Drugs

I went for a walk today and felt more like my old self. I actually did smile, willingly. :-) The reason? I had my Walkman on and "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath was crashing away (pretty fitting, come to think of it). There's nothing like a good heavy metal/rock song to get me feeling good. Punk too. When Johnny Rotten sang, "I wanna be anarchy", I was right there with him, sneering away. That was in my "fuck everything" phase.

But when I was in my teens, it was the rock that did it for me. I can remember endless Friday nights of AC/DC's "Back in Black" playing in my friend's boyfriend's apartment, beer bottles clinking, smoke fogging the air. I was a very enthusiastic pot and hash smoker back then. Not to mention beer drinker. God, we had fun back then. Getting totally smashed and high was the goal, and we'd all brag about it the next day. "Man, I got so fucked up last night ..." That's usually how all my conversations with my friends started.

I don't regret a minute of it. I had a fantastic time and it was a time in my life where I really bonded with my friends and discovered a lot about myself. I think it's very important for everyone to have that kind of hedonistic, overindulgent time in their life (hopefully when they're young enough to get away with it).

I could never understand why the anti-drug people always say that smoking pot leads to heavier drug use. That is such crap. It may lead to experimentation with other drugs, but the abuse of those heavier drugs is totally within the person's control. I did try coke once, and it did nothing for me, and I never felt compelled to try it again. I have to admit I was always curious about what a shot of heroin would feel like, but I'm not a total idiot. I was smart enough to leave it as a curiosity. Knowing my addictive personality ... I don't even want to go there.

It's funny, because now I'm such a teetotaller. I barely ever take a sip of beer anymore, except for the very occasional foray out to a bar with one of my old and still very-wild girlfriends. The last time I went out with her, I kept the cab driver in stitches with my slurring all the way home. And it was also funny because I actually did smoke pot recently, but it was a very short-lived reunion. A guy I was seeing bought pot once in awhile and told me he wanted to get me high. I had told him all the stories about my excesses. So, we were in his apartment and I stood beside him grinning, watching him grind it up and roll it. And then when we smoked it, I started coughing like a neophyte which made us both laugh and before you know it, I barely took three or four tokes and I was high as a kite. "You're economical," he joked, and I had to laugh. I couldn't even finish the whole thing before I told him I'd had enough.

But that old familiar feeling was back ... the euphoria, the grin a mile wide stretching my cheeks, the incredible awareness of everything in my body and my surroundings, and when we lay down on his couch to make out, all the deliciousness of that magnified a hundred times.

I don't want to go back to those overindulgent days in my teens. Frankly, feeling that overstimulated and out of control kind of scares me a little now. But every time I listen to a good, loud, rock and roll song, those memories come back and remind me of how happy I was back then. It's almost as good a feeling as feeling that high. Not quite ... but close enough.