It’s a slow week. My mind is sludgy. I just ate meatloaf and I’m bored.

This is where my mind is at:

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This parody anti-drug video is so fucking classic. The dude who portrays the dealer seems to have honest knowledge of the type of behavior associated with paranoid drug binges. Not that I personally know anything about that type of stuff…*cough*

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This is brillaint. Absolutely fucking brilliant:

Link.

Several months ago, I read a really fucked up article in Harper’s (an excellent magazine, by the way. Totally worth the dead trees) about the New Life Church and it’s leader, Pastor Ted Haggard. The article, which describes the rise, habits and history and controversy of the church as well as the modern evangelical movement in America blew my mind. I’d never really considered or been aware of the reality of a modern, Neo-Christian fascist movement. The people seemed brainless, their leaders seemed like oily thugs and the whole thing really disturbed me. Scary, bad people.

This morning, I read in the news that Pastor Ted was involved in a very lurid scandal involving the purchase and probable use of methamphetamine coupled with paid encounters over the last three years with a gay prostitute.

It’s like xmas in November. Seriously, somebody toss some confetti. Hail Satan!

Pastor Ted’s resigned from New Life Church and the Presidency of the NAE (over 30 million served!) as well making some admissions to buying meth but not using it and to hanging out with a male prostitute, but only getting a massage. Yeah… a massage—THAT’S the ticket!

Here’s a fun interview where he denies everything and tries to come across like such a good Christian. After that, enjoy some analysis of the voicemails of him calling the prostitute to order up some meth.

It really can’t get much sweeter than when a shit-filled, hate-bag like Pastor Ted gets outed as the hypocritical, meth-toking, reach-around-guy he is. The media is going to burn him alive. I for one, would like to melt s’mores off the flames.

The world is full of evil people, horrible things and bad endings. It’s really nice to know that every once in a while the planet rights itself and some good ol’ karmic justice is doled out. Life is very, very good.

I’ve been using the nicotine patch in yet another effort to quit smoking. For about a week now that I’ve worn it, my quality of sleep has been very fitful due to the fact that my body is getting nicotine pumped into it as I slumber (I normally don’t smoke while I’m asleep). The general feeling of being wired, coupled with vivid and usually lucid dreams have me feeling a serious deficit in quality rest.

So, I’ve taken to using over the counter sleeping pills to knock my ass out. I’ve gone for the non-habit forming ones. Specifically Unisom and a generic knockoff. I started off with the generics, which were these two little blue pills. They worked well enough. Instead of waking ten or twelve times a night, I’d only be awake once and then only for a few minutes. I arose feeling fine, with no after-effects and it seemed like a solution for the next two weeks till I downgrade to a patch of lesser potency.

Last night, I tried Unisom. You take this single blue pill, which I did before getting in bed. Again, as with the generics, I felt that my quality of sleep was improved, but my condition this morning, or more precisely, early afternoon is pretty different. I’ve felt like I’ve been a zombie-like, semi hypnotic state all morning. I occasionally snap out of it, sitting at a table, coffee in hand after having lost the past four minutes of my life to La-La Land.

Even now, as I write this, I keep drifting off and snapping back (or more descriptively, slogging back) to my laptop. The air in my apartment has a strong and pronounced odor of burning plastic that suggests the possibility of a fire somewhere in my building, but sheeeeeeeee-it.

Wait…huh?

See? That had to have been two to three minutes of disconnected, spaced-out shit. I have to read back through this paragraph to remember what I was writing about.

Burning plastic smell! What the hell?

I think I’m done with Unisom.

I was reading this article about this guy who made the seemingly innocent mistake of driving through Nebraska with a large amount of money in his rented car.

This guy—Gonzales had teamed up with a partner and combined their life savings to buy a refrigerated truck and start a produce business. In total, they had $124,700 in cash. Gonzales found a truck for sale in Chicago and flew out there on a one-way ticket with the cash to buy it. However, when he got there, the truck had already been sold. So, with all this cash and no truck, he decided to rent a car to drive back. Since he didn’t have a credit card, he had someone else rent the car for him. Nervous about traveling with so much money, he hid the money in a cooler and stuck it in the trunk of the rental. Off he goes back home, until he gets pulled over for speeding.

A Nebraska state trooper stopped him on the interstate and in the process of giving him a ticket, noticed the guy’s name wasn’t on the rental contract. He started questioning Gonzales, who had a limited ability with English and ended up searching the car. He found the cooler with the cash and called in a K9 unit, thinking this guy must be either going to buy drugs or has just sold some and is slinking home with the profit.

The police dog shows up and sniffs out the car. When the dog gets to the cash, he starts barking. The cop tells Gonzales that he suspects him of trafficking drugs and confiscates the fucking cash! All of it!

Here’s the problem, up to 80% of US currency has trace amounts of cocaine on it. You take enough cash, especially the “I’ve been saving all my life in jars buried in the backyard” variety of cash, put it all together, yeah, it’s not so surprising a drug dog’s going to smell smell something.

Gonzales and his patner contested the seizure, won a ruling, but an appeal by the police had a circuit judge ruling against them and making the judgement that “Possession of a large sum of cash is ’strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity.

Read the article. there’s no point in me rehashing the whole thing. The point is, I think it’s fucking ridiculous. I’d also argue that what the circuit judge realy wanted to say was “Possession of a large sum of cash and driving while Latino is ’strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity.” It’s fucking disgusting.

I’ve had one of those generic lousy mornings, complete with the shitty night’s sleep, the late to work action, the forgotten lunch on the kitchen counter and the misplaced cash. So, exhausted, tired and lost amidst wires, ink, chaos and a vague, general malaise, I broke my usual dietary rules and ate a doughnut. Glazed. Two of them, actually. Shh, don’t tell.

I gave up about 90% of the sugar from my diet about five months ago. I stopped putting it in my coffee in the morning. No more candy, except for the occasional piece of dark chocolate. No ice cream, cookies, nothing. Over time, I’ve allowed the occasional exceptions, but for the most part, I’ve been really good about abstaining. It helps that since I’ve cut so much sugar out, my tolerance has dramatically dropped. A few bites of chocolate has me OD’d, sweating, dizzy and feeling I like just did time in a wind tunnel filled with airplane glue. Those days as a child, when I would devour ten to twelve candy bars for a post Halloween breakfast seem like a distant and hazy mirage. I am now a sugar wimp. Call me Mr. Goodbar’s bitch.

So now I’m sitting in my Cubicle of Doom, desperately fighting the effects of two oversized glazed doughnuts, wondering what the hell I could have been thinking to do this to myself. I’m standing square at the crossroads between blowing chunks all over my monitor and passing out, face-down on the keyboard. My brain is contemplating hanging itself from my spinal cord with a suicide note taped to the medulla oblongata. My eyes are fighting a cage match against each other to see who can hold the monitor in focus the longest. For every word my left hand picks out on the keyboard, my right hand’s on the backspace acting like Godzilla in the streets of Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to whole sentences of gibberish and half-formed, semi-drooling thoughts. It’s kind of sad to see.

However pathetic my current situation may be, it can’t hold a candle to last night’s experiment with Kava Kava.

Some time ago, when quitting cigarettes and hitting that frenzied state of withdrawal where you want to rip your skin off, staple your eyeballs backwards and dance the tarantella till you die or someone says it’s okay for you to smoke, I’d tried using Kava Kava to quell or at least lessen the suffering. I picked up a bottle at a health food store and popped something like four or five of the capsules. It helped, I think. Or if it didn’t, I was at the very least too fucking high to notice the difference.

Last night, on a whim, I popped three capsules and sat down to yet another Zatoichi film (someday, somehow, I will have watched them all, dammit) to see if anything would happen.

Very shortly after, I found myself high as fucking hell, head cocked at three o’ clock, with the beginnings of a decent drool as little leprechauns goose-stepped back and forth in my stomach. I had the schizoid desire to jump up and do massive manic jumping-jacks while simultaneously taking a nap. While it was not entirely unpleasant, it was more than a little unnerving and in my advanced age and much more pasteurized lifestyle, I’ll probably refrain from taking it again.

Daveb has returned from a vacation in Vermont. He climbed a mountain and is now a man, reinvigorated with all the deadly ass kicking power of a shaved shih-tzu. Sitting, ensconced in his Cubicle of Doom, he bides his time, repairing brain cells destroyed from 4 straight days of non-stop marijuana abuse and plans his eventual and inevitable grab for total world domination or some other really impressive shit, whichever comes first.

In the normal course of life, daveb is at a point where he does not indulge in drugs, nor excessive amounts of alcohol except for when he makes those rare and infrequent trips to Vermont. He finds it enjoyable to lose a week to waking up, taking a bunch of bong hits and trying to figure out why evil alien parasites would bother posing as Regis Philben and Kelly Ripa (WTF? Where’s the motive?). It’s a good morning, you should try it.

On the other hand, it can be a bit disturbing that, upon returning to the city and back to a life of abstainment, the months pass by and daveb feels just as brain damaged. Yup, it’s done. All those years of non-stop hallucinogen-cannabis-alcohol (the Holy Fucking Trinity) abuse have paid off and given birth to a permanently addled space cadet, age 30.

However, daveb is an army of one! Such mental limitations do not keep him down. He straps on the penguins and moonboots and fucks shit up! There’s work to be done in this world. Puppies need kicking. Old people need fondling and licking. Babies need to be ground into taco meat. There’s no time to be brain damaged.

Over the past 4 years, daveb as slowly been weaning various bad habits out of his life. Some happened on their own, like quitting weed and drinking to excess. Others, like quitting cigarettes took herculean efforts. For the past three days, daveb has been struggling with his latest project, quitting sugar and starch.

Now before you label daveb as one of those miserable, monastic bastards with no joy in his life, understand that he wants to be able to do everything for a long time to come. However, he has a bit of a nervous and addictive personality, one that attracts habits that will likely put him six feet under sooner than he’d like. His thinking is, kill all of these “habits”, like drinking, sugar, smoking weed, etc. so that once you have them removed from your life, you can reintroduce them in sane and measured amounts. Moderation, people, it’s the new black for daveb. He envisions going back to Vermont for vacations, getting off the plane and immediately cracking a beer, a candy bar, a bag of Fritos and a huge-ass blunt with a cigar for later. Other drugs and snack foods would be highly welcome. After two or three days of wretched, blurry debauchery, daveb would wipe the greasy crumbs from his eyebrows, hop the plane back to NYC and back to the normal lifestyle.
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