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Is it the drugs or just being young? There’s a euphoria when you’re 18 or 20 or 23 and up late, stoned with people you swear are your tribe for life. Waking up on someone’s dirty couch and that awesome grogginess that doesn’t yet involve back pain. You are young, life is a great adventure and you feel like kind of a badass on top of it all. I would love to feel that way again, but I’m in my 40s, and my back would hurt and a lot of those people either grew up and are boring or didn’t and are pathetic.

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This was lovely, Freddie. The best writing captures something we already know but transcribes it in a way we’re not capable of. I’ll read this again, but two images really stood out for me: “I miss the moment when you see one of your friends, in the unguarded moment of the peak of her high, slowly close her eyes, roll her head back towards the ceiling, and exalt.” God, definitely. Those moments were true, unmediated beauty, unmediated despite the drugs. And your paragraph on the morning after was spot on. I really liked those mornings, when I lived in the Boston suburbs and the air was cool and crisp. It was real chumminess, real camaraderie. The liquor and pot (small amounts of both) with and after breakfast; the comfortable knowing that you aren’t going to do shit that day but hang out with your friends inside the house and on the porch and dress well for the weather and look forward to and be pleased by the people who stop by. Thanks for this.

I wrote a darker paragraph to follow this, but I’m not to post it and upset the mood you’re establishing here. This is about the nice parts, the exciting parts, not the rest. I also wrote a long response on pot culture in response to your previous article on smoking weed, but didn’t publish that one either. It felt too personal. Maybe I will respond negatively to this topic at some point. I am getting concerned that the pro-drug narrative is getting too simplified, too certain that the overall effects of legalization are going to be positive (although the raw comments to your pot article convinced me that there are plenty of people out there who are right in line with my thoughts).

Anyway, thanks Freddie. I can't tell you how nice it is to read articles on beauty these days. There's too few of them.

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Oh, man, this is exactly how I feel about quitting cigarettes. I even use the same line, that I miss them like I miss an ex-girlfriend. Smoking was such an integral part of my day for so long, for good and ill. I would never start up again, but I don't regret starting. If I were a teen today I probably wouldn't because it's so much more expensive and restricted (I once smoked on an airplane!) But I don't regret it, and I think back on that time wistfully.

That's always the advice I give people who are trying to quit, to treat it like being dumped. Don't tell yourself it's bad because you know that's not true. Just tell yourself that period of your life is over and it's time to move on.

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I miss alcohol. 6 years sober and I still think about it everyday. I rarely think about the weed and coke anymore. But memories of my first time being drunk, 16 years old, alone in the basement with a bottle of whisky, thinking that this is how I want to feel forever, those still haunt me.

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Wow, can't relate at all lol. Appreciate your thoughts though.

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Yesterday I was reminiscing about college daze, all the fun, new experiences, constantly ingesting a variety of mind-altering substances. Now I'm mid-aged, reveling in the changing of seasons, knowing how many I have left is rapidly dwindling. Great piece - thanks for the contact high :)

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Very nicely written.

The thought of drugs invoke a similar nostalgia for me related to girls, being in my 20s, and living in a different NY.

Indulging in a couple lines at a bachelor party or a similar occasion every couple years is enough to know that those times can't be recaptured. One, there's no sense of discovery or surprise - it's all mapped out and at an intellectual remove. Two, many things that were fun at 25 are mostly sad at 40. Which is OK.

But still, especially as it gets a bit cooler in the fall, it's hard not to be wistful for an evening in grad school when you felt giddy because you had some coke, were heading to a bar, and were going to spend the whole night drinking with a really pretty girl that you were thrilled to have just started dating.

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Absolutely beautiful writing.

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founding

All the attachment and family metaphors are getting at the truth. Modern life has pruned our relationships down to nothing, and drugs create the feeling of closeness without the reality.

People have a relationship with drugs. The problem is that they are just chemicals, and they don't care.

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It's the shame that gets me. If I could do it all without the shame then i'd never stop. I don't know where it comes from, but the shame is too much. It's the opposite of beauty.

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Damn, this shit was fucking beautiful.

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"I loved drugs in part because the consequences were so minor and because there was never any movie-of-the-week tragedy...

"Yet for all of it, what consequence?...You experience no permanent consequences because you refuse the crass narrative that there must be consequences."

One reason I avoided drugs was because I seemed to be a kid who'd attract the consequences of doing drugs without doing any.

I already had "visions", some pictorial, some musical. Including migraine auras, the best of which turned the night sky more vivid than "Starry Night". What, I wondered, would drugs add, except their potential downsides? Even without doing drugs, I got caught.

Most memorably, I was threatened with arrest for appearing "drugged" (sick and sad) unless I took an ambulance ride I couldn't afford to a hospital I knew wouldn't help me. If I had been high, the encounter might've been fun. Maybe I would've been insolent enough to stand on rights I didn't know I had to avoid ambulance bills I couldn't pay (only later did I learn the police had no legitimate power to arrest me for refusing the ambulance).

Instead, months later I spent a week or so mulling over both some "Happy Shiny Jesus" cult brochure and the sex work ads in the local paper, doubting I had better options for clearing mounting debt. Part of that was self-torture: sex work may be the oldest profession for the desperate, but churchgoing virgins might fail even at sex work; joining the cult would mean giving up math, which I loved, in exchange for promised relief of the debt I hated. Still, I did feel kind of desperate. And if nothing's more shameful than being "the Millennial loser" who fails to launch and moves back in with parents, then finding both sex work and getting scammed by a cult that promises to clear your debts less shameful than that is only logical.

Ultimately I took the most shameful path, though it meant (of all things) agreeing with family to seek treatment for "chronic Lyme". 

Tasting what it's like to arbitrarily get "extra consequences" is why I refuse the narrative that there must be consequences. Someone else walks into the same room as me with smoke on his clothes, and chances are my lungs close up. This does not make me special: undeserved consequences are common as dirt. Thinking the smoker's own lungs should close instead since "there must be consequences" for his choices does me not one damn bit of good. If I relied on consequences to do justice against the smoker, then what is the justice consequences have done against me? I'm risk-averse — with good reason, I think — but not because risks are just.

From childhood, I was dependent on at least an asthma prescription. Taking drugs was a chore, and drugs just for recreation struck me as a complication I couldn't afford, even if other people could. I sought my own kind of thrills and, without intending, got into some absurdly foolish scrapes. Just not while high. Now that I'm a parent, I don't swim dangerously anymore, for example, and I miss that. I miss undivided attention for visionary experiences — the vexing consequences for getting absorbed in anything besides kids when kids are on the loose seem endless. I miss what Pascal called l'esprit de finesse — visionary, wordless thought that leaps ahead of discursive reason (l'esprit de géométrie) to draw it onward. (Words are just janitors, tidying up after real life. They annoy me, though I use a lot of them.)

On the other hand, getting absorbed in kids has perks. Most of them, while young enough, succeed effortlessly at being impolitely alive.

One last rejection of "there must be consequences" from DB Hart: "Easter is an act of 'rebellion' against all false necessity and all illegitimate or misused authority, all cruelty and heartless chance. It liberates us from servitude to and terror before the 'elements'. It emancipates us from fate. It overcomes the 'world': Easter should make rebels of us all.”

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The trick is to get to the age of 60. An inordinate number of people I know who were heavy into the so-called 'hard' stuff in college had brains that short-circuited age 55-59. This is not a scientific observation, nor meant to be predictive, but it has been profoundly unsettling to me. Wandering into a group of friends, I found the best way to not engage in substance abuse was to do nothing and stay straight around them while they indulge. There are not enough pejoratives to describe the banality of their behavior. Locked in their brain, they think they are profound. Expressed in archaic computer terms, they were a bunch of no-ops. I'm afraid to the universe, which coldly hews to cause-and-effect, such people appear either expendable, or just simply worth passing by.

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one of these a month makes it all worth the price of admission

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All due respect but it sounds like what you miss is your youth and what's difficult is getting older. There's really no prescription or street drug that can take that away.

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Just fantastic…as one who knows exactly what you mean

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