As Wilson was able to name himself a nicotine addict in an earlier chapter, I will go ahead and confess that I am as well. I shake when I'm separated from it and nigh evr'y time I puff, I wish I didn't want to. This is made all the more complicated by the fact that I regularly have to discourage vaping. (I'm going to go ahead and preface whatever comes after with the fact that I despise vaping and I hate the cloud of dubiousness around it; the credulity-engulfing miasma that ping-pongs back and forth between the unreliable and the also unreliable. I would always rather be sparking up a cigarette than sucking on the glorified USB drive that has become my techno-nipple. If I die and retain any consciousness that allows me to know that the penalty for vaping is the same or worse than combustibles, I'll just die.) I have earnestly implored many people to never try nicotine, because you are rolling the dice that first time with a lifelong addiction cycle. The memory of my first cigarette is like a blown-glass bird with wings outstretched and filled with syrup. Too late, I realized the syrup was filling up my lungs. Nicotine, man. Addiction fucking sucks.
One of my coworkers, much older and shrewder, used to make a silly remark when we'd talk about our shared addiction..."Ozzy Osbourne always said it was harder to stop smoking cigarettes than quit heroin."
I don't know that much about Ozzy; I loved the reality show when I was a kid and like most of his music. (I also specifically hate him for his song that mangled the reputation of one of my mentors. It also spread the crass mispronunciation of his sainted name.) I'm not sure if he said that about cigarettes, but if he did....I imagine he was wrong and/or purposely being hyperbolic.
Heroin seems like a really bum deal. I am not afraid of heroin addicts, having known a few in my life. The violence that heroin users do is not typically perpetrated randomly on the streets but against themselves and those that love them. Most are quite similar to our Joe Smith/Holy Out...people who drift and fumble through life while engendering a mixture of sympathy and, forgive me, revulsion. The glassy eyes of the opiate abuser that Wilson dwells upon multiple times during his story always get to me very quickly, along with the inability to hold a topic in their head or perform simple tasks. (If you've ever been behind someone strung out on opiates in a gas station line, you'll understand what I'm talking about. The only thing more annoying and embarrassing than that is the person who won't stop buying lottery tickets and scratching them at the counter.)
I imagine that aversion also comes from the "there but for the yadda yadda yadda go I..." mantra that many of us have embedded. I can see specific similarities between Joe/Holy and myself. I can drawl on at length about the ills of society (though I pray I am not guilty of "dead-level abstracting") and am prone to a breed of cynical self-pity. I also, and this part always makes me uncomfortable, was hung up on the "harm" caused me by my first heartbreak and wondered for years if I was doomed to repeat the pattern of my first relationship ad nauseum. I have pondered deeply around the tragedy of hearing and saying the word "no." I can see where I would probably take to heroin pretty quickly. There but for yadda yadda yadda...
I think the saddest part of this chapter is, it almost seems as if Joe/Holy is actually going to make it out for a minute. Then the teenage girlfriend arrives on the scene and the reader knows that with those types of decision making skills, our boy isn't long for the world of semi-stability. I guess I've never strayed near heroin because I do try to retain a bare minimum consciousness of the decisions I make and heroin seems like doing the opposite. That's one other thing about heroin users, as well as most addicts, I've know; nothing is ever their fault, or at least not for long. That is to say nothing is their fault outwardly, but then it seems from their behavior and implicit guilt like everything must be their fault, inwardly. I don't think I ever touched heroin because I never hated myself quite that much. And maybe it says something about my lack of understanding that I consider self-hatred as a prerequisite to heroin abuse. (I should also mention the path to heroin that springs from a prescription that becomes a habit/relief and then leads to further abuse.)
I don't have a lot of intelligent comments to add to the topic of these white powders. I guess I've got to draw on the immortal words of that bitch Nancy Reagan: "Just Say No."
Stray Thoughts
- Ed Sanders is absolutely as wonderful as he appears in the description by Wilson and far more interesting than the blurb does justice to. Relevant to our discussion, Sanders apologizes in one of his memoirs for downplaying the seriousness of amphetamine and heroin abuse at times during his youth.
- Like Arlen, my beloved wife has reminded me in conversation before that that first rejection is just as hard on girls as it is on boys. I really do wonder how many of us can trace our romantic mistakes back to the imprints of our "first love"/first rejection.
- Once again, this didn't really inspire a song in me. I guess listen to The Velvet Underground or Marianne Faithful. Maybe Rodriguez or Curtis Mayfield. Neil Young or James Taylor...there are a lot of songs about heroin.
- On the other hand;
:Pertinent suggestions:
The discussion of addiction in the previous chapter made me think about my challenges with overeating.
ReplyDeleteI'm traveling and don't have this book with me so will have to comment on the content of this chapter later.
ReplyDeleteI remember a comment a friend once made 10 or so years ago that where she lived in the East Village in New York, in the middle of the night/wee hours of the morning, it seemed far easier to get heroin than cigarettes as all the stores for the latter were closed.
I've used nicotine very rarely, never smoked cigarettes. There was a short time of rolling joints of hash with a little nicotine to keep it burning. The dizziness from the nicotine contributed to the high though I could handle far less tobacco than regular smokers. When I was 17, an older co-worker gave me a Colt cigar celebrating the birth of his child. I smoked it and got really high and thought, this is great I don't have to buy weed. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes later I felt sick as a dog, very nauseous, and never tried that again. My little brother's babysitter, whom I had a crush on in the 7th grade, got me to try a drag on her smoke, but I didn't like it. Not all of her corrupting influences seemed bad, she did turn me on to Jimi Hendrix, his first record Are You Experienced which sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. My best friend in High School and I thought it cool to go against the grain and not smoke cigarettes in spite of all our friends smoking. I lucked out in that regard.
I've only ever vaped THC and CBD. I much prefer taking single hits of weed out of a pipe. A lot of the cartridges from dispensaries taste very chemical and industrial to me and give a weird high so I avoid those. My friend used to make high quality, clean vape oil cartridges that worked well. This was good for places like hotel rooms or in public places where weed smoke appeared very inappropriate.
Music: The Needle and the Damage Done, the live version by Neil Young. The emotion of the melody along with the lyrics contributes to the tragic mood of overdosing. We've lost so many great musicians to this scourge. The song Heroin, particularly from Lou Reed's live album, Rock n Roll Animal seems a good take on the exhilarating side of that substance. Patti Smith puns on heroine in her song Dancing Barefoot. Smith doesn't have a reputation for white substance use but a lot of her punk friends certainly did.
I think you may be onto something re: self-hatred and opiate use.
I wrote a long comment here that didn't get posted. Forgot to copy it.
ReplyDeleteMy comment in the post right before this one did survive. I wrote it
ReplyDeletejust before writing the one for this post.
Sorry, Oz!! I saw the comments today and restored the original, I really don't understand why this keeps happening.
DeleteNo problem, thanks for the restoration.
DeleteSeveral years ago I covered the opening and early days of a detox center at the local health department in Sandusky, Ohio, i.e. a place for alcoholics and addicts to begin their journey to sobriety by going through withdrawal in a medically-supervised place. Being a health department, the folks there frowned on smoking and tried to ban it. They quickly discovered that this was unworkable. The alcoholics and addicts might be willing to give up one of their habits, but they would not agree to quit tobacco, or alternatively they could not.
ReplyDeleteI interviewed a recovering addict some years ago who described one of her overdoses to me: When she woke up, she was angry she hadn't died. I interviewed the brother of a woman who had died either from an overdose or a heart attack (accounts differed); he told me she hated herself and wanted to die. A small sample size, but pretty sobering.
Apuleius, to answer your question from last week, I tend to call myself an everytarian, as I refuse to enclose myself in any type of dogmatic diet. But in practice, I usually try to limit my dead animals intake as much as I can. I have less of an issue with it if I know where it comes from, but this seldom happens.
ReplyDeleteI did not know RAW used to be a radio host, now that’s cool. Do we know if any recordings of some exist, somewhere over the Interweb?
I liked that in this interlude, we get two illustrations of situations RAW mentioned in the previous chapter.
The first is about junkies going through withdrawal symptoms while in jail. About this, I wonder if the guard is said to give Holy Out “a horse laugh” because horse is slang for heroin.
The second instance appears as the connection between heroin and alcohol, with Holy Out the “great white horse” rider turning into Joe Smith “the pleasant kind of drunk”. Two ways to try and numb the same emotional pain.
I found much food for thoughts in the dichotomy we find on p.268 between people who feel the need for patterns and regularity in order to stay afloat, and those who do not (along with their substances of choice). This seems to me an important difference to consider on many levels, ultimately maybe more relevant and universal than differences based on alleged gender, race or sexual orientation for instance.
Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier, horsin’ around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0T3W5Ia8Aw
Spacemen 3 made what might be the best opiate album ever with The Perfect Prescription, and pretty much every time they talk about God, you can be sure it’s really all about what gave Holy Out his nickname. Jason Pierce kept at it for the following three decades with Spiritualized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRuoXqpL6ZM
And finally, since Arlen talks about Primal Scream, here they are:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E86gWQs-ios
Thanks for posting the music videos, I listened to all three, I hadn't heard that version of "The Needle and the Damage Done" before. Lou's song sounds pro-heroin, but that's the closest I'd ever want to get to it; Neil's seems anti-heroin, the tragedy of it; Patti's sounds ambiguous - "Oh god I fell for you," you can't be sure if she sings about a person or a personification. I like the line in her song, "why must not death be redefined."
ReplyDeleteSomehow, we all forgot the obvious one:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqpcrpC3P28
Great band, terrific album.