pure phase - 02-20-02

Some dry little facts:

No, I've never shot dope. But I do seem to have an inordinate number of ex-junkie friends and acquaintances. I don't know why that is. I haven't even ever done coke. In all earnestness I can say that those films they showed in grade school made quite an impact on me. Some things I've just never had to be told twice. Like "don't shoot dope" and "don't eat paint chips". Those two phrases ring the same bells with me. It just makes sense. Also, around the time I would've had both the curiousity about and access to cocaine for the first time someone around me was fucking up so spectacularly on it that it was a real turn off.

But I'm a far more sensible person than I am a moral person, so I don't mind being around drugs, as long as the people using or selling them remain "interesting" and don't seem likely to get me hurt or looking at serious jail time. Also, I'm not made uncomfortable by seediness. I don't necessarily seek it out, but again, as long as it's "interesting" I tend to stick around. And I don't seem to make marginal people uncomfortable. To the extent that they notice me at all I strike them as a merely benign or indifferent presence. And even when they do notice me, they are unlikely to remember me.

Another thing - I'm observant. I notice who keeps coming in and out at the bars. I make mental notes of types of pipes and lighters when I see people smoking in cars. I know the alleys where my ex-junkie friends used to score. I remember their descriptions of the guys laid back in lawn chairs, towels over their faces, bags in their mouths, not talking, waiting.

It would be worth exploring why I choose to notice and remember these things and not others. Why I consider this somehow a less alien environment than one of honda accords and cable tv and central air. Since I'm really not a part of either world, only a spectator of one and a fugitive of the other.

But it is true that I spent the late eighties practically grinding my teeth to nubs on shitty acid. It was fun. But somewhere around 1991 getting off on that stuff just got to be too exhausting. I no longer felt like I had the stamina for a good fourteen hours of mind-fuckery every other week or so. I still think about it once in a while (obviously), but more and more it just seems like something "young people do."