Savage Neighbors Part 2

I have no real aversion to someone taking drink on occasion. I don't have any real aversion to this only because I have the predilection to take a drink too. Although I don't not approve the nearly obsessive use of marijuana, I am unfortunately trapped in the dead middle of dope smoking country. I do not understand the illicit drugs that seem to transform the users into monsters. I fear the pill shakes that those pill poppers have and when you see these people in public, they seem more like zombies or sub-humans rather than someone I could talk to.

It always makes me scratch my head. Perhaps I have just been overly lucky. I have never had the cause to take pills, prescriptions or otherwise. I never had need to take any more drugs than the occasional experiment in college. And as far as the booze goes, I have never wanted to drink so much that it interfered with my ability or my time to write. I suppose, I am lucky on this point too, that the writing has always been more important than a buzz.

But this is not the case with everyone. I think that it should be. I wish everyone was driven to do something, something artistic or something creative. It's like I wish everyone was out there digging in a garden night and day enticing growth and insect life. It's like I wish everyone was out there making music, painting pictures, living life. It's like I've been to parties where we were all having fun, drinking drinks, inhibitions down, everyone talking and joking and noise making. Then someone comes in and says, “hey, wanna smoke pot?” And of course everyone's been drinking and the inhibitions are down and just about anything seems reasonable. So everyone smokes dope. Then, the energy level at the party has died out. Then the noise, and the talking and all that has gone. If this doesn't seem reasonable to you, then the next time at the party, refuse pot and just see how dumb the atmosphere gets.

Now, imagine that the entire town you live in was like this. Imagine if everyone becomes quiet and absorbed and stoned. Now, imagine if the entire country got this way. What then? Well, we could always turn to potato chips and video games.

It's an exaggeration, and I know it. I know there are plenty of writers who got up in the morning and began on the drugs and on the booze and waited until sufficiently inebriated before they began to write. I still laugh, mostly out of wonder, at Hunter S. Thompson's daily intake of everything. But a writer, or anyone like Hunter S. Thompson is definitely the exception, not the rule. I feel like anyone who indulges in drugs, and that means all of them, the illegal ones and the more terrifyingly legal ones, has decided to stop thinking, stop feeling.

Whatever happens, it probably doesn't matter. In the larger scope of human endeavors, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if your entire population goes under the influence of god knows what and that we no longer do anything. It doesn't matter if half the world's population takes a drug today that either anesthetizes them or murders them, it's all the same thing. It won't matter if the time passes, and we all pass and then there is no record left of our time, our lifetime—collectively or individually. It won't matter at all. What will matter will be that we were good citizens who partook in the medical miracles of our time or that we were criminals who partook in the other stuff.

I have never had that sort of furious political thought that so many writers seem to have. I have never a cared for party lines or government policy. I do not care who becomes the president because the new boss is the same as the old boss. But I have always has had critical if not furious social thought. I have always wanted for my countrymen or my brothers and sisters across the globe to find that personal enlightenment swiftly, perfectly, artfully. I have wanted, sincerely that my neighbors can overcome the pitfalls of modern life, and have the ability to record the perfect light of a perfect day with perfect accuracy, lucidity and grace.

There are too many things that our brains are no match for. I remember the first time I have caffeine. I was not prepared for it. And now, I don't live without it. Whether it ends with caffeine for others, I won't know. But when we start to tinker with our brain chemistry, have we tinkered with what it means to be a human being.