something I wish I could forget

I wish that I could forget the way it feels to be intoxicated.

We all have natural urges and desires, for food, fellowship, rest, sex, etc. Those drives are natural and a healthy person is capable of exercising control over them in order to be productive. The craving of drugs is not among these natural urges. They are synthetic additions to the landscape of motivating forces within us, and they all predicated on some manifestation of brokeness, pain, or selfishness within the circumstantial contexts of life. A desire to escape or enhance what life has to offer.

Knowing what it's like to be drunk and singing karaoke, or to be stoned at the movies sort of takes away a certain level of enjoyment out of life, knowing that it could be "better" with the addition of X substance. Of course it wouldn't be better, I've tried the "I don't value sobriety like other people do" thing, and it just isn't profitable. There is a reason that we do not naturally or regularly feel the way we when we are intoxicated, and that's because we're not supposed to feel those things.

Euphoria is a blessing, elation is a blessing, relaxation is a blessing, warmth and feelings of goodwill are blessings and it is a blessing these experiences are dependant on context. Going out of your way to manufacture long-lasting emotional states for the sake of the experience itself is futile and dangerous. Without the exclusive and limited nature of emotion, there wouldn't be a way to organize a hierarchy of importance in our lives. If everything was equally amazing all the time there'd be no difference between shit and shinola, as it were. But when you give yourself over to constant intoxication, everything feels exactly how you want it to feel as often as you take the drug. Then you start to recognize that it's the drug, not the life experiences, that you want. You start to attach yourself to those feelings and your identity enmeshes with the drug experience, and the very thought of never feeling that way again becomes terrifying. And just like that, the adventure is taken out of life and you're left calculating out your life moment to moment, basing your schedule around when a certain pill is gonna kick in, how much money you have for the bar, or planning entire days around 8-12 hour periods of time where you will be useless to anybody but the pizza delivery guy.

Despite all that, I know what it's like to feel and see things in ways that are literally impossible without ingesting different kinds of poison. And I often find myself missing it like you'd miss a dead relative. It's almost a constant a state of ingratitude, as if the beauty of life isn't good enough as it is. Like a rubber band that gets stretched beyond it's limit and never fully takes its original shape again.

Don't do drugs kids.