The First Hit
I was always that people who do drugs were cowards. “Real men face their problems, not run from them.” Both of my parents, having taken part of the wave of legal immigrants leaving the motherland for the promise of employment and life changing salaries abroad, were deeply religious at some point of their life and were adamantly against recreational drug use and sparsely drank, save for holidays and birthday parties. This is all well and good, however, it has come to my attention that I have an extremely compulsive and addictive personality.
We’re all junkies if you think about it. We may not all be frothing at the mouth, hobbled in alleyways, pithy in the destruction and desolation of our lives. We won’t all be screaming at busy strangers during rush hour, ruining the ebb and flow of city sidewalk traffic to finance our next fix. But we are all junkies in some regard. I don’t look like the part (fuck no). But I know if you stare deep enough into the pitch black nothingness of my pupils, passed my feigned interest at your shitty boring fucking life and deeper still passed my attempts at contemporary pleasant conversation, I am simply a vessel for which humanity’s proclivity for self-destruction flows through and interacts with the world (I like to call this the “fuck up mechanism”). Through my fancy-schmancy private school education, my middle class suburban upbringing, my mild mannered white washed Asian American disposition, I am simply, in essence, a dog perpetually chasing its tail, consuming my dwindling personal resources on instruments of regret. Not for sustenance, not because I have a particular purpose for them, but for the fuck of it. The thrill of the kill. The piercing beauty of the peak and the crushing polarity of the oncoming crash. I want it all. And in the darkest corners of my mind, in the quietest moments of personal solitude, secrets I have whispered on the way down have revealed that I need it. For whatever reason, I fucking need it.
