“I’m bored. We should do something fun tonight.”
“Yeah. You want to watch a DVD?”
“Nah, that’s all we ever do.”
“We could go out.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Ah, you know what… we should do some drugs.”
“Hmm.”
“Come on, when was the last time we did any drugs?”
“Well, I’ve been busy.”
“I know. I think that’s part of your problem. You need one major psychedelic trip every three months or your brain rots.”
“What would we do?”
“We could do acid.”
“We don’t have any acid.”
“We don’t?”
“No, nobody has acid any more. There hasn’t been any acid since before Jerry Garcia died.”
“We’ve done acid more recently than that.”
“No, it just seems like we have. Acid is a tricky bastard.”
“What about MDMA? We haven’t done that in a while.”
“The reason we haven’t done that in a while is I feel cracked out for three days afterwards and I can’t concentrate at work and I can’t get the sound of thump thump music out of my head.”
“Right, but it feels good before all that.”
“It feels good in that sort of ‘I know this is supposed to feel good, so I’m going to just go ahead and enjoy it, even though my body is very tense and my jaw hurts’ kind of way. It feels good in reference to other times that it felt good, mostly.”
“How about mushrooms?”
“Mushrooms are creepy and dark.”
“Well, sure, if you take an enormous amount and wear a blindfold.”
“But if you take a small amount and don’t wear a blindfold, you just have mild intestinal discomfort and a slightly distorted view of the apartment.”
“OK, how about AMT? You love AMT.”
“I do love AMT. I just don’t happen to have three weeks of my life to spare being high.”
“How did you used to manage three weeks at a time to do AMT?”
“I don’t know. Was I unemployed?”
“Oh. Right. Look, you’re not being helpful here. Didn’t you used to like drugs?”
“I still like drugs.”
“Which ones?”
“Umm… I guess I like theoretical drugs that probably exist in top secret underground laboratories, where you can trip very hard for exactly one hour and forty-five minutes and then roll over promptly and go straight to sleep, and wake up in the morning feeling relaxed and refreshed.”
“I see.”
“I like the idea of drugs more than I like doing them.”
“The idea of drugs does not get you high.”
“No, but the idea of drugs also does not give me a complex if too many people are in the room, and never gives me a false sense of security about how things are going in my life, and never tricks me into saying things that sound deep in the moment but make me feel like a cliché when I think about it the next day.”
“Right, but the idea of drugs does not get you high.”
“Of course not, but the idea of drugs also doesn’t eat up valuable spare time that I could be spending on projects, and it doesn’t make me feel like a fugitive, and it doesn’t disrupt my sleep cycle and make me feel crabby and inexplicably exhausted.”
“Did I mention the part about not getting high?”
“I like the fact of drugs. I like knowing that drugs are out there, and that people are doing them. I like being part of the club – the people who are clever enough to have tried drugs, even just once. I like feeling smug that I have a whole vocabulary of elaborate justifications for why my drug use has been meaningful and rewarding, even if I can’t be bothered to do them much anymore. Sure, I used to like drugs, and that hasn’t changed.”
“But?”
“But appetites change. Environments change. Communities change. I remember when a drug party was a novel thing.”
“You are too young to front the jaded shtick.”
“It’s not jaded. It’s just pragmatism.”
“It’s lack of something short acting enough to not be any work.”
“See, why are you calling it ‘work’? I thought these were ‘recreational’ drugs.”
Long pause.
“So if you don’t want to do drugs, what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know… wanna watch a DVD?”