Drug Culture

"Is there anybody left alive
What's the point of choosing sides
When you know what the mirror hides"
-3, High Times

When you take professional sports out of the equation (because sports are important), drugs just may be the only thing holding our society together.

Some of these drugs allow us to be ourselves without having to justify being ourselves. These are what we traditionally think of as drugs, the kind of drugs that can develop into a drug problem, the kind you will go to jail for possessing, manufacturing, or selling. In a broad sense, these allow you to attribute aspects of your intrinsic nature to the drugs, while removing yourself from your own intrinsic nature. (If there is an intrinsic nature to anybody, but we could start a whole nother Ozone Shack dedicated to that debate.) These allow us to hide from ourselves and hide ourselves from others. We're not justifying the morality (or for those of us who no longer operate with a conscious moral framework- for this is a time when such mindsets have become mainstream - social expectations of right and wrong) of our actions, we are simply justifying ourselves. In some ways, drugs, alcohol included, are wonderful wonderful things. They make us more fun, they make life less depressing, they allow those who are challenged in the area of lateral thinking to conceive of things that are beyond the superficial. But increasingly so, I have observed that drugs are now the only things that people choose to make themselves fun, undepressed, and cerebral. And even more disturbingly, these are becoming the only acceptable ways to be, if not undepressed, fun and cerebral. I have had people ask me, after I post about the more minute details of robot hegemonies, "were you high when you thought of that?" or even more damningly, "how high were you when you thought of that?" the implication there being that I must have been some degree of high.

Of course, the only way that I was able to think of something offbeat or original must have been because there was enough THC in my brain to alter my neural pathways to the point where robot overlords entered the picture. But that's just what I think about. This would be like looking at an MC Escher sketch and wondering how much acid he dropped to have birds turn into fish turn into castles. MC Escher just had an imaginative mind, something that made him a little rough around the edges. And people are scared to be rough around the edges when they're sober. And we would like everyone to believe that it's not us that's causing that roughness, it's the drug.

Within my demographic, parties revolve around the around the drinking game, contests requiring varying amounts of skill, designed to speed up the process of intoxication, and since playing a game called "drink your beer," where the only rule is that every player must drink their beer on command, some of these games have become very elaborate over time, reinforcing my suspicion that all aspects of any drinking culture are simply to mask that the intent, if only superficially, is to get drunk. One of the most popular of these games is beer pong (or beirut, for all you jaw-clenching, polo-popping, Ivy League assholes). If I need to explain the game to you, you're either too young or too old to be reading this. Instead read something else.

Now I want to try an experiment. Go to a highly rural place in a heavily theocratic Islamic country, or if we could, time travel to the Roaring Twenties (so we can kill Hitler, because according to every bit of bad sci-fi it's the first thing you should ever do if you discover time travel), where alcohol plays no role in the culture, and set up a game of water pong, which is beer pong with water instead of beer, for those of you unable to make the connection (which you shouldn't try to justify by saying you're high, because I'll accept you anyway.) We teach the locals to play, and hype it up like it's the most exciting and important thing we'll ever do. In other words, we act like any male college student playing a game of beer pong. The fate of civilization is on the line!

Then once we get them hooked on water pong, we leave, but set up secret cameras in popular haunts throughout the village. We observe how long it takes them to get bored of it. I would give them a week, maybe ten days during the harvest season. Because without alcohol, this game is nothing but tossing a ball into a cup.

And without games like beer pong, parties are something where people have to actually interact with other people. And this terrifies everybody. People either have nothing to say or the things they say are too outside the box. Making friends is an elaborate dance of hiding your quirks, your rough edges, and your idiosyncrasies. But the best way to hid these things is not even to hide them at all, it is to pass them off as not being your own.

And that's why the best friends are the ones who have your same quirks, and aren't afraid to show them. And that's also why so many people have a drug for a best friend.

Everything needs to be justified. Nobody wants to show their quirks.