An education in the buzz.

I have to admit that college didn’t really work the way it was supposed to. The academic aspect of my education has been almost entirely useless except to help me sound smart at dinner parties. But being suspended between adolescence and real adulthood for five years had its advantages. I’ve had my fair share of hedonistic adventures in the realms of recreational chemical experimentation. And nothing else could’ve prepared me for the drugs that doctors give.

The idea for this blog entry occurred to me while lying awake in bed sometime between late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning. But let me digress…

I recently reintroduced caffeine back into my diet. I’ve never been the kind of coffee drinker that my mother was (two pots a day) and even at the height of my caffeine usage I still preferred fancy drinks that were more chocolate and whipped cream than espresso. When I had to go straight edge for health reasons earlier this year, caffeine was an easy sacrifice, though a few milligrams snuck into my blood stream via the occasional green tea. But, forgive my language, chronic fatigue is a bitch and a little caffeine goes a long way to maintaining functionality during the long afternoons at work.

Well, I had under estimated my sensitivity on this occasion; apparently 8 hours is not adequate buffer time for caffeine to exit the blood stream. At about three a.m., four brain racing hours into a nasty case of insomnia, I gave in and took a cocktail of pills that has never failed to put me under before. The following four hours did not include sleep.  Instead I was treated to a heavy floating cool tingly warm fuzzy body buzz and a few mild visual hallucinations. The combination was actually a recommendation from my doctor, and I’ve taken it more than a few times before with unmemorable results. Something about the addition of caffeine , insomnia, and maybe the recent increase in dosage of my SNRI… as the kids say, I was trippin’.

I remember thinking, I’m going to have to remember this combination later. Of course that’s something a poet thinks in the midst of a cerebral euphoria which makes every thought seem beautiful and important. The exhaustion next day was enough to deter any future attempts at recreating the blood chemistry. I’m not the party monster I once was.

During my early twenties I was the average student. I drank like a fish, I smoked like a chimney, and I dabbled like the liberal middle class English major that I was. There are things that no one ever tries, except in cautionary tales of overdoses and car crashes. And then there are things that almost everyone tries, even the cute virgin Jesus freak that works in the children’s section of the library. And then there’s a buffet table of “wild” experiences from which people like me pick and choose. I was never as feral as some of my lady friends, but no one called me naïve. Thanks to a combination of common sense, good luck, and good friends I always came out on the other side of my debauchery with hardly more than a hangover.

So when I found myself watching whispy gray ghosts of silver light dancing around the ceiling, thinking magical thoughts that I prayed I would remember in the morning, I didn’t freak out. I took my temperature, checked my body for signs of allergic reaction, drank a tall glass of water, and just rode it out.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if the medications to treat my illnesses have pleasant side effects, than please and thank you. I’ll be happy to get high, doctor.

Some photographic evidence of my wilder days...