Let’s take a break from the more serious fare and spend a little bit discussing some random things that are popping into my mind at the moment, an opportunity to lighten the mood a bit after my last few posts.

Thanks to one of my best friends I was inspired to entertain myself at the Central States Fair one August in a way that had nothing to do with any of the rides. I spent a while wandering aimlessly through the midway until it got dark enough for my purposes and I was prepared to have some fun…and my experiences with scouting at an earlier age had taught me quite a bit about being prepared.

I had a few Alka Seltzer tablets in my pocket and a fountain drink I had purchased from a concession stand along the way. I picked my victims for this prank entirely at random, approaching them slowly, popping a tablet of the Alka Seltzer into my mouth, filling my cheeks with soda, and allowing the foam to begin spilling from my mouth as I latched onto the stranger, rolling my eyes back into my head so that only the whites were showing and muttering in a rasping voice, “Someone in here wants to talk to you.”

I got away with startling people with that particularly amusing prank five or six times before I noticed the obvious security personnel following me wherever I went. I had gotten my enjoyment out of the night and figured it was time to cut my losses and get out of there before I got into some sort of trouble, also the front of my shirt was pretty well drenched from the foam that had been spilling out of my mouth. If I had been thinking I would have hidden away in the haunted house and tried out my prank on the people in there…would have added a legitimate scare to the attraction perhaps.

The next prank was planned, but never implemented. My fellow musician and I wanted to rent or outright purchase full wet suits which would leave no skin exposed and sneak into a port-a-potty at the fairgrounds, lowering ourselves into the respective basins of two separate units, from which point we would fling feces back up at unsuspecting victims when they used the toilets…maybe even just slapping a handful of the waste against their cheeks when they sat down, potentially scaring the shit out of them in a far more literal sense.

We figured that we could safely escape from security or police because no one was going to attempt to tackle us, coated in filth the way that we surely would be. We could race, awkwardly as would be the case wearing scuba gear, to the creek where we would dive in to the relative safety of the water where we could swim away to a safe distance and escape to laugh our sick asses off in safety somewhere.

In retrospect I have to think it might be best that we never did attempt that specific prank since I doubt it would have gone anywhere near as smoothly and seamlessly as we imagined it going. Wouldn’t it have been grand, though? If it had worked out as planned, it would have been absolutely fucking brilliant.

Or maybe I’m just crazy…but you can keep your opinion to yourself on that matter.

We had many genius plans, my fellow musician and I, so many hilarious pranks that we never got the chance to try out.

We wanted to purchase nice, white suits of some thin, breathable material, dress ourselves up as fancy as possible, and swallow almost toxic quantities of laxative. The plan was to board an elevator, push our way to the front of the cab, and let loose in front of everyone before accusingly looking at every other passenger when the smell permeated the compartment.

After we had gotten bored with the elevator the plan would have been to wander around in a public place, shit stains on display, without acknowledging the situation. Having no shame could be liberating sometimes, and it would have been terrific fun to try out that little prank as well, if not also a bit degrading.

There was also an entertaining idea of staying with someone who owned cats and insisting on using the litter box instead of the bathroom with a totally unbroken nonchalance, regardless of the privacy level…I still consider trying that one out as an adult someday, which should tell you just how adult I really am…or am not.

We may have had numerous plans that were never fulfilled, but there were plenty of things we did for entertainment without any planning involved. My fellow musician and I had a coworker who became a friend of ours and she happened to live in an apartment downtown near where we would aimlessly find ourselves wandering a great deal of the time during the midnight hours.

It just so happened that the alley entrance to her building never seemed to be locked, and we decided to walk right in on many occasions. At the end of the hall where the apartments were located was a large cabinet with wooden doors, which were similarly unlocked, and we couldn’t keep from peeking.

Out of that sheer juvenile curiosity (though we were both supposedly adults at the time) we discovered that these doors opened on the breakers for all of the apartments on that floor. It should be obvious what came next, as we immediately tripped all of the breakers before restoring the power again.

We came back and did the same thing quite a few times, when we were walking downtown and happened to pass by that particular alley entrance. Perhaps our actions cost some resident their job because an alarm didn’t go off in the morning, but we didn’t care. We were amusing ourselves and that was the only thing that mattered to us at the time. The victims of our amusement weren’t even afterthoughts.

That sort of dissociative mentality informed a lot of our decisions…and especially mine, as you will learn (if you haven’t already), but that’s all I wanted to share right now. That’s it…move along, there is nothing more to see here.

When the degenerate showed up in my life the final time, he was married and enjoying his own meth addiction (as was his wife, who happened to be a nurse)…the difference being that they were intravenous users, which is something I didn’t much care for. All of that aside, he did appear to be a little more stable than he’d been the last time I’d seen him when he’d attempted suicide on my living room floor…but I know how deceiving appearances could be, especially where the degenerate was concerned.

His own source being unreliable, the degenerate quickly latched onto my roommate’s best friend like the parasite that he was. Seeing those two spending more and more time together was depressing, to say the least, and it saddened both my roommate and I. The saddest part of that was how quickly the degenerate’s corrupting influence took hold, and intravenous use became the preferred method of administration by those my roommate and I had previously spent so much of our time with.

As a brief aside, intravenous use produces a quicker and more intense rush of a high that doesn’t last as long as it does when administered through either smoking or snorting…it also produces more pronounced psychological effects, and increases the health risks associated with drug use almost exponentially, no matter how careful the user in question happens to be (and the problem with drug users is that caution becomes less and less important with the passage of time). My roommate and I were well aware of these issues and considered them to be the line we weren’t interested in crossing.

The corrupting influence the degenerate exuded extended beyond the drug use itself, as he and my roommate’s best friend got a job together with a moving company where they began stealing small items like jewelry in order to sell it. This activity led to them being fired and made my point quite clearly for me, that there was more money to be made in actually sustaining employment than engaging in stupid and risky behavior for relatively small short-term payoffs. Neither of them was capable of taking the long-term into account though, not at that point…they were both too far-gone.

The increasing distaste that my roommate and I had for those in our circle of friends and acquaintances led us to begin treating them like subjects in an experiment we were performing, as we grew steadily more and more detached. We started trying to predict the behavior of different individuals, manipulating them in subtle (and sometimes far from subtle) ways in order to test their reactions and note them.

We called this Project Crystal Dreams, and we came up with shorthand nicknames for our participants within the experiment so that we could communicate about them openly regardless of who was present.

We actually got pretty good at it, calculating when one or another of our subjects would arrive at our apartment simply by determining where they were presently and what their previous movements had been. Our calling different places and asking questions about someone as far as where they were and when they’d left became another sort of manipulation, of those individuals from whom we were making our inquiries as well as those we were actively trying to monitor. We focused a great deal of our attention on the process of monitoring and exercising small amounts of control over their circumstances and the reactions they exhibited in response.

There was a perverse pleasure to be derived from those times when our extrapolations proved to be accurate, regardless of how negative the conditions might actually have been. I doubt that either of us really put much thought into it at the time, but I suspect that our interest in this little thought experiment was a method by which we could distance ourselves from the steady decline we were witnessing in our friends. We were doing what we could to separate ourselves from what was going on in order to avoid feeling connected to the events around us any more than we absolutely had to.

What the fuck do I know, though? We were spun out and suffering from severe sleep deprivation by this point, often going as long as a week without even laying down for more than an hour even though our bodies knew better than we did and forced unnoticeable little traces of unconsciousness upon us.

Sadly, as aware as I was of the state of everyone else in our lives, I was oblivious to just how much the long-term drug use and sleep deprivation was impacting my roommate. It was New Years Eve of 2003 when I looked around me, with my eyes wide open for the first time in a long while and determined that it was time to get out while I still had something of a life to return to.

I made the unilateral decision that there would be no further methamphetamine in our apartment and some self-aware aspect of my roommate was still clear headed enough to display a look of relief when I told him, in no uncertain terms, that we were done.

If I had known how close to the edge my roommate had been, I would have done what we had left all by myself, or (at the very least) split it a bit less evenly between us. We had a fairly large supply remaining that night, and his half of it must have been just a little too much.

That was the last time I did methamphetamine until a few months later when I had to test the quality of a batch that a friend of mine picked up when we took a trip to Denver for the purpose of a drug run. He didn’t use any of it himself, and he knew that I was familiar enough with the substance to be able to give him a fairly good idea of the quality he was paying for. That was the only time I broke with my sobriety, and not for the purpose of pleasure.

That’s beside the point though, back to what I was talking about.

I went to sleep for a couple of hours that night (I’m one of those individuals who could successfully nap when under the influence if so inclined) because I hadn’t been sleeping and I knew I needed it.

When I woke up a couple of hours later and walked down the hallway towards the bathroom my roommate abruptly opened his door a crack and peered out at me suspiciously. It was bizarre, but I was inured to bizarre behavior by that point since it was essentially a constant.

It wasn’t until after I’d used the bathroom and was on my way back to my bedroom when he opened the door wide enough for me to see what looked like a god damn disaster area and stood there with an expression that was almost challenging. My first thought, upon seeing the state of his bedroom, was to wonder how in the fuck I might have slept through what he’d done in there.

Everything was strewn about everywhere with no apparent order. Even his bed and dresser had been pulled apart and spread around the room, his blinds had been pulled from the window, and posters were removed from the wall.

I asked him what the fuck he was doing with his bedroom and he responded with something terse and paranoid about how I knew exactly what was going on that night.

I turned around and headed to the kitchen for a soda, shouting on my way down the hallway that I was surprised he hadn’t fashioned himself a tinfoil hat. He replied that he had done precisely that, which was the first indication that his sense of humor was still intact or that he had completely broken from reality, and I shouted back that it was curious that he could manage that without any tinfoil in the apartment.

I stood outside of his bedroom door like an angry parent and told him that he needed to clean that fucking mess up right then and there and to get his fucking blinds back in the window before our landlord happened to come by and see the state his room was in because his window faced directly onto our porch next to the front door.

It took a little while to discover what had been going through his head while I slept that night. According to him the rest of us (his best friend, my ex-girlfriend, and I) had been on the other side of the wall separating his bedroom from mine, watching him and laughing at him more and more as he broke down. We were apparently using lasers aimed at his window to monitor him and we were mocking him the whole time. There was something about a homosexual conspiracy as well, as he had been drawing something that turned out to be an accumulation of dicks, and he was being controlled by external forces in doing so.

He cleaned things up a little bit (though nowhere near enough to satisfy me) and then left for a couple of days to recover at a friend’s house where he could separate himself from what happened that night, this friend being entirely unconnected to the drug use and activities that had been taking place. He seemed much better when he returned, but recovery from a breakdown like that takes a while.

I like to think that I helped him to regain some semblance of centering, with a healthy dose of mockery and friendly derision thrown in for good measure, because I simply couldn’t help myself. We already discussed the fact that inappropriate humor is one of my ways of coping with things that make me uncomfortable.

Upon sobering ourselves up we made our apartment into the default safe haven for our friends to find some peace and temporary sobriety as well and it seemed to go pretty well.

For the most part, it was a good thing…but it could always be assumed that the degenerate would find a way to fuck it up. One day I was letting him wind down at the apartment after a particularly heavy binge. I was staying in the living room where he was because I didn’t trust him enough to leave him to his own devices in our apartment after all the times he’d proven that only an idiot would trust him.

I happened to fall asleep on the loveseat in the living room, keeping an eye on him, and he was gone when I woke up.

It was a day or so later when I began noticing that some of my DVDs were no longer in my collection (which was nowhere near as substantial as it is today) and I began asking around as to whether anyone had borrowed any of my movies.

I was able to narrow down when they had disappeared based upon the fact that I’d watched one of the movies in question the night before the degenerate ended up coming over and I confronted him about it. He threw a fit and became angry with me for accusing him of stealing from me.

I filed a police report and provided them with his name in connection with the theft and, sure enough, they located a handful of my missing movies in one of the local pawnshops with a ticket in his name. The prick had stolen from me and then had the gall to act like I was an asshole for accusing him of doing so.

It turned out that the police would recover my items but I couldn’t have them back until they had been retained as evidence if I wanted to press charges, otherwise I would have to go into the pawnshop and pay to recovery my own stolen items. I didn’t want to wait for what could be half a year or more before getting my movies back, so I opted to pay my own damn money to get my things back. Ultimately it didn’t get me back everything I had lost, because the degenerate had only pawned some of them himself

If I had thought to mention my roommate’s best friend as well, I would have been able to recover all of my missing movies, because the degenerate had given him another bunch of my movies to pawn in his name too.

From that point on, the degenerate was never welcome in my home again. It was the last straw for me; that he had stolen from me, lied about it, and led to me having to pay to retrieve what was rightfully mine in the first place. I decided that he was simply not worth having around and informed him of that fact. I haven’t seen him again since then, and I will be a happy man if I never do see him again.

Thus we have reached the end of my tale, at least the part pertaining to drugs and debauchery, as there have been no further drugs consumed by your humble narrator (aside from the occasional prescription medication, most of which has been prescribed to me legitimately).

Once more we venture into the period of my life as a methamphetamine use. This will not be a coherent, linear bit of storytelling, I don’t believe. That might be an impossible thing to manage, even if I desperately wanted to pull it off. Shit starts to run together and time blurs more than a little bit. This is more likely to be a series of snapshots randomly pieced together, rather than a movie.

I recall an instance when one of the anchors at the NBC station approached me in the break room, asking me in passing if I had been losing weight, to which I inquired, feigning insult, “Are you trying to say that I was fat?” It’s funny to me, knowing that the anchor in question probably had some idea what was going on regarding my apparent weight loss, because I was routinely carrying a small supply of the crystal in my wallet when I went to work, intermittently doing lines on the counter in the control room where I worked, frequently while there was other staff in the building. There were definite perks to working almost entirely autonomously.

Caution goes out the window with greater and greater ease the longer one is under the influence of methamphetamine. There were a couple of occasions when the former cop who was hosting our Mexican friend would offer me rides to work and we would casually end up smoking the substance from a glass pipe while driving down the streets in the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t just me who experienced that sort of disconnect from common sense, is what I’m trying to say, that drug has a definite impact on one’s sense of personal vulnerability…fundamentally erasing it.

There were literally whole days and nights that would run together seamlessly in the most surreal way while my roommate and I would spend the whole time in that former officer’s house, alternately doing lines and smoking from pipes almost constantly. I shudder to think of the quantities we were consuming that way in just one sitting (and not solely because of how entirely wasteful it was). We would lose track of time in conversation and monitoring the grainy feeds from the numerous security cameras that provided uninterrupted views of the whole area surrounding the house, because trafficking in massive quantities of crystal meth is the sort of thing that merits a bit of precaution. All said, it was actually damn enjoyable for us.

My roommate and I were almost always sent home with a decent quantity of our own to get us by in our everyday lives…and it most certainly did. There was often enough that we weren’t opposed to sharing with friends who occasionally came by and even the relatively new downstairs neighbors, when they were inclined to partake. One of those times, when our supply was low, they agreed to reciprocate when they had some of their own a few days later.

Sure enough, they did contact us (a few days later than expected) to let us know that they had what we were waiting for and my roommate went downstairs to retrieve it. I was already doing just fine at the time, so I wasn’t in the kitchen when he tapped into what he’d been given, only to almost immediately begin complaining that it was burning in a way it shouldn’t have been and that it tasted like shit, having an ammonia or piss smell to it. I started laughing and went into the kitchen to see what the problem was. I began laughing even harder when I tried a small taste of the yellowish rocks that he’d brought upstairs, because my roommate had just been snorting crack.

It took about a week or so before I stopped routinely teasing him for being a crackhead, each time he would end up with this sheepish, uncomfortable look on his face while still smiling and chuckling about it.

Those same downstairs neighbors had a difficult time staying out of trouble, quite unlike we more civilized folk upstairs, as one might expect from the sort of people who would trade crack for methamphetamine as an equitable exchange…and the company they kept was equally classy. One of these lovely individuals ended up coming to our door and finally hanging out in our apartment after the downstairs neighbors had left and she discovered that she’d left her baby in a running car that she’d locked herself out of before going into their apartment (more than likely to procure some substance or another from them). We weren’t happy about the position that whole situation had put us in, because we had to actively argue with her for a good long while before she would agree to let us call the police to help her get into her car.

That wasn’t the only time the police came around because of incidents directly relating to those neighbors. One night I was laying in my dark bedroom, preparing for one of the increasingly rare intervals of sleep that I was enjoying, with the window open when I heard the distinctive squelch from a police radio just outside. I quickly and quietly got my roommate’s attention and we split the supply that we had on hand and snorted it all to insure that there was no trace of it there in the apartment if the officer outside was there to see us for any reason.

It wasn’t long before there was indeed a knock at our door and an officer was standing there to greet me when I opened it up. He was there to ask me if we had heard any strange noises from downstairs because there had allegedly been an altercation involving the junkie couple that lived there. The line from Sid and Nancy was absolutely correct, “Never trust a junkie.” We hadn’t heard anything, and told him so, and the officer thanked us for our assistance and went on his way.

We were wide awake by that time and there was no chance of sleep coming for either of us any time soon after what we’d ingested in our panic, so we settled down in front of the television and happened to catch the beginning of The Illustrated Man (the film loosely adapted from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection) on one of the channels…it was a pretty good night, all things considered.

There was a bit of a scare with the traffic coming and going at the former cop’s house and the possibility that someone who’d been privy to what was going on there might be talking to the police and it was discussed as an option that the Mexican would be shifting his base of operations to our apartment temporarily because there was no obvious connection between my roommate and I and what was going on over there. Had the apartment not been only a two-bedroom with insufficient space, that might have happened, and I must admit that I’m relieved that we weren’t put in a position like that.

My roommate’s behavior began to get increasingly erratic as our drug use persisted and his attitude seemed to be shifting in an uncomfortable way. He had lost his job a while before and wasn’t having any luck obtaining a new one, and we were all becoming more than a little bit worried about him. His best friend and the former cop who were providing us with our supply (perhaps at the behest of the Mexican living there, a man who apparently wasn’t terribly fond of my roommate) determined that it might be best to cut him off for a little while and they requested that I not let him know about anything that I was still being given.

I felt the same concern that they did, of course, and I thought that cutting back might be a good idea (but I couldn’t bring myself to cut him off entirely, and ultimately neither could his best friend), so I downplayed what I had available (as did our suppliers), hiding the bulk of it differently than I had before and doling it out more sparingly.

This slow drip access led to the unexpected side effect of my roommate being more productive around the apartment than he had been for a while…primarily when trying to locate any stray traces of crystal that might have fallen on the floor or into any of the furniture. I came home to a clean house a couple of times because of this, and we both got a bit of a chuckle out of his displaying the stereotypical behavior of sifting through carpet fibers for drugs that had spilled.

He was definitely behaving in such a way that our concern was merited, sneaking around and searching for any methamphetamine that might have been hidden from him. One evening, before I went to work, I cut us off a couple of lines and intended to do the same with some of what was left after I returned home. When I did get home though, what was left was only about a third of what had been there before I left. He came into my bedroom when he heard me breaking up what was left and nervously asked if there was enough for him, to which I raised my eyebrow skeptically and said that there was a lot less than I thought there had been.

It was another month or so before he confessed to me about sneaking into my stash that night and apologized for it, and for the deception. I reminded him that I wasn’t a complete idiot and that I already knew, that I’d known that night.

It was shortly after that when the initial Mexican fellow needed to return to where he’d come from south of the border, a replacement being here to take his place in the region. I was asked if I would like to accompany my roommate’s best friend in driving the Mexican back to where he needed to go. Apparently my presence had been specifically requested by the Mexican in question and I was all for that opportunity for adventure until the former cop pulled me aside and warned me that there might be some unpleasant or undesired conditions that would go along with meeting the people these specific Mexicans worked for.

Hosting the Mexicans in his home, the former cop had been privy to some conversations taking place between the two of them and had seemingly heard them discussing me in addition to their business matters. My first response was to daydream a bit about becoming intimately involved with a large scale criminal enterprise like that…a certain moral flexibility I exhibit, that you should be aware of by now, made that prospect very appealing to me.

It took me a moment to consider the somewhat sinister undertone to the story when the Mexican was telling me about how he hadn’t seen his daughter in a long time and that this was going to be his chance to see her again. I had children of my own, and the last thing I ever wanted to do was have them dragged into anything associated with that lifestyle because of my stupid, impulsive desire to live the life of an actual criminal. I had to decline; though I do sometimes wonder what direction my life might have taken if I had not.

It was around this same time, as the binge period was beginning to take on a darker tone, when the degenerate reappeared for the final time in my life.

I’ll end this here. This seems like a good place, as good as any other. Don’t worry; I’ll get back to it soon enough…just not right away. Something else is on my mind that I feel I need to share, related to moral flexibility, before I get to that.