7th
caffeine is a hell of a drug
I think it’s something truly scary and says a lot about how the world functions when you start showing more symptoms of addiction towards legal psychoactive drugs such as coffee than you do illegal ones.
I normally don’t drink that much coffee. Only that these past two weeks have been really hectic and stressful, I’ve been having some funny sleeping patterns and a little fuzzy sense of time.
I’m going to be using the word “high” for all drugs since I think it’s total bullshit that legal drugs you get a benevolent “buzz” from and illegal drugs you get “high” which is obviously the malevolent older brother of “buzz”. Society is an ass for differentiating these states of mind because it makes something much more socially acceptable while arbitrarily giving the other an absolute horrid reputation.
The “high” I get from coffee is damn hard. One second you have no appetite, no motivation, no sense of time, don’t want to shower, don’t feel like working out after school. The next you have this metalic yet somehow analogue ringing in your ears. Your eyes open up automatically, you want to eat (actually that’s more trying to get the shitty taste out than increased appetite), shower sounds like a good idea and you start packing for the gym.
The problem is when you don’t realize you’ve been starting the day high on a cup of coffee for the past two weeks and suddenly you realize, as you turn the instant coffee jar upside down, that you are actually making coffee without thinking about it and the reality of it just hit you.
So I sit down and sip my coffee and think about my previous experience with a drug I thought I would never touch but turned into a very different scenario.
First time getting drunk was pretty damn funny because I thought the floor was actually moving. I paniced and tried to move people to safety. Then Mr. L tells me that I’m fucking drunk and that’s when it all hit me. People didn’t drink this shit cuz it tastes good, they drink it cuz you get fucking high. I was experiencing something that I thought you would experience from taking “illegal drugs”. I was scared at first becaues I thought I would become an alcoholic the next day. As it turns out I didn’t feel like drinking at all the next day. Or month. That changed when university started. Long story short I drank a lot. After a year of that I realized how fucking much I drank and thought I needed to take it easy and stopped.
But the scenarios are pretty interesting.
Alcohol and coffee both taste like shit. You get high from both, albeit the effects are a little different, but you’re not very “crisp” for lack of a better word, when high. Both are proving much more addictive than what I thought. Not that I didn’t consider them as addicting but underestimated them.
Now I’m thinking: why the hell are these things legal? And the conclusion I’ve come to is that we live in a drug driven world. The clock ticks and shit spins and we can all live the american dream because people are high on something. So much work is done with caffeine. So many relationships (good or bad, short or long) got more than just a little help from alcohol.
So what does this say about how shit works? I think it says exactly what a free market, consumption driven society does say: if the pros outweigh the cons, then let’s have it.
Cars kill a lot of people every year. I don’t know the statistics and im too lazy to pull them up but i know its a lot. Easily enough to warrant debates and talks and people to start asking questions.
But we don’t.
Because we consider that the advantage of getting from A to B in a fraction of the time it would take if we walked or biked is worth the probability of death from a traffic accident.
The same way the “higher ups” realize that alcohol and caffeine is bad for you, but they see that it works pretty damn well as a social lubricant and performance booster, and the pros outweigh the cons. So they market the drugs as glamorous, nothing is cooler than holding a tall cup of Starbucks or sipping a glass of Grey Goose.
Both taste like shit. I would take a glass of orange juice anyday. Too bad you don’t get any funny effects from it.
But they make the world work. So they take away the bad connotations and switch the words “high” with “buzzed”, “tipsy” or “drunk”. And we can all continue living in this artificial pouch of warm amniotic fluid cooked up by the govt so that people can go out and get shitfaced or load up on caffeine till it’s coming out their ears and hey, they’re not “high”… they’re just having a good time.
I’m off to go get some more coffee, and will try to consume it in proportionate and appropriate amounts.
