All the Way Down

All The Way Down

Self-destruction is not an easy task.
         The brain is delicate, but the mind is tough. Just ask the SAS. But I’ve got something better than white noise to drive you crazy. "White - yes. Noise - no." It takes time and a total lack of respect. You have to be willing to take it as far as you can.
         It all starts off with alcohol. Downing beers when you're young and puking it all up again. But was it worth it? Hell yes. This is life experience. This is growth.

         Once you’ve drunk enough alcohol you start looking for a better combination. You need a top up. Something for the lungs perhaps. Why not?
         Just cigarettes? Or something more. More wins the vote. Introducing marijuana. And what an introduction it was.
         Not only do you get to do a new drug, with new effects, but you get to learn a new skill. Rolling. And learn you must, because the first joints you roll will be so bad you’ll just manage to smoke some of it before it unwraps or spontaneously combusts. But never fear - practice is here.
         So it goes, you’re drinking and smoking. The start of a cocktail that will be too sweet to let go. But you don’t know this - you’re young and blissfully stupid. It all feels good. You start the dope philosophy course, where you have an all new perspective to life. You’re talking shit you won’t remember in years to come. All those nights wonderfully out of your mind. Bliss indeed.
         You mess up university. So it's time to go into full time work. The whole eight hour thing. The reason teachers can always smile at the kids that cause them grief is because they know the real world hits after finishing your education. Maybe it should be renamed vacation.
         Nothing prepares you to work for the rest of your life. The downer of working full time. Some people like it, even enjoy it. Others just can’t handle it. But you still do it. Because you need money. It will always rule the world, judge, jury and executioner.
         You need money for the drugs that relax you in your own time. Work your ass off to pay for your own self destruction.
         Years of drinking and smoking, years of experience and fun. Its upgrade time. So what comes next? You’ve got the money coming in, no problem.
         This is when you have a massive choice range. You’ve already tried speed, don’t want to try crack or heroin, too time consuming. Can’t be bothered with acid, because your imagination is too good already. So many drugs so many choices. It’s the, which one is right for me" attitude. What drug fits me as a person? A little bit of a boost is needed. I know, I know.
         Cocaine. Coke. Charlie. Hello. Hello. Hello. Holy shit. I’ve found the elixir of the drugs zone. Could a cocktail get any better than a line, a pre-rolled joint, chased by an ice cold beer. You’d be hard pressed. This combination is so good you can’t quite believe it. So you do it again and again. It's repeat subscription time. Who says routine is boring?
         Perfection after working your eight hour day. You’re entitled to relax and chill out. It’s your time and you’ll do what you want with it. Besides you’re on shifts and your body clock has no idea what the fucking time is. Best that it doesn’t as well. Because there’s no way you could wake at six am to waste another eight hours.
         Do enough drugs and life feel’s amazing. You perceive more, you never worry. Fear nothing. You find the right balance of real time and drug time. Of work and play.
         Trying every different flavour you can get. One of these, two of those, I’ll take a dozen. So much choice, so little time. Delivery as well. Excellent.
         You get stuck in a routine. Your not a drug addict, you’re a drug user. I don’t steal televisions and mug old ladies. I work a full time job and enjoy myself when I can. This is how you start the deception. You’re fucking yourself over and you don’t even know it. Not that you’d give a shit, you’re wasted.
         How many days have you wasted already? A hundred? A thousand? How many hours completely off your nut? Just so you can feel relaxed, chatty, and social.
         Pubs, clubs, gigs. Every night you’ve ever gone out. Were you ever sober? Does such a thing exist? Your mask is on and you’re the life and soul of the party.

You have permission to be the fool.
You have permission to be a complete asshole.
You have the right to remain oblivious.
You cannot hold me responsible for my actions.

         Life is grand. There’s no such thing as a low. Low is from waking, to the time you have breakfast. Food tastes better when you feel like shit.
         But you never ever prepared yourself for the day when suddenly your release from the world is taken from you. The words "give up", or "cut down" have never ever been in your vocabulary unless someone else was saying it.
         So how could the perfect balance of drugs and work go so horribly wrong? How do you end up being one of those drug stories you hear about. It could never happen to you. You’re in charge.
         Easy, far too easy.
         Propaganda is a two way affair. From drug extraordinaire, to a pathetic curled up mass of overdose. You shrivel up like a prune. In the end you’re in a constant state of dehydration. You can’t remember when your piss wasn’t yellow.
         Stuck in an endless cycle like the earth around the sun. Until your own personal asteroid hits you square in the face.
         Most drug users don’t know the damage the stuff they ingest is doing to them. If it feels good why stop? If you wake up feeling like shit enough times, you’d feel weird if you didn’t. In the end you’ve taken so many drugs, so often, that you’re never truly sober. You’re a walking time bomb just waiting to explode. How long will you last before your body says enough is enough?
         What you do not see cannot hurt you. Whenever I’ve hurt myself, I have to look at the damage before the pain sets in. I wonder if I had never bothered looking in the first place would I still feel as much pain.
         This is the advantage of drug taking. It goes in. The damage is done. And you never have to see it. Most modern drugs have pain killing affects anyway. Numb the body so you can’t feel the poison.
         Cocaine is a strong central nervous system stimulant. It increases your heart rate, blood pressure, can cause bleeding on the brain, strokes. But when you’re on it, all you care about is the high. You smoke dope and drink at the same time to ‘balance’ the effects. What you don’t know is that it’s actually causing more damage.
         Given enough time the damage will catch up with you. It’ll happen so fast you won’t know what’s going on. One moment you’re at work doing the job you’re paid to do, waiting to finish. And the next your hearing things that don’t exist.
         If there is one thing cocaine guarantees other than a great high. It’s a great depression. After chronic use you end up taking it to feel normal. Secretly you know something is wrong, but you just can’t figure it out. The drugs are never ever to blame. Until one day the word paranoia takes on a new meaning.
         Smoking dope, you might be paranoid that cops in a passing car can see the joint in your hand. You don’t go out of your way to hide it. Just play it cool, cup it in your hand, breath out naturally. No problem.
         Coke paranoia on the other hand is unbearable to say the least.
         Cocaine does something quite unexpected. It does something that neither the mind nor the brain can understand. Suddenly there is a volume switch to your thoughts. You’re convinced that people can hear everything you think. And when this happens you’re screwed. You actually start testing it. Anger takes over from calm; you start to get angry at everything and everyone.
         It’s said that cocaine has the ability to mimic many mental disorders. One of the reasons believed for this is cocaine’s ability to play with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is responsible for feeling pleasure. Serotonin is responsible for things such as mood. If you mess around with these two then you are asking for trouble.
         After extended use of coke, it causes the transmitters to flood, instead of flowing as they should. This puts you in a very confused, anxious, and agitated state. You simply lose the plot completely.
         I don’t know if chronic use causes some kind of infection in the ears, but it certainly seems like it. You can hear, but from your eardrum to your brain something is wrong. Auditory hallucination just doesn’t quite cover it. It’s as though you’re hearing 3 or 4 dimensions at once. Whatever the damage is, your body is trying to tell you about it, but it’s just too much too take.
         You get so mad that you’re screaming in your mind as loud as you can for it to just shut up. At first you can’t quite figure out what’s going on. Did you really hear that? Who fucking said that? What the fuck is going on?
         You get headaches so bad that you can feel the blood rushing to your brain like a floodgate. Problem is you do not feel the ache side of it. The brain does not have pain receptors in the same way as the rest of the body. You feel something is horribly wrong but you do not know what it is.
         Therefore, you quit taking all drugs. The problems however, are only just beginning.
         Now you have to survive the withdrawal.
         The word crash takes on a whole new meaning. A train, a plane, a bus can’t crash as bad as you can.
         The brain has evolved a series of negative feedback mechanisms. Their effect is to stop us from ever being truly happy for very long. The longer you took drugs, the more negative feedback you will receive in the end. Nature always gets its way. This is why when going clean, people feel like they are dying.
         All the stories you hear about going cold turkey shrivel in comparison to experiencing it first hand. You feel so bad you wish you were dead, in a coma. Any attempt to get food to stay down is a battle you will not win. As soon as it reaches your stomach it wants to come straight back out. The reason is you’re body is so toxic that it can just about break down the drugs in your system. It will reject all food. This can last days or weeks depending how much of a state you’re in.
         The whole time you can barely think. You feel nothing but emptiness. Not only that - you feel worthless. Your mind reacts to everything even though you don’t want it too. Problem is your reacting before you have something to react too. It’s like suffering from precognition. Before the sound hits your eardrum you already know a dog is going to start barking. A car is passing. It’s like being in another dimension. The whole time you’re absolutely terrified of everything. The only things you feel are anxiety, fear and pain.
         Add to this the fact that you’re experiencing most of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia without knowing it. Your sense of humour packs its bags and fucks off for a few months. In fact the very things that you use to be able laugh and joke about turn against you. Everything is suddenly completely serious.
         And you haven’t even tried sleeping yet. You thought you had trouble sleeping when you were on drugs. Without that bed time joint how are you going to sleep now? The answer is you’re not.
         But when you finally fall to sleep you will have the most vivid dreams of your life. Your brain is working overtime to repair the damage wrought. You wake up everyday and hope it won’t be there. You’re tired all the time. And not just from repairing the damage, but from manic exhaustion.
         Insanity is a tiring business. It uses up energy that could be put to use elsewhere. Like healing your internal organs.
         Because it is utter irrationality it won’t listen to reason. If someone is saying something jokingly to you and the paranoia is still there, then once again you’ll end up hearing it wrong. When you’re in this state if you hear someone laugh it will sound utterly horrible. Like an insane cackle in a film, but a million times worse.
         As far as you’re concerned the world is against you, everyone knows you, everyone laughs at you. People that beep their car horns are doing it to show you they can hear you. So it goes on and on for what seems like forever.
         Five months will pass and you’ll still be hearing the insanity from the first week like a bad echo. You have no sense of time. Your own memory is distorted. This is damage to your hippocampus. The days fly by without any change except you feel worse.
         After long enough you start to get a bit of yourself back. You cry for thoughts you had that now make you feel awful. You look back in time and cringe at some of the things you thought. Just because you believed that your privacy had been taken away.
         When you suddenly stop ‘hearing’ these things you can’t quite believe it. Silence is too golden. You’re afraid it could come back at any moment. And it usually does because you’re thinking about it. The only thing you hold dear to is that it can never be as bad as when you had no control over it.
         Once you start feeling emotions again, most of the insanity will peel away as though it never existed. Makes you wonder if all madness is, is a lack of emotion. Or a lack of properly feeling it. You can never again be afraid of emotion because as soon as it comes back, you hold on to it with a death grip.
         Now you’ve got the vital part of yourself back you have to try to get back in to the real world. It is daunting enough for someone who spent all day experiencing this kind of warped reality. It takes a hell of a lot of time just to feel normal. There’s no more ‘I think I’ll have a smoke to calm my nerves’.
         The whole time you were crazy you never once blamed the drugs for doing it. Not once. Just goes to show you how much you relied on that endless cycle just to be yourself. Now that has gone you feel lost, confused, like a having a head injury. Except this is more serious than a bump on the head. Your skull is not protecting you from this injury it is only hiding it.
         What you do not see is hurting you. The outside may look fine, but the inside is a mess that may never heal properly.
         The definition of the self has been debated, philosophised, speculated, imagined, researched, and yet still it eludes us. But when you lose your sanity, the quest for that most important sense is the difference between life and death. If you don’t find it your chances of recovery are slim.
         It is a sneaky bastard though.
         My personal description of it would be this, it is as minuscule as a black hole, surrounded by a universe of knowledge and information, and when you finally find it, it has the power of a true warp in space.
         It destroys any of the insanities that can tear a person apart. It is true feeling. But it is futile to search for it. To scream in agony that it has abandoned you. Eventually it will catch up to you. It is only a matter of time.
         Giving up drugs is easy. Wishing I hadn’t given up drugs even easier. It's living without them that is the hard part.

The one who knew all about drugs.