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Welcome to my utmost random thoughts on random shit that really doesn't matter much.
This is where my mind takes a dump.
~ Sticks, Stones and Funnybones ~
Part 23 - The Drugs
The Drugs
The British government ordered a thorough investigation on drugs; mainly on their social and medical impact on all our lives - users and non-users alike. A top notch team of British psychologists, social scientists, police, hospital staff and medical researchers catalogued and listed the most common drugs from top to bottom; reflecting how “bad” they were for people and the world they lived in. Deaths, side effects, criminal behavior, long lasting effects, long term damages, second person effects, popularity, availability – it was all weighed in. Last week the results were in and, unfortunately, they may not have been exactly what the doctor ordered. Popular kid drugs like ecstasy didn't even make the Top 10, whereas social givens like booze and smokes did.
Here is the Top 10, from worst to least bad, with my comments:
1. Heroin
Public Enemy #1, and has been for decades. Supposedly the hardest drug to kick the addiction to. Some people claim you can be a Lounge Heroinist, but from the effects I have seen it have on people in my surrounding I would beg to differ. They all went from being good friends to me, nice guys and girls, excellent musicians and respectable professionals, to being hollow-cheeked teeth-rotted bums stealing shit and scraps to pawn to buy just another hit – chasing that elusive first high. They’re all either dead or in prison now. I didn’t go to any of their funerals, nor did I ever visit them in prison. They are not the people they were anymore anyway.
2. Cocaine
The party-drug. It’s not so much the drug you get addicted to as the lifestyle, I guess. Like you don’t have to be an alcoholic to look forward to getting plowed at a cool club, dancing the night away, so does also cocaine carry with it a certain “flair”. Just believe me on this, cocaine has taken more rock stars’ careers than heroin ever did – second only to booze. It starts with the party, and ends with you doing it at any time of the day, just to get by. Setting up shows in New York for “rock stars” taught me that the first question out of all their mouths, when they arrive, is where the bath room is - and unless they take that piss out of their noses there is no reason to go there once an hour and come out with tissue paper to stem the nosebleed, grinning like idiots and with eyes shining like windows. Looking at Peter Steele of Type O Negative being so far gone he didn’t care he was snorting coke off the table he was signing autographs at, bleeding down his shirt like a stuck pig, was the best “Don’t do drugs, kids” poster I ever saw. I will always regret not having a camera for that one.
3. Barbiturates
This is what killed Hendrix and Elvis, kids! It’s also one of the most common closet-demons. Housewives and traveling salesmen alike – they get hooked on the next pill from an original need to “relax their nerves”.
4. Methadone
What you give heroin junkies to wane them off the hard drug. Unfortunately methadone is also a hard drug, and even though its long term addiction is not as severe as heroine, it doesn’t take away the heroine addiction – just replaces it – until that heroin addict can get hold of some good shit again, that is. It’s like curing alcoholism with wine, while telling them “No, bad boy!”
5. Alcohol
Speaking of wine… Old Demon Alcohol is still going strong. As you may already have noticed cannabis is not on the list. It’s quite simple, really. How many pot heads throw up all over you on the bus? How many dope smokers stumble around in traffic, swatting at cars with an empty bottle? How many pot heads get all lit up and beat the shit out of their wives? How many people do you know who roll up a joint at the barbeque and then get so fucked up he can’t help himself from touching your wife and picking fights with the neighbors? Sure, both alcohol and cannabis are highly addicting – especially to those so inclined – but alcohol carries more social destruction in its wake. And that is the drug we choose to socially accept as the “harmless one”.
6. Narcotics
Here we are of course talking about The Popular Pill; Vicodin, Darvocet, Percocet, all the morphines… The list goes on. This is the drug Joe Schmoe gets hooked on after falling down and hurting his back. His doctor prescribes him some vicodin and then makes him come back for more every month. Surprising how, if you really want to, you can find all sorts of body parts that hurt once the effects wear off, right? All of a sudden you need a narcotics prescription for an ingrown toe nail. If this was an American list I have a feeling this would be number three, as we have a multitude of perfectly legal street corners where people can buy a month’s supply of fixes, all cleverly disguised as “Pain Management Clinics”. I wrote a very good article on this once. Check it out here.
7. Benzodiazepines
I don’t know anything about this, so I will stop talking out of my ass. Why don’t you take a breather? Walk the dog. Calm down. That’s what this is, by the way; relaxation agents.
8. Amphetamine
The performance enhancing drug. The Speed Demon. Used to be way up on the list, but seems to have lost its attraction somewhat lately. Kids rather go with the cheaper ecstasy and “grown ups” are too tired to fuck all night long anyway so they go with vicodin – just to feel good and normal about themselves. Of course, in some places amphetamines still reign supreme… Crystal meth will always be to the fancy-dancy prescribed stuff what a Mason jar of moonshine is to a bottle of Cristal – it’s the redneck poison of choice.
9. Tobacco
This is the most important entry on the list, and the one that should be taken more seriously. The investigation established that tobacco is more dangerous – medically and “addictionally” – than most other drugs. You get hooked on it and it gives you lung cancer and then you die. You can’t even say that about LSD or sniffing glue. The British task group concluded its tobacco report by stating that if Tobacco had been discovered today it would inevitably have been classified as an illegal and harmful drug. Now it’s too late; too many people are making way too much money on this shit. And quite frankly, bars should have that blue cigarette smoke lingering in the air – adds to the atmosphere. A jazz club with syringes and empty pill bottles in the corners just doesn’t seem the same.
10. Buprenorphine
Another methadone-like drug used for drug rehabs in Britain. I have nothing.
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Now, please note that this was a British list, and that an American list would have had crack on number two. Farther down on this list was, of course, LSD, ecstasy, poppers and the number one choice for London cab drivers everywhere: Khat. (You have not lived until you have been driven around at random by a Khat-crazed taxi-driver chewing on a root, blasting African techno through the seedy parts of town, hitting parked cars like you were living a pin-ball game, laughing like a mad scientist. Good times.)
Now, as all the pot heads of the world breathed a sigh of relief to not be on the Top 10 list (you guys were on #11)… There is nothing worse than working with a pot head. I would rather work with a psychotic speedballer than put up with the social slugs that make up the pot head community. Working the bars in London fuelled my collegial distaste for these lazy ass bastards and moving to America didn’t exactly help. Am I the only one who just wants to pick them up by the scruff of their necks and shake them the fuck awake? Big dumb smile and hazy eyes, “Hey, chill man! It’s all good.” Easy to say if you’re not the straight one still trying to serve a bar of three hundred people all demanding service NOW.
And as far as artistic creativity goes; pothead artists only cater to other pot heads. That’s why Grateful Dead, Phish, The Doors and all that other shit fucking sucks.
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The Cartoon
So our kid figured she would cultivate an interest that was all hers. She’s 11 now and she is slowly (and sadly) starting to snap out of the fact that her parents are the coolest thing on Earth. For some reason, after watching a music video on YouTube I think, she wanted to explore the world of Anime. What is Anime, you ask? It’s Japanese animated cartoons, of questionable age-appropriate value. Knowing this, I investigated this particular series she wanted to get for her birthday. I read all the reviews, I checked all the ratings, I even watched a few episodes on youtube – making sure there was none of that perverted Japanese shit on there.
Her birthday came and went, and it wasn’t until mine and my wife’s anniversary rolled around that I felt comfortable with the results fo my research. As a special thing for the day we give her a gift as well, celebrating the anniversary as “becoming a family” or something equally gay. I gave her the DVD box set for all the seasons of this particular Anime show, she squealed with joy and disappeared into her room. (The plan worked.)
A little later she comes out and asks, “What is an average penis like?” Needless to say, me and my wife both hit the ceiling at the same time. What was the kid talking about? While I fastforwarded and rewound, trying to find the segment, I could hear the kid asking my wife why men pant when they see underwear and why they got hard when they were touched in that spot.
It all ended with me and my wife having to watch the whole damn thing, from beginning to end – all seven seasons, trying to figure out what the show was about. Here is my conclusion: Japanese people are screwed up. Obviously those bombs didn’t take and I would recommend total annihilation to commence anytime now.
The show is about a 19-year old boy who finds a personal computer who looks exactly like a 12 year old little girl (big eyes, big boobs and dumb as dirt), and then have “thoughts” about this robot. I am sure the kid didn’t even get 1% of the sexual innuendos in the show, but they were, oh, so very obvious to us. The guy has to turn his robot on by sticking his hand up her skirt between her legs. The guy has to bathe his little robot. The guy tells the robot to get a job and she starts working peep shows. All the other robots in the show, belonging to other people, are dressed in French Maid uniforms and giggle a lot.
I am suspecting that this is not a show for kids, but rather another perverted manifestation of the Japanese psyche. They are intimidated by women and therefore fantasize about having absolute control over an underage girl, to do with what they will. Fucking pederast psychos.
We picked out a few episodes here and there that weren’t too bad, and let her watch those.
2006 – the year we bought our 11-year old kid Japanese porn for our anniversary.
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Since this dragged out this week I will just finish with some extremely short comments on some random things I saw in the news:
The Shack
I saw on CNN that enterprising architects are designing “affordable” houses made from some of all the thousands of unused steel containers littering the horizon in Los Angeles. Just what LA needed; a real shanty town with corrugated metal shacks. Can we pick up the whole fucking city and move it to Mexico now, please? They can keep Paris Hilton.
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The Slut
The last shot for the family of Natalee Holloway to pin the murder of their daughter to Van Der Sloot ran between their fingers last week as the court in Aruba dismissed the lawsuit. Two things are true in this case: Natalee Holloway was a slut, and also… if you’re that sure that this guy killed her, then cash in your stock and hire somebody to break his face. Never mind some third world country’s legal system.
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The Comedy
Am I the only one who can’t fucking stand Will Ferrell? Something about him pisses me off almost as much as Jack Black does. Comedies these days are just bleak copies of each other; The Anchorman, the 40-year old Virgin, Talladega Nights, everything with Jack Black, Rob Schneider or fucking Ben Stiller… Damn, where did all the hardcore funny shit go? I’d take the good old 80’s action comedies over any of these new infantile movies. The actors are just not as genuinely funny, without being boringly “goofy”, these days. The fact that a guy like Chris Tucker even gets parts in movies is a testament to this.
Eddie Murphy’s “Raw” fucking wipes the floor with sedate affairs like “The David Chappelle Show” any day of the week. Richard Pryor vs. Jamie Foxx – give me a break. Chris Rock is the only motherfucker I can stand these days.
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