 Flight
of the Virgin
I'm embarrassed, but that's not about to stop me.
I've done something very silly, and enjoyed it, and anyone reading is probably
thinking god what a geek.
Yeah, well, I've been a geek all my life, so fuckit.
I tried tussin. 4 oz. Not the maximum strength kind.
Keep in mind that tussing is not what makes me a
geek. It's my approach that makes me a geek. I've never done
any drug recreationally, unless you are one of those sticklers who counts
tobacco and alcohol. My therapeutic experience is pretty limited,
too. Tylenol 3 for particularly nasty headaches, demerol during childbirth,
a little morphine that a British ship's doctor gave me for stomach flu.
In each case I was a bit too busy being miserable to actually enjoy anything.
Anyway, it's right at the top of my confessions
that I regret never having tried weed. And I am not now in the position
where I can try.
I am real familiar with the effects of alcohol
by now, and have made my break with nicotine. Caffeine gets me where
I wanna go on a daily basis. The hard stuff, the scary stuff, the
addictive stuff, I'd never want to try, cuz I'm something of a control
freak, or rather a self-control freak. I don't want anything to rob
me of my power over myself. The very thought of living day in and
day out obsessed with trying to get enough of some substance to keep me
going, well it's terrifying. A lot of people think they can
try and not get addicted. Yeah, right. It's a risk I'm not
willing to take.
So, where does that leave me?
One January I was on my way across the country and
took a nice long stopover at the Grand Canyon. I had a great time
hanging with the locals, as it was the off-season. The guy I was
staying with, though, was the butt of some joking in the town, because
he was known to tuss. Nobody knew why he was into Robitussin DM,
nobody understood. And I never brought it up; he didn't tuss in front
of me, and frankly as long as the sex was good, I didn't care.
Sex was my drug of choice. Relatively cheap,
readily available, intoxicating. Aerobic. Legal.
So, anyway, now I know about dextromethorphan, I
read the FAQ and
a few other places. Anything I say here would be redundant.
How was it? It was ok. Like drunkenness
but different, too. Didn't seem to feel a thing if I didn't move.
But if I did move, everything was swimmy sometimes, sometimes choppy, like
a strobe light, sometimes very slow. I hadn't been able to find a
DXM product that didn't have guinefasin in it too, so I had to deal with
the nausea that comes with that ingredient.
I watched Muriel's Wedding while under the
influence, hadn't seen it yet. Bad choice. The mockery of the
sham wedding, the humiliation at the hands of her "friends", all the undercurrents
were really blown up huge. The feel, the very fabric of the movie,
the texture of it, changed every couple scenes. All in all, it got
hard to follow. I saw it again this morning and was able to understand
it a lot better. The same applies to most of the websites I hit after
the movie was over. Not to say I didn't understand them at all, quite
the opposite. I understood individual elements far too much, or in
too differing ways, for them to mesh together smoothly. Oh hell,
I can't really explain, but two pages out of Zach's
journal, "The
Boy Who Cried Wolf " and "Burning
Bridges", had to be reread this morning for total comprehension to
set in.
When I hit the hay around 4 am, the effects were
still pretty much with me, a surprise because I am so used to alcohol,
which wears off rather quickly. I climbed into bed with my boys (I
really hate sleeping in his room when he is here, barely
go in there now that he is away) and Boober wrapped his little arms around
my neck and it sent me into a state of maternal bliss. He was lying
there asleep with his eyes open, as he sometimes does while dreaming, saying
things that don't make any sense out of the context of whatever dream he
was having. It seemed to be a happy dream, and he hugged me into
the night, and I just soaked it up as I fell into sleep. |
