The moment crunches. Realisation hits. Understanding dawns. The minds' focus snaps like a focus-pull in a movie, making the protagonist and the background slide apart although noone moves. Scales fall from your eyes. The hidden magic eye picture reveals itself in glorious 3D.
It's funny, but we're a self-defeating species at the core. If you get to the point where you understand that the best thing you can do as a human is to not reproduce, what can you do with this discovery?
You can certainly practise it, but the way we're evolutionarily wired, if I do practice this theory, then a hundred years from now there will be less people in the world who share my belief. Those who oppose me will have reproduced and seeded the world with more humans who see reproducing as a neat thing.
And where can I go to discuss my belief? If I had a view on how to cook a mean souffle, or had a desire to dance with a minor B grade celebrity, then I could possibly garner some airtime to push these memes. But to talk about non-reproduction? Well there's 4ZZZ and in the states the PBS, but little else.
I just watched a film called Gasland that got me thinking like that. And it reminded me of a similar documentary called Food Inc. that I watched a few months ago. It documented the damage that the corporatisation of the food industry has had on the modern US diet. I'm a child of the environmental movement. I grew up in a society that was just starting to say 'Hey maybe raping and pillaging the ground we stand on is not the most prudent course of action.'
I would guess that the generations that have come after me have a view of conservation that is to them just "common sense". Perhaps sometimes they forget they share the world with rulers who do not share that view. Who see life as a chance to grab as much as you can for yourself and family as fast as you can. It's strange that such defilers and ruiners are the first to name someone such as myself as a ruiner because I have turned my waste inwards instead of taking with both hands.
And sometimes I am aware that things I hold to be self-evident, obvious, just 'right', are alien to others. How to know when you're just stating the obvious, and when you're helping someone by pointing out a better way to live.
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The using lifestyle's not an easy choice. The last week has been rough on myself and S, perhaps more on me than her. She trails me in age by about three years, so I like to kid myself that any ill effects I experience are just precursors of what's on the horizon for her.
Silly logic, I know, no two people are that alike, as anyone testing pharmaceuticals could tell you. And then when you go with different genders and basic behavioural differences like she smokes and I don't, well, I think we're distinct.
Health's always an issue for the regular user. Put simply, there's a thing called a blood/gut barrier, and it's not meant to be bypassed. Normal human behaviour protects the individual by ingesting substances orally - stuff goes down the gullet into the stomach and is absorbed into the gut and bloodstream, through various mechanisms designed to filter out the average pollutants and toxicants. If a tiny bit of chalk, say a millimetre in size, gets mixed in your dinner accidentally, well that's okay as your body will excrete it (after trying to process it for any possible beneficial minerals or vitamins).
Now enter the junkie. How do they get their gabo to be absorbed most efficiently? Injection is the key way to get gabo into your brain in Australia. (This is an economic function of the distance between gear production and gear use - the massive distance results in high prices, which result in users taking the most efficient means of administration rather than the safest). This bypasses the blood and gut barriers. To use an IT analogy, it's like walking into a highly secure corprate LAN and using a flash drive to copy trojaned .exes onto the root drive of the main server. Firewalls that protect the LAN from the nasty outside world are just not brought into play.
So, being a junkie who takes their drug intravenously, you accept that you're taking a risk at each shot. I had a friend's girlfriend ring me eighteen years ago, telling me her boyfriend was puking and feverish an hour after his shot. The next morning he was dead. 'Dirty hits' are horrible but rarely fatal. My usual remedy is to score more gear and chase them away with another shot, as paradoxical as that sounds.
As long as you use fresh water and new tools, this has worked for me about 90% of the time. The pollutant that causes the fever is usually in the water or an old sharp rather than in the sterile dusty sample of gear.
Of course, it can be immensely hard to get yourself up and out to score again whilst alternately freezing and overheating, plus the projectile vomiting, aand then you'll often need to beg for tick as how many junkies score a 100 packet with another 100 in their back pocket?
My last dirty was in perhaps mid 2009, and I was scoring off a guy in the city, and scoring for a friend who wasn't using very heavily. I was lucky in that he was understanding and was happy to give tick, plus my friend who I'd just scored for did not get sick and drove me in the city. Sim and I both developed symptoms at the same time, across town - she at home, me at Red Hill. She rang me as her headache was coming on. The suddenness and intensity of a dirty headache leaves one who has experienced it before in little doubt as to the express train of suffering bearing down.
"Get out and get more gear!" was a praphrased summary of her call. I protested that I was sick. But she doesn't drive, which means in these situations there was little point wasting energy and the few minutes of non-vomiting time we had left arguing.
So today I was in my doctor's getting my monthly metro script, and overcame my usual 'don't mention health stuff, it's probably a result of your using' behaviour - I found myself whingeing about these other health issues - a sore finger that wasn't healing, gums that stayed sore for a long time, and a tight painful chest that felt like it had slammed into a steering wheel a week ago.
Her response was funny and exactly what I expected - "Stop whingeing!". But she only joked for a minute, before I knew it I had a flat wooden depressor on my tongue as she checked out my sore gums, and I peeled back the band aid to show her my sore finger. Yes I felt stupid, but I justified it by thinking that I blow $60 every month on a doctor's appointment to get a script so I may as well get some healthcare occasionally.
"That's a job for dentist" she informed me redundantly after pulling away from my mouth.
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There's a line in a comedy somewhere the hero informs the listener that they refuse to go to any country that requires you to have shots before heading there. I'm reaching an age now where I start to understand that thought. To go to Nepal I'm meant to have two Hep A shots, the H1N1 (Swine Flu) vaccine, Meningococcal and Typhoid vaccines, and then take anti-malarials and avoid mossies completely because of the 'chicken gunya' disease....
That's a few different ways to die, plus the cost of all these vaccines is over a couple of hundred dollars...the thought of spending two hundred bucks on something injectable and all to show for it is a swollen arm and a dizzy sensation (the typhoid shot made me a little feverish last time - 1992) - well, I'd want to follow them up with a chaser of my own design. Not exactly recommended treatment but that's how this head works...
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Methadone fills the gaps when you cannot score, when finance or just life get in the way. It steps in like your girlfriends' older sister and entertains you for a few hours, distracts you.
But no real substitute. You go looking. Your mind wanders while it's still in your system. Everything ends, every dose wears off.