Alive and Pazzing

A Story by Matt Fleming

uuuugh. Yeah. Think fear and loathing in Las vegas meets... early highschool exam?

It started out as a regular day. wake up, go to work, get paid, repeat. that day I woke up, went to work, moved out of my parents and never repeated.

After working my job for a few months I was fired due to my insomnia. 3 days sleep deprivation and making orders for 70 people don't mix. The following week 3 of my close friends died with in 4 days of each other and the week after I had my first (and only thank god) puff of meth, my first GHB experience, my first cocaine line, my first tabs of acid, my first pure MDMA and I came as close as I was comfortable with in hardcore drug use.

Altered states of mind where nothing to me. after you've been awake for 5 days at a time you tend to just accept everything that goes on around you and move on, same goes for drugs. So what if you have work tomorrow, or in 30 minutes that’s for future me to worry about. I was stuck in the present the only thing that mattered was surviving the paranoia coming my way.

Soon I was part of a $6000 acid deal. I turned up at my friends house who had acquired 400 blots of good quality LSD... I quad dropped that night and it's lead me here.

The night started out good, a few mates sitting around appreciating the business they had done acquiring this amount of hallucinogens. the guy who had organised it all was a meth user and going to a dark place very quickly. he'd had a puff on the cracky just after getting the acid to set him straight and calm him down, but a bad timed RACV call because the keys were locked in the car quickly turned that into a paranoid state of mind. I had to deal with a meth addict, full blown signs of addicted and coming down, all the while I was fucked on acid. a paranoid violent tempered meth addict does not do well in social situations, they also are not in the best mind to make decisions. A person high on acid is in much the same boat. When it comes to the choice of if the meth user should go to work or not it's decided he won't and the LSD user will call up the work and explain "He called me up in the middle of the night vomiting, he ate chicken that had gone off.” BAD DECISION. The phrase "I’m fucked on acid" is how I wanted to finish every sentence but sadly I had sober people to deal with. After what felt like an eternity grappling mentally with a demon who could at any moment jump across the room and stab you with a fork I had to then deal with sober people. Safety I thought, I’m sober enough to talk to sober people. Looping, feedbacks, trails, never ending thoughts... It's hard to be articulate in the first place when you don't know who you're meant to be speaking with, let alone when you are fucked... on acid.

The call didn't go well, I had dropped names but provided no reason for the names to be mentioned, I’d confused 2 people who knew exactly who I was talking about, I hadn't solved any problems I had created them. new idea, get away. I walked in explained what had happened but the meth had taken a hold, nothing got through but "I made the call" so I gathered my things and headed out.

Coffee... I need coffee. Lots of it in little cups and I need it delivered to me now. It was only just after 7am so nothing was open. me and my friend, who was new to this whole scene, waited out the front of a café for 10 minutes, walked away to a rotunda around the back of the building and back, then sat and had our coffee. 2 long blacks. My shirt unbuttoned on a crisp end of winter, early spring morning, long fringe covering my moon sized pupils, sitting drinking coffee while school kids assembled out the front waiting to catch a bus. Freedom, home. We stood up and headed to the bakery to get the food we had originally said we would set out to get. 5 plain pies then back to the den.

Ash everywhere... Anything clean now had a dirty brown tint to it, case full of drug paraphernalia sitting on the coffee table. I made clean the situation we where in. "You aren't at work, my call probably made them suspicious and we're starting to come down hard off of these drugs." a stomach cramp reassured me.

I left. finally, safety away from the meth, away from responsibility. All I had to do was drop my more sober friend back at his house, head home then sleep. What ended up happening was I dropped my sober friend off, went to a park, sat in the car park with my heart beat and blood pressure so depleted I almost checked myself into the hospital. Thank god for caffeine. Caffeine was keeping me alive, keeping my heart pumping. I sat in that car park for 3 hours until a friend came to keep me safe.

I have been to hell and faced my demons, they are the people in my life who I feel I need to get involved with. I spent what felt like would be an eternity dealing with a man coming off meth so hard every word was a step in the minefield. Never again, not soon, not for a while, not this week, not now.

-Zead

Drug culture is the only culture some people have.