I want a new drug
My dear wife Susan had hip replacement surgery about seven weeks ago, which gave me access to a very limited supply of Oxycodone. I tried one one day, and two another day, at risk of being constipated (it does that to you). One pill was vaguely pleasant; two added up to sleepy-sleety, not-so-good, vague. Not worth risking constipation.
The New York Times has been warning me (and you) constantly for the past few months that any amount of alcohol is bad for the brain. Still, I drink wine with every dinner, which unfortunately makes me sleepy a couple of hours after dinner, which means I lose track of what’s going on in the detective shows. I also mix myself maybe two cocktails per week (gin or vodka, combined with something, hopefully also with a dash of tart cherry juice). Cocktails really open me up to gladness and conversation for about 45 minutes, which is not a bad run in this Time of Trump. I sometimes even make phone calls during those 45 minutes, if Susan is not around to share my mood.
My favorite drug by far (by far!) is Ecstasy (MDMA), but I’ve only managed to obtain it four times in my life. Periodically I ask close friends if they can get me some, but most of them are too old to know how to get drugs, or they forget about my request and I forget to mention it when my birthday rolls around. Ecstasy is a delightful serotonin-uptake inhibitor, which means your brain is having a warm, lovely bath for several hours, and you want to be kissing someone you love and having rich, honest conversations.
Yesterday my Starlight Trio went to a recording studio for the first time and spent two hours recording four songs. Now, that was like a good drug. The equipment was excellent, the engineer really liked my songs, and playing music and singing is transporting and communicative and rich fun. Rich fun. That’s what I want from drugs.
Today I got a delivery of heating oil after having missed one last week because my driveway wasn’t shoveled out wide enough for the truck. I had spent the past three early mornings snow-blowing and shoveling (I can do so for about a half-hour at a time) and voila! The truck came down and the guy walked on the long path I had dug for him and now we have a full tank of oil. Which means we can leave the thermostat on 70º which means the house (with the wood stove going) is about 66º in this Arctic weather, which is good enough as long as I’m wearing longjohns. So I feel safe and content — which is also what I want from drugs.
Marijuana doesn’t do that for me. Marijuana sets my hair on fire and makes my body vibrate and makes me talk too much. I’ve barely touched the stuff for years.
Psychedelics, too, are way, way too heavy for my taste. As a young man, I did enough tripping to last a lifetime, until I finally realized that there was to be no God for me despite all the manifestations of interconnection that I experienced, all of which I eventually wrote about in my book, Waiting for God.
Still, I do enjoy being philosophical, which is why I read George Saunders. I just finished his new one, Vigil, which is all about a major oil executive on the cusp of dying. Saunders, who wrote Lincoln in the Bardo — one of my top ten books of all time — has a wonderful flair for creating physical manifestations of human psyches. For example, there’s a character at the start of Lincoln in the Bardo who dies before he has sex with his virginal wife, and therefore has a penis the size of a log that he has to carry around as a spirit wherever he goes in the Bardo (the Buddhist version of purgatory). Vigil plays the same game, dancing with the mysteries of death and the mysteries of the psyche, and it transported me into reflections on my life at this stage (standing towards the back of the line to enter the Bardo) and on being human in general.
I guess reading good literature works like a drug for me. I wish I took it more often than I do.
What I’m seeking is to intensify the richness of private life. To block all political and relational static for a while. I do not listen to the news while drinking my cocktails.
Getting my happiness to flow, however, even if only from a gin and tonic (with cherry juice), also makes me care even more passionately about the outside world, and once I’m sober, I turn the news back on, and start worrying about what to do, what to do, what to do . . .