Drug Use as Horror and Pretext to Self-Discovery

"Junk is the ultimate commodity, the merchandise is not sold to the consumer - the consumer is sold to the merchandise."-William S. Burroughs

When you're in a dark, damp, dank room filled with smoke, the gentle perforations of slow heartbeats, shadows, bare exoskeletons, and the slow, but labor-intensive muddlings of breath, you really can't make much of anything out; there's no stimuli, no frame of reference, and there is seemingly no purpose to the scene. Surreal to be sure, but I when was invited to this apartment I really don't know what I was expecting. However, somewhere deep within my bowels, I think I knew exactly what I was getting myself into.

It's funny the things that you notice when your eyes finally begin to fully dilate and the shadows become verdant images of disease and nomenclature usually reserved for the morgue. All I remember seeing was something that I had grown all too used to, something I have since dubbed "the slow drip."It is an image that is redundantly familiar in the world of a subculture that lives hidden up the sleeves of every magician, right behind the skinniest birch tree in the barest field, something that has always been in sight, but ends up lying just over the curvature of the earth-it is the velveteen picture of an angel slowly bleeding to death.

My best friend Andy had invited me to this apartment and he, as I began to notice, was the very same seraph I saw on the rocking chair in the depths of a NASA-like rocket burn. His silhouette was thin, eyes gone, arms outstretched and pierced, body limp, now sleeping; for reasons of clarity I want to get my terms straight because when I say sleeping, I use that word very lightly. When high, a junky doesn't sleep, rather he is in a state of semiconscious pseudo-reality that is euphoric, but it is also something which plays with, yet also fools, and tries to aid into his disease; it masquerades as a life, and eventually it does become life for him.