drugs

I'd gotten high enough to fly through time.

Your choices can only be limited by your mind.

That's one of those questions that you think of a better answer for five minutes after you've answered it.

Sure, I might not be someone to look up to, but you're no role model either.

You need a break every once in a while to enjoy the everyday and you need the everyday to enjoy the break you take every once in a while.

She's happy to be home but being home means that it's an end to her adventure and escape.

However, with a gut full of heroin, it's hard to be an optimist.

The day, like all good days, passed far too quickly.

I figured this guy was a fair dinkum Australian. The type of guy that worked the land all day, cracked open a beer or two at night and called girls 'sheilas'.

I ended up going into this big art historical argument.' [Barry Blinderman] invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald__ Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases__o the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. 'It__ because he__ the man of sorrows,' Blinderman argued. 'He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction.

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory.

Blackouts can be fun if approached with the right mindset. You just can't sweat the fact that you've lost a small portion of your life for all eternity. Occasionally, little bubbles of memory will float up like surreal Mylar party balloons at unexpected times throughout the net day and start piecing together a colorful, if incomplete, version of reality.

I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. "Well, hi there," I whispered.

The Doper's DreamLast night I dreamed I was plugged right inTo a bubblin' hookah so high,When all of a sudden some Arab jinniJump up just a-winkin' his eye.'I'm here to obey all your wishes,' he told me.As for words I was trying to grope.'Good buddy,' I cried, 'you could surely oblige meBy turning me on to some dope!'With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,And we flew down the sky in a flash,And the first thing I saw in the land where he took meWas a whole solid mountain of hash!All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills,Whur the Romilar River flowed by,To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,So pretty that I wanted to cry.All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,Mourning glories woven into their hair,Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,All their dope they were eager to share.We we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin',In the flowering Panama Red,Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea,And those brownies so kind to your head.Now I could've passed that good time forever,And I really was fixing to stay,But you know that jinni turned out, t'be a narco man,And he busted me right whur I lay.And he took me back to a cold, cold world'N' now m'prison's whurever I be...And I dream of the days back in DoperlandAnd I wonder, will I ever go free?

At twenty years old, Michael had vague plans to make changes in his life, but turning blue whilst stood in a walk-in bath in an old people's home wasn't one of them. Usually boys of his age might consider changes along the lines of smoking less grass at home, at college or at work, to be a good idea. Or maybe spending less time on that solitary pursuit common to men of his age across the globe. Enjoyable though he found it, he was going to cut back on the procrastination, but that was going to have to wait.

But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.

Hey Alecto, film this!_ she called out. With the slide being as tall as a two-storey house, it felt slightly risky being up there. __n second thought, why don__ you come up here? It__ a blast being up here.___ don__ really like to be in high places,_ said Alecto as he filmed her, the camera lens reflecting the entire playground, which was partially secluded by tall trees that cast otherworldly shadows dancing across the ground.__f you don__ like being in high places, then why__ you take so many drugs in the seventies?_ Mandy questioned jokingly. __o you want me to go up there and push you off the top of that slide?_ Alecto threatened coldly.__ou__ never do that, we__e best friends!_ Mandy pointed out. She reached over and picked a bright red maple flower from one of the long branches of the trees, tossing it down to him. __ven in this failing 21st century, where people are cell phone addicts and crude humor and violence is the norm, even when society falls apart and drowns in its own mistakes, we__l still be best friends!_ She looked incredibly eccentric, never mind the fact that she was an adult woman wearing a trippy rainbow Pucci dress from the 1970__, standing on top of a slide at a children__ playground. Alecto didn__ seem to mind, he just continued to film her with his camera like she__ asked him to.

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.