"What makes most people feel happy leads us headlong into harm." -The Smiths, "Paint a Vulgar Picture"
It's 420. Guess who will not be celebrating. With the end of college so close at hand, getting stoned seems like one of those things I'll end up just never doing. Tried once--about a year ago--but all that happened was I got very sleepy and coughed for two weeks afterward. A history of asthma gives me a convenient excuse to not inhale things that aren't air. Just another foregone way in which my days of being wild were over before they ever began.
To answer the title question, no, I can't has, because I do enjoy a good beer or glass of Scotch. But I rarely, if ever, feel that I'm missing something by being relatively sober. Even during band practice, which my bandmates view as a good reason to drink lots of wine. I guess I fail to see the appeal. Then again, I fail to see the appeal of a lot of things that many people embrace with enthusiasm. Where did I read that line about seeing through everything being the same as seeing nothing at all?
Talking about how boring hedonism is to me was doomed to be a pretty uninteresting endeavor from the beginning, so here is a quote from Margaret Atwood's review of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I somehow found tonight:
"The reluctance of Kathy H. and her pals to really confront what awaits them—pain, mutilation, death—may account for the curious lack of physicality of Kathy's descriptions of their life. Nobody eats anything much in this book, nobody smells anything. We don't know much about what the main characters look like. Even the sex is oddly bloodless. But landscapes, buildings, and the weather are intensely present. It's as if Kathy has invested a lot of her sense of self in things quite far away from her own body, and thus less likely to be injured."
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3 comments:
Ah, damn it. I just wrote a whole comment and then lost it. Let me try again.
I am glad I am in good sober company on this "holiday". All of my friends are totally blazed, have been talking about it for weeks, I just don't see the appeal. I smoked once and all it made me was angry, hungry, and sleepy. I'm not sure how that equates to a good time.
As for drinking, I've worn off the appeal of that too, which is kind of disappointing since I'm two days from 21. I guess if I was never allowed alcohol it would be cool, but I've been drinking since I was a wee one. It might be nice to be able to get into shows and sit at a bar once in a while, but I don't see myself going out and getting crunk. And even being completely legal, totally an adult, which we all fantasize about as a child has lost it's sparkle since I realized being an adult is really sucktastic and being a kid is a total dream.
Such is life I guess right?
...Situations arise because of the weather [and the buildings]. And no kinds of love are better than others...
For some years I've been trying to understand the people who see the world in terms of weather, buildings and newspapers and refuse to invest any of their own senses into the telling. But Margaret Atwood reminds me that these people are just as psychologically fragile as I originally pegged them to be. Not to be mean, if you consider yourself one of those building-people.
Our dear mutual friend asked me where to buy pot. It was funny.
So you're not into hedonism? That makes two of us. But would you make disclaimers about it not being a matter of principle - in other words, would you be ashamed of not being into hedonism? 'Cause I wouldn't.
Ironically, I smoked if not on 420, then within an hour of 420. The funny thing is a) it did nothing that I noticed, and b) I didn't know or care that it was 420, and the probability of me randomly smoking on 420 is low b/c of how rarely I do it at all. Like I can count the times on one hand.
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