hope the recipient doesn’t forward my email to my boss or something. Maybe they already forwarded the email to my boss. Maybe, on Monday, when I log in, my boss will already be waiting to talk to me about my terribly worded email. Maybe I’ll get fired. But if I get fired, how would I be able to play video games in comfort, without any money coming in? Why is my first thought, if I were to lose my job, whether I’d still be able to play video games? What the fuck are my priorities? Maybe getting fired isn’t so bad, because I do sort of hate my job, and maybe I deserve to be fired. It’s not like I'm good at my job or anything, or good at anything really, especially writing, I'm definitely not good at writing, and I only write about myself pretty much, which kind of supports the whole I-only-love-myself thing, so maybe I really am an egotistical asshole, like all my ex-girlfriends say, and it’s not like anyone reads my stuff anyway, which means it’s not appealing to a wide audience, or even a small audience, which certainly indicates that my writing is shit, and considering that, my writing seems kind of embarrassing now, in hindsight, pretentious almost, so maybe I should just delete all my stuff, it's not like anyone would notice. I am seriously considering this. I could just fade into obscurity as if nothing ever happened, start over, no evidence, then no one would know how much of a self-centered pretentious asshole I am. But surely my high school ex-girlfriend would still think I'm a self-centered pretentious asshole, considering all the times I ignored her and told her that I didn't love her just to provoke some sort of reaction. Sometimes I miss her. Sometimes I dream about her, but I really wish I didn't, considering I'm married now and all. Maybe I should call her up and apologize. I don't know. I think I'm going to turn off Daggerfall now, maybe open an incognito tab, look her up, but on second thought, that probably wouldn't be a good idea, would it? What am I thinking? She’d probably just say 'um, thanks?' and hang up on me, anyway. I'm surprised more people don't just go 'um, thanks' then hang up on me, frankly, because I'm really not a great conversationalist, and I'm barely any good at speaking. Like, it takes a lot of effort for me to form coherent sentences out loud that don't sound like they're being spoken by some guy who just suffered severe head trauma, and I stutter and jumble my words a lot, which is why I prefer writing, because writing allows all this prep time to make myself appear smart, because that's all this writing stuff really is, just a way to make myself appear smart, to trick not only myself into believing that I'm smart but also everyone around me, so I'm really just a huge fraud, all appearances, and I'm almost like 99% positive everyone can tell, too, like they can all see right through me. That's why I can't make any friends, because I'm a stupid loser trying to pretend that I'm smart, which, when you get right down to it, is the most pretentious thing a person could possibly be. That's pretty much the exact definition of pretentious, isn't it? I’m going to look up the exact definition on Google now, 'attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed.' Yep, that’s me, to a tee. So much so, in fact, that they should give me some sort of trophy or something for being the most off-putting pretentious poser that no one wants to hang around ever in the history of the world. I'm such an idiot. Moron. Dumbass. Maybe I don’t love myself, maybe I just hate myself, and all the internal vanity is some sort of unconscious defense mechanism to prevent myself from realizing the truth and thus unaliving myself? There’s no way that people think I’m smart or a good writer or a nice person or even pleasant to be around. I'm sure everyone says this behind my back too, because why wouldn't they? It's true. And all the people who put up with me, they just do it to be nice, they don't want to start any drama. No one is truthful about what they really feel, it's all smoke and mirrors and masks. You can't trust anyone, myself included, not even my subconscious mind, clearly. My whole persona is an act, a terrible lie. I pretend that, if I just pretend to be something I’m not, I will eventually become the thing I am pretending to be, but does it really work that way? Is that what everyone is, a great pretender? Or am I the only great pretender, and everyone else just doesn’t have to pretend at all? Why does it feel like my head is in a glass bubble 3,682 meters below sea level? I wonder if I'm going to get fired on Monday. How do I make this pressure go away? I bet my own mother even thinks I'm an insufferable prick, that’s probably why she doesn’t even know that I write, and why I’ve never shown anyone in my family anything that I’ve written, because they know my limits, they’ve known me since I was a kid, so they’d probably take one look at my writing and laugh it off. Why is any of this important anyway? Why can’t I just chill the fuck out? I would seriously like to stop taking life so seriously. Maybe I just need to go to sleep. I think I'm just going to lay down now.”

Or something like that.

Some diehard gigglebush connoisseurs, like the two dreaded Rogans, Joe and Seth, both of whom I absolutely cannot stand, insist that this sort of introspection knock-out session is part of the whole gigglebush experience and is in fact one of the main reasons you should smoke gigglebush. “You just don't think about this kind of stuff when you're clean, so gigglebush opens your mind, man, teaches you deep subconscious things about yourself, dude, to help you self-improve.”

But I don’t need gigglebush to do this. I think about this introspective shit all the time without getting high. Gigglebush just makes me loop unnecessarily on this introspective shit, which I normally have very little harmful anxiety about, but when I smoke, I become insanely anxious and borderline suicidal. The only mind-opening gigglebush does, for me, is open my mind to madness and misery, which unsurprisingly is actually not a useful state of mind to be in. It's actually counterproductive to self-improvement, because, for me, getting high never leads to any sort of constructive long-term change in my behavior. It just leads to more anxious looping, and afterwards I barely remember any of the weed revelations, if there were any at all.

So my counterargument to the Dread Rogans would be, if you can't be introspective without smoking dope, then maybe you're just not very introspective to begin with? And considering that, I would challenge the wisdom and judgment of their brains on gigglebush just as much as I would challenge the wisdom and judgement of their brains not on gigglebush, both of which have a strong desire for gigglebush, because they're definitionally addicted, which makes me question just how “open” their minds really are.

So, I guess the lesson here is, don't take drug recommendations from non-introspective drug addicts.

And that's pretty much the extent of my experience with gigglebush.

Maybe next time I'll write about that one time my friend and I took mushrooms, and how my friend insisted that he had peed himself, but upon feeling his pants, they were totally dry, which I guess means that maybe drugs do actually open the mind, to suicidal ideations and fantastical pants-pissing.