Even in the heat of it, blood-muddled and brain-hazy, there comes a point during the night when I wonder what the point of this is.
Which seems odd if you believe in the power of drugs to cut you loose, flip the switch on your inhibitions, and enable you to truly (often literally) hang out. I’ve never felt that the cliches about “forgetting one’s responsibilities/problems/self” sufficiently explain why people go balls-out. We hear about it all the time: Lana’s going fucking craaazy, Johnny Cash has the cocaine blues, Kanye’s going hard, Miley’s going hard, Ke$ha’s going hard (until she dies young).
Getting fucked-up for the fun of it is one thing: but why do we so often feel the urge to drink past limits of pleasure, bypassing a pick-me-up for a throw-me-down-the-fucking-stairs? Peaking reminds me of a childhood fever, when I was five-years-old and heard voices calling my name from both sides of a computer-animated canyon. Why the poetry and ritual surrounding substances that bring one back to this helpless, floaty state? For however spacey, crass, or easygoing I become, ecstasy comes with a grain of salt that ends up in my eye rather than drink-rim. People throw up. People pass out on the floor. Shrooms are fancy food poisoning; cross-fadedness is eerily similar to the pre-fainting sensation of dotty vision and chills. I’ve come to realize that these shivers aren’t side-effects; they are the headliners. Distress is our shwasty objective.
We go hard because we are uncomfortable with wellness, that probiotic brew of health and stillness. If we aren’t generally suffering, coexisting against a backdrop throb, we feel antsy. R&R compels us to create our own ache—a sadistic Build-A-Bear workshop. Drugs are the sexiest methods by which we return to this more familiar state of disease. Just look at the adjectives we use to describe the state of going hard: one gets wasted, shitfaced, hammered, smashed, trashed, slizzard, dumb….slang-terms both violent and flippant.
Buddhism incants: to live is to suffer. When we aren’t suffering due to lost love, a tsunami, or systemic injustice, we feel the need to take matters into our own hands. By going hard, we return to the hurt by which we feel vindicated, that ramshackle family-home, whilst also controlling the pain’s duration and magnitude. We get wasted and can’t control what happens next; but it’s all on our own time. The element of surprise that makes disasters doubly painful is nixed. We pack extra underwear, we designate drivers: we plan ahead for the plunge.
Does this sound a bit too Puritanical? It’s not that we feel guilty in the “off-hours” and want to punish ourselves for the gift of wellness by getting blasted; it’s that wellness makes us uncomfortable, and we want to return to a more trustworthy state of shit-in-the-fannery. Wellness is unnatural, or rather, it feels weird to be aware of your own wellness, whereas pain you can rely on. When we are most well and most pure, we are scrubby little kids unburdened by consciousness. The instant we become aware of our purity (cue that first zit or driplet), we can no longer bear it, because we realize not only how precious it is but also how fleeting. The years when we have it the best are the years we go hardest. As bright-eyed college kids, we begin every night in a state of relative wellness: even if one is poor, depressed, lonely, or ill, the sun has still come up and rayed your way (westward, as it were). You still have the freedom to get freaky. Knowing how fragile this state of wellness is and how rare in the grand scheme of things, we are led to self-destructive hobbies in a metaphysical gesture of i’m-dumping-you-before-you-can-dump-me. How else can one explain the conscious decision to blur our golden years, to get so fucked-up that they look lemon-lime? Why else would I put my body under duress, strain my relationships, in short act a fool, for no payoff beyond a brunch-time story? We quell our uneasiness at a lapse in suffering by going hard, pushing our bodies towards an edge where we no longer feel removed from the ongoing food-fight of real life.
Perhaps one feels that by electing to suffer, one is making a deal with fate. We are rushing to fill our quota of suffering so that later, when less young and our passed-out bodies less picturesque in their sprawl, life won’t come barreling at us with overdue fury. No one wants to be a virgin when karma has a prehistoric dick. By going hard, we regulate our reality-checks—or at least try to. Thus, shitshow nights are not so much catharsis as they are a penance. When we get wasted, just as when we suffer a blow to the head or break to the heart, we are freed: we no longer need to fret or hustle, because we are at that final level. We are where all things are headed. We got there early: blanket spread, we picnic on Klonopin and wine.
These are the thoughts that swarm me every Friday night; perhaps my addled thoughts translate like too-high handwriting, which is to say, sloppily. This is the simplest way that I can put it. Sometimes I meet people who are so beautiful that I can’t look them in the face. I look down. Cute shoes, too. I want to take their beauty in, but I can’t bring myself to look up. What if they open their mouths to say hi and it’s ruined? What if they saunter away? Wellness is that hottie, in whom youth and peace, stillness and health, so stunningly combine; going hard is the crowd into which you dissolve, pushing past this person and muttering something (to the floorboards) about getting another drink.
(‘16, Culture and Commentary Editor) (also known as Ratty St. John) is in your walls. Her chewing sounds lull you to sleep. Keep abreast of the bastard at rattysaintjohn.tumblr.com.