This holiday season, substance abuse was my coping mechanism of choice.
I hate the holidays. Everything shuts down. You can't get a cup of coffee. Nobody's baking fresh pastries to put in store windows.
People you love are dead, it's cold outside, it rains, you get the shortest days of the year, the traffic sucks, everybody's rushing to buy the latest creepy toy for their kids (like those dolls that pee and barf and whatever - when did it become fun to change your doll's diapers?), every third guy in the street is dressed as Santa Claus, people start eating weird cake with dried nuts and fruit in it, socks are pinned unhygienically over fireplaces, in-laws are looking for a place to sleep, meals are slaved over, people sip "egg-nog" which is the most disgusting name ever invented for a foodstuff, glass ornaments get dropped, and everybody's wearing the same god-damned sweater with Rudolph the god-damned Red Nosed Reindeer on it, and the little bastard's nose lights up because there's a freaking bulb embedded in the sweater that connects to some enormous battery somewhere, and the most offensive models of which aggress innocent passersby with that irritating Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer song.
Christmas is a gateway drug. All the stress and blinking lights - it forces you to find a way to check out.
Drugs are no longer a part of my life, so they were out of the question.
It was when I was trying to tie the mistletoe into a noose to hang myself with on Christmas Day when I decided I'd give life one more chance, and that the chance would come in the form of absolutely anything in the house that would knock me the hell out.
I was up at the paternal grandfather's house. It's rather isolated, and even when it isn't an official holiday, getting to the supermarket is a chore.
I figured I could whip something up with turkey and nutmeg. Turkey's full of tryptophan which is a precursor to serotonin (one of the "feel good" neurotransmitters), and nutmeg, taken in large quantities, is a hallucinogin. With the right preparation, I could have had a sort of psychedelic Prozac on my hands.
My sister, genius that she is, suggested that I might just try alcohol before resorting to turning my grandfather's kitchen into a meth-lab.
Except for a few lapses here and there, I don't drink. I have a complex migraine thing, and alcohol, traditionally, makes me go blind. It's only temporary, but it's unpleasant all the same. When you can't see things, you bump into those things.
However, going blind would have at least put me in my own little universe, and that wouldn't have been so bad.
Because it was her idea, I sent my sister to round up as much alcohol as she could find. She went to the garage, checked the pantry, went through the refrigerators, checked in bags, and came back with a bunch of glass bottles full of liquid.
She also asked my grandfather if he had any more glass bottles with liquid in them. He shook his head disapprovingly and said, "You're not getting drunk."
I told him that I don't get drunk, and that I can't get drunk - that I'm too physically and emotionally rock-solid - and that if he just gave me all of his glass bottles full of liquid, I could prove it.
There were at this point two possible outcomes for the night, and one of them was that my grandfather was right and that I would get drunk. Although this did turn out to be the case, I'd like to say in my defense that I didn't know there was alcohol in the beer. Nobody said it was going to be that kind of beer. I suddenly understood why he thought I was going to get drunk. It's not my fault somebody put alcohol in the beer.
About twenty-seven bottles of beer into the evening, I was starting to feel it. Nobody else could tell. I was being loud, saying lewd thing, being tremendously obnoxious, and spilling wine all over myself. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.
Inside my head, though, things were getting foggy. The pain of Christmas lifted, and I found solace in holiday debauchery. I had heard that if you drink enough beer, you eventually get drunk, and then pass out. As someone who used to routinely send himself into dreamland by inducing small-scale comas, I had a pretty good idea of what I was going for.
It never happened. I drank and I drank and I drank and I drank and I drank, but it seemed that, the more I drank, the better I felt, and the less inclined I was to pass out.
That night, I saw the power of alcohol. I didn't even go blind. It was amazing.
After that, I decided to drink regularly to see if it would continue to help my psychological disposition. The plan was that I would drink every night until January 2nd, when I could finally rest because the holidays were over.
I did just that. And I learned so very much.
On New Years Eve, I even smoked a cigarette.
I have, then, over the past ten days, indulged in the two most widely abused substances on the planet, and I have important information to pass on:
CIGARETTES AND ALCOHOL ARE MORE DESTRUCTIVE AND DISRUPTIVE THAN MANY ILLEGAL SUBSTANCES OF ABUSE.
That's right. I've Been There and Done That when it comes to substance abuse. Through all the years, cigarettes and alcohol are the two drugs I avoided.
I used to have a problem with opiates. I was in a horrible, horrible place, and they gave me relief. That's all there is to it. On what was probably the worst day of 2006, my then-boss sent me to Las Vegas to give an MSDN Events presentation. My grandmother's funeral was on Tuesday. The talk was on Thursday. For some reason, the bastard thought it was acceptable to tell me to leave my family - when they needed me and I needed them - to fly out just to give a four-hour talk that could have been given by anyone else on the team. It wasn't even my territory. The guy who was supposed to do that talk - a friend of mine - had a lunch scheduled with Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo that Thursday, and it conflicted with the talk.
I was being sent to give this talk because of a lunch.
When I pointed this out to the boss, telling him that I was in absolutely no condition to go give the talk, and that he should send someone else, he laughed and told me there was no way it was going to happen.
So, I went. It wasn't the customers' fault my boss was an asshole.
When I got there, and so I could make it through the day, I stopped in my rental car to insuffalate about 200mg of powdered morphine, which is enough to kill a family of Catholic rhinos.
I got up there and gave the talk. Nobody in the audience knew any better. I could still function just fine. Granted, being addicted to something was a nightmare I'd never like to repeat, but...
When friends and family found out about the extent of my problem, I got a lot of lectures. They told me I was dying, that I was killing myself, and that my drug of choice was a Really Bad Thing, the use of which was morally reprehensible.
What drove me nuts was that, half the time, I got that lecture from someone who was drinking, someone who was smoking, or someone who was drinking and smoking. The hypocrisy was lost on them, as smokers and drinkers don't like to refer to cigarettes and alcohol as "drugs" - they're just cigarettes and alcohol. Drugs are "illegal," and that's the difference, so what they were doing was good, and what I was doing was bad.
As much as it bothered me, I saw it all in the abstract. I didn't actually know what it was like to drink booze and smoke cigarettes. I know quite a few people who drink themselves out of their minds everyday, and people who have to take breaks from whatever they're doing every fifteen minutes to satisfy their craving for the totally-not-drugs cigarettes.
If this stuff is legal, and if everybody does it, then my guess was that it wasn't all that bad.
I was so, so wrong.
Here's why.
---- Alcohol ----
After ten days of drinking, I can't believe alcohol is legal.
Let's take a look at the effects of this totally-not-a-drug:
- Disinhibition - If you're too scared to sing karaoke, then you won't be five beers from now. It's like the outgoing filter on idiotic behavior gets shut down. I like a bit of the silly myself, but I've never done a drug that made me so un-self-aware that I thought it would be a good idea to get on stage and massacre Madonna songs with a raspy voice and tone-deafness. That comes naturally to me. But at least I know I'm making an ass out of myself.
- Aggression - The only times in recent years that I've been in scrapes or potential scrapes, alcohol was a factor. I haven't had any stoners take a swing, but a little booze seems to bring out the worst in people. It might have to do with a potential effect alcohol has on testosterone levels. That combined with the disinhibition might also explain why the worst sexual experiences of my life took place around alcohol.
- Stupidity - I've noticed that people who drink want you to drink as well. They don't like to get sloppy with a sober person. I usually take off in those situations, as they're downhill for someone who likes conversation. Now I know why they want you to booze it up, too - I caught myself saying incredibly stupid things this week while drinking. You reveal too much, say too much, and do too much. Common sense disappears, and so does good judgment. It's amazing.
- Confidence - Add this to the stupidity and aggression, and you get people who think they're "just fine" to drive. Thousands of people die each year in the US in alcohol-related traffic accidents. What's amazing is that alcohol is available just about everywhere, and you typically have to drive to these places. Some states even have drive-thru liquor stores. And it's legal.
- Total Breakdown of Cognitive Functioning - My mom called me the other night and got on my case about why I've been avoiding her. The call lasted at least a couple hours, and as it went on and on, she got nasty. Just inexcusable. Yelling, lying, accusing... early on, I told her it sounded like she'd been drinking, and that I'd rather not have that discussion until she was sober. She insisted that she hadn't touched anything that night, but by the end of the call, she was slurring her speech, losing track of what she was saying, going from mad to sad to mad to sad - it was insane. And this is how many other people I know wind up after they've been drinking. They lose all control and meddle in other peoples' lives, probably driving them nuts. But it's Ok because alcohol's legal.
- Total Breakdown of Physical Functioning - Barfing, diarrhea, marathon pissing, belching, loss of coordination, loss of peripheral vision, distorted sense of taste, smell, and just about everything else. You can't see, and even if you could, you couldn't control where your feet should go next. You walk like a half-melted Gumby.
Those are just a few things off the top of my head.
Your eyes go bloodshot, your face goes red, and you have to repeatedly excuse yourself to hit the powder-room because you've put six gallons of liquid into your body so you could feel this way. The problem is that the liquid doesn't fit inside your body, so it has to go somewhere. Most often, where it goes is "out".
Which leads us to the breath. The breath of a drinker is one of the rankest things an alcoholic will never notice. It's uncontrollable - you can't pop a mint and cover it up. Alcohol exists the bloodstream through the lungs. You simply can't do anything about it, and it's foul. Especially in people who drink regularly, and who have that rotting gut vapor constantly fuming its way out of their innards.
It ruins your body. The calories add up, and you put on tons of weight. Your liver gets trashed, your brain gets trashed, and your kidneys get worked over. It burns your stomach, prevents the absorption of nutrients, and finds its way out of your body in all of the most graceless ways physically possible.
It's extremely addictive, and the withdrawals associated with quitting - or just not getting your fix on time - are potentially life-threatening. If you don't taper off, and if you're a genuine alcoholic (and a lot of people are), you can have seizures within one to three days of quitting cold-turkey.
And this stuff is legal!
---- Cigarettes ----
While I was on a roll with the booze, I decided I'd go all the way and give smoking a try. People love to match smoking with drinking. Something about the combo makes them happy.
So, on New Years Eve, I smoked a cigarette. I believe it was a Pall Mall, though I'm not certain. It tasted how I imagine it would taste if I shoved my head up a monkey's ass and then stuck my tongue out.
Some observations:
- Rapid Onset - I've never done a drug that hit me so fast as nicotine by way of smoke-inhalation. I felt a sort of calmness hit me within just a few seconds of the first drag. It was clearly different from what I was already feeling, and as I continued to smoke, that same feeling grew stronger. I don't care how you do your drugs - swallowing, skin creams, the patch, IV, insuffilation - none of it has ever hit me so quickly.
- General Sense of Well-Being - The appeal of the drug was obvious. I felt calm, but not drowsy. Oddly, I also suddenly felt alert. It was as though my emotional state was leveled out and then boosted. Very strange.
- Short Duration of Action - It leaves almost as quickly as it arrives. I understand now why people have to take breaks so often to smoke, and also why some chain-smoke. It just comes and goes.
You take these three things, and you have the worst scenario for a substance of abuse.
Drugs that hit you quickly are abused because people like the "rush" - they love that immediate wall of whatever-it-is-that-turns-their-crank to hit them full on.
Drugs that make you feel good about things have obvious abuse potential.
Drugs that work for a very short amount of time before ditching you back in your original state (if not worse) lead you to want to indulge each time you come down.
This is exactly why cocaine is so addictive. It hits you quickly, makes you feel like a bajillion dollars, and then it drops you, so you do more.
The difference is that, for reasons I cannot - even with the vast intellectual resources at my disposal - understand, cigarettes are legal. They're even still somewhat socially-acceptable.
Over time, they stop working, of course. That's what happens with drugs. There's a downregulation of activity in the specific bits of the brain nicotine tickles. It can happen in many ways, but it happens. The brain goes for homeostasis. Whatever you do to it, it tries to counter. This leaves you a total mess when you decide to stop doing it, as it takes a while for your brain to get back to normal. That's the weeks (and even months) of emotional and physical turbulence you experience.
It makes you smell like shit. If you're a non-smoker and you kiss a smoker, the first thing you notice is that their mouths taste like rotten eggs. The next thing you notice is that you don't want to kiss them anymore. Just after that, you notice that you're instinctively keeping your face at a safe distance from the odoriferously offending orifice. Just after that, you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to the person to whom the stinky mouth is attached that you'd rather have your eye poked out by a 747 than continue with this torture.
Then there's the cancer, heart disease, and other associated conditions that ruin your life and the lives of the people around you.
But don't let any of this bother you, 'cause this stuff is legal.
---- How do you like them apples? ----
Don't misunderstand me - I've really enjoyed my time with booze. I even enjoyed the cigarette, though I don't see myself administering nicotine to myself on a regular basis, as it's really hard to position my head in such a way that it doesn't have to smell itself.
I'm going to continue drinking. It's the only drug I've ever done that knocks me senseless and makes it impossible for me to tie my shoes, let alone think about what's bugging me in life.
I like the disinhibition. It makes it easier to be chummy with people.
I love beer. If non-alcoholic beer tasted like real beer, I'd drink it. I've been having quite the time drinking fancy-shmancy beer. Went out with this lovely girl last night and we went for the beer that was about $35 a pint. It's good. More expensive than a moderate supply of opiates and not as pleasing, but it's legal and easily accessible. You also get to be the one wagging your finger at all the people out there doing drugs. They're bad. They're really bad people.
I've been lucky so far in that, despite having imbibed enough that I could barely stand, I haven't had a hangover. I got a little queasy one day, but it quickly passed. Aside from that, it's been pretty nice.
However, now that I've been there and gotten to do the drugs everybody else does, I've gotta say - I'm pretty ticked off. The holier-than-thou attitude I got from drinkers and smokers who disapproved of my drug use is no longer just annoying - it's downright offensive.
The next time a smoker or a drinker wags a disapproving finger at me for my former drug use, I'm going to take advantage of my alcohol-induced disinhibition, aggression, and stupidity to break it.
[Gratuitous Links to my Homies - Not Part of the Post Above] [Learn More]
No links for this post. I don't want to associate my friends - even indirectly - with it.