when i was a wee lad, i took apart my record player and wired it up to simulate stereo sound. it was extremely primitive, but i was around ten at the time. my favorite book in 4th grade was A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L’Engle. in 5th grade i was churning out radio play scripts like nobody’s business. most of them were parodies of pop-culture films and television and whatnot. some were original sci-fi works. in junior high, i designed two game systems. one was an unfinished RPG set on the planet i claimed to have come from (go figure). the other was a space combat simulator set in the Star Trek universe, and was like a highly advanced version of Battleship, but on graph paper. it was very detailed, and me and my buddies played the HELL out of it. i had the best, most accurate, and most detailed ship maps around. i still have them in storage, and whenever i run across them, i’m always pretty proud of them. by the time i finished 8th grade, i had expanded it into an RPG. in high school, i was a playwright, a cartoonist (actually, that started in 3rd grade), an amateur filmmaker, an actor, a theoretical physicist (okay, that’s stretching things just a bit), and a musician. i wasn’t half bad at any of these things, either.
then i discovered sex (14), drugs (18), and rock and roll (12). also booze (18) and cigarettes (16).
i blame none of these things for me having turned out an idiot.
but the booze and the reefer didn’t help much. i went from being a pretty smart kid to a pretty stupid adult between 18 and 24. i think i’ve quite possibly burned more braincells than i have remaining. i often refer to my brain as “my brain cell,” and i’m really not joking… just exaggerating. i’m practically fucking retarded now. when i open up my new Discover magazine every month, my favorite thing to do is to read but NOT solve the braintwisters in the back. i get a big kick out of thinking to myself ‘damn, i wish i could still think hard enough to do these’ and then read the articles. i used to be able to do that stuff, but i just can’t think very rigorously anymore. i can see in my mind the shape of a hypersphere, but i can’t figure out how to solve those damn little mind bogglers. i can barely scrape my way through one of those Dell Logic Problems books that they sell in grocery stores anymore – and even then, i leave several of the harder ones unfinished.
but it’s not the drugs or the booze themselves. it’s the fact that for several years i drank far too much, and for a few years i got stoned far too often and too deeply. having said that, i would not recommend those things to anyone. even my beloved LSD has far too many clauses under which one must exercise the utmost caution to benefit from, so from a practical POV, i can’t really even recommend that anymore, generally speaking.
drugs and booze don’t fuck your head up. it’s USING them unwisely that does. drug users walk a very thin line, and i daresay that 99% of them don’t have any clue what they’re doing. the other day when i said that i arbitrarily gave up pot and other drugs? that’s only partially true. i was also sick and tired of being around other druggies. i can’t stand potheads any more. such wastes! living just to suck on that fine, sweet grass. i love the grass, too, man, believe me – but damn, y’all… ya GOTS ta have some perspective! every day use? jesus. that’s just sad and pathetic. even weekly use of reefer is pushing it. if i could get back into it – and believe me, i want to, i just don’t want to deal with the other pot-heads – i’d smoke a little teeny tiny bit maybe 1-3 times a month, if not less. just enough to space me out and give me cosmic miiiiiiind-powers and all that crazed bullshit.
this is not about drugs; it’s about me turning into a wasted splash of vegetable-jelly instead of the well-rounded, productive, and meaningful member of humanity that i was initially destined to be.
what a waste. sad and pathetic!
there’s probably nothing more heart-dropping than realising that you’ve become nothing more than just another one of the brainless mob that continues to ruin this civilization. to the very core, i am Joe Camaro, and i will never be anything more than another blue-collar slob. if i woke up tomorrow to discover that i suddenly liked wrasslin’, watching Springer on teevee, collecting “Girls Gone Wild” tapes, and pit-bulls, i’d kill myself on sheer principle. i don’t want to be one of the unwashed masses… i don’t want there to BE an unwashed mass. i want everyone to suddenly be smart as hell, make good decisions that are not emotionally-based, give a crap about the future (and the present!) of humanity, and to take positive steps forward instead of constantly standing still. but that’s not going to happen, and it’s all my fault. me and people like me.
Sixpack Steve. i have a right to an SUV and a super-sized All-Amurikin McFatass Value Combo I’m-a-Winner-No-Really Meal™. i have a right to sick my bull mastiff on your ass if you come near my house in anything other than a heterosexual personnel-delivery vehicle. i have a right to shoot my guns in your neighborhood. i have a right to make the world around me more stupid simply by my presence. i am l’Americain Stupide, goddammit, and i’ll pinch your wife’s ass any god damned time i feel like it! i have rights! i have the freedom to stomp your ass for saying bad things about Jesus or the President. i have the freedom to never read a book again for the rest of my life, to sit around the house after work playing video games until my eyeballs fall out of their sockets and land in my 400-oz Megaslurp and then bounce around the neighborhood drunk looking for teenaged girls to forcibly “seduce” with my giant hairy beer gut (and my rabbit-huntin’ pistol).
that’s the attitude i’m going to have to adjust to, if i’m going to live up to my potential as a Regular Guy.
…never!
perhaps i wouldn’t have given in to my escapist tendencies if i hadn’t been lied to all thoughout my childhood. i grew into a world that was vastly worse than the one i was set up to expect, and i am bitter and resentful of that. when i have kids, they’re going to grow into a world that’s better or equal to their expectations. no lies. no fat old man in red pyjamas who loves them so much that he forsakes his christmas vacation every year to break into their homes and leave sick little bribes. how creepy is that anyway? why did that lie stick around, for shit’s sake?! no, no lies for my kids. they’ll be little hardasses with hearts of solid gold. they’ll know about homelessness and famine, disease and devastatingly bloody political wars and they’ll understand what hard times are all about. they’ll grow up knowing that just a matter of decades before them, humankind was so sick and depraved that people actually enslaved their own just to make a buck and avoid cutting into their bottom line. they’ll know that men are greedy pigs. they’ll know that people are selfish and degenerate and will turn you in at a moment’s notice if they can’t make you their fuck dolls or their whipping boys. they’ll know that god is a primitive myth that fools teach their children in order to get them to behave and take their licks, just or unjust, without complaint. they’ll understand that there is not going to be a messiah, ever, unless they themselves want to try to save the world; and they’ll know that they will probably fail, because humans are a lot stupider than anyone ever gives them credit for being. they’ll know that all bosses are inherently evil. they’ll know that the workers get paid far less than the managers, who do nothing, and that the owners, who do even less, get paid thousands of times more than even the managers. they’ll understand that they are being forced into an fucked up, foolish, upside-down world that they never asked for. and they’ll be happier knowing that what they actually get is no worse that what they were set to expect.
