The Book of Drugs_ A Memoir - Mike Doughty [100]
I prefer where I’m at to where I was; the general serenity and satisfaction of my life is better than the brief surges of euphoria that were all I used to have. I wouldn’t want to go back to the drugs even if they concocted a pill that would allow me to use casually, like a non-addict does. (The joke goes: If there were a cure for alcoholism, I’d go get wasted!) But I don’t discredit the drugs. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I wasn’t where I was, then.
(I don’t recommend drugs, either: if you have the addict thing, you’re more likely to die, or live a sad grey life, than get to where I got.)
I do stuff, the way I used to envy Molly Escalator’s ability to do stuff. All the travel I’ve done. I learned how to speak German, just for the joy of it. (I’m of the minority opinion that it’s a beautiful language; more people might dig it if we heard it anywhere other than being yelled in movies; even French sounds ugly yelled.) I went to a meeting in Germany and spoke, although what came out probably sounded like: “Drug is no happy, I make bad! To stop, many times meetings, I go fine! Good the life-ing is!”
I struggle with a notion of god-consciousness. I need both reverence and irreverence. I chafe at the word god, and I chafe at self-important atheists. I don’t believe in God-the-dude, who lives somewhere, but I don’t pray to a gaseous ball of energy, either, but to something with compassion in the way a human being has compassion.
A guy in the rooms said, “I call it god because it’s easy to spell.”
By pray—and I wish I could express the act with a word other than that one—I mean, mostly, speaking out loud to the darkness. Sometimes, just thinking at the darkness. Some people like the on-the-knees gambit—it’s been recommended to me, and I’ve tried, but couldn’t get with it. (Do you lean back on your ankles? Or sit up, Dorf on Golf style, putting the weight on your knees?) Scrap and I go to meetings out on tour; sometimes the Lord’s Prayer is said at the end of them, rather than the serenity prayer, and it fills me with resentment: I won’t say it. Scrap sighs at me, annoyed, like, Come on, man, it’s not a big deal, just accept it as its own thing.
Sometimes, in a freakout on the subway, in a theater, in the park, I’ll type long stream-of-consciousness prayers into my phone.
And it works. Atheists, your points are often impeccable—but, for me and a bunch of my friends, at least, it works. Or, maybe I should say, it can work. You want data. I don’t have any. You might want me to quantify the effects of prayer on—what?—pulse rate, income level, serotonin secretion, indices of satisfaction. You probably can’t take me seriously if I don’t have a solid hypothesis on who/what/why god is, a firm set of givens, but that’s not possible for me—my version of god is one thing one day, another thing the next, yet another thing an hour later. My faith in the usefulness of prayer fluctuates from the prompting of cosmic intervention to a very slight easing of stress. Even to call myself agnostic is to presume a lot more sense and rigor than I could muster.
Key to me is what the rock legend said: You’re like a flea contemplating the Empire State Building. What’s there is too vast for a human being to get his or her head around. The only shred of a rational justification—and I mean justification to myself, I’m not presenting an argument here—is this: if you believe in evolution, and thus believe that dogs aren’t as smart as pigs, which aren’t as smart as dolphins, which aren’t as smart as humans, you must believe there’s an evolutionary step—millions of years down the line—beyond the current state of humanness. There must be things we aren’t sophisticated enough, as animals, to comprehend—to perceive, even.
(To believe we’re the pinnacle of evolution—that no facet of reality could elude our understanding—might be thought of as along the lines of the book of Genesis: god made man