Stray Hawkeye

This film on protein synthesis, created in 1971, is proof that the first few years of the 70′s got a contact high from the 60′s.  Wait untill about three and a half minutes in for the drugs to take effect.

Bet you never thought of the basic building block of life as tripping, dancing hippies with balloons taped to their heads before, did you?

I just finished reading Requiem For A Dream (yes, it was a book before it was a movie), and I must say, it’s really good.  It’s a challenging read, for instance, Selby doesn’t separate what the characters say from the text around it with quotation marks, it’s just huge blocks of text, which takes a while to get used to.   And the subject matter is every bit as depressing as the movie, though in a sort of different way.  It’s one of the better things I’ve read in quite a while, though, have I mentioned depressing?

The reason I bring this up is not just to brag about still reading books occasionally and choosing challenging books (a little for that, but not enough for a post on it’s own :) ), or to recommend a book, but to point out a couple parallels between this and another work on the same subject matter of heroin addicted junkies in New York.  The musical Rent.

This is mainly because the morning after I finished reading Requiem For A Dream, I happened to have the soundtrack for Rent in the CD player in my car, and was listening to it on the way to work (irony of listening to Rent on the way to my corporate job aside for the moment).  As it so happened, I was near the end of the first disc, and some of the first lyrics were, in ultra upbeat, cheery musical theater style:

I’m Willin’
I’m Illin’
I Gotta Get My Sickness Off
Gotta Run, Gotta Ride
Gotta Gun, Gotta Hide — Gotta Go
And It’s Beginning To Snow

First I was struck by the absolute tonal dissidence of these two takes on the same subject matter.  Like a Sound of Music / Schindler’s List contrast.  (Okay, I’ve never seen Schindler’s List, but if you makes you want to die for about a week after watching it, we’re on the right track.)  Especially that song from Rent versus the chapters of pain and agony in Requiem of “trying to get one’s sickness off”.  I was a little clueless on some of the lingo and allusions in Rent as well, but Requiem expounds on it pretty well.  For example, “getting one’s sickness off” is taking another dose of heroin to stop the sickness caused by withdrawal symptoms when a junkie has gone too long between fixes.  From Requiem‘s description this sickness is gut wrenchingly nasty.

After getting past the style difference, and I started to notice more and more overlap in language and slang, it started to strike me that for the huge difference in tone and style, how many plot points the two works had in common.

A sampling of what I have picked up on so far, in roughly order that I noticed them rather than any sort of theme I’m trying to develop.  Note- there are lots and lots of spoilers in here:

• Both features heroin addicts living in New York struggling with addiction.
• Both feature somewhat prominently the phone calls (and lack there of) around rather one sided parent child relationships.
• The main protagonist is a male.  He has a love interest who is also a junkie.  The female has some amount of involvement in activities bordering on or venturing well into prostitution.  The male protagonist is fairly aware of this but generally turns a blind eye to, except for the isolated moments where it particularly sets him off into a sort of festering rage.
• The main protagonist has a male friend who is also featured rather prominently, who has a generally detached/ambivalent view of his friend’s love live / involvement, but generally tries to take some amount of care of the female.  This friend tends to be slightly more detached and unemotional in general.
• The main characters have dreams/plans of starting a dining establishment which will serve as an escape from their current situation and as a long term source of financial well being.  Slight attempts are made at getting started on the establishment of this restaurant, but are generally abortive early on and the goal is more or less forgotten by the end, clouded out by drugs and love (and lack there of).
• One main character is teetering on the boarder of death at the end, and has a near death experience where he/she goes towards and then come back from a white light.  His/her exact status of life/death is somewhat unclear at the end but it is likely safe to assume he/she is not long for this world.
• A trip to a distant, southern portion of the USA is planned as part of their long term financial success, though any sort of real though or plans are entirely lacking.
• There is a brief period of excitement and optimism just before exactly half way through, which leads to a long, slow decline over the second half.
• The events take place over almost exactly the course of one full year (slightly less in Requiem)
• The ability to pay the rent is featured as a prominent driver of action.
• The ease/challenges and burden/benefits of surviving with or without one’s significant other feature very prominently.  Especially as they relate to one’s own drug addiction.
• A fair portion of the action takes place in/around abandoned and dangerous areas of New York.  Only briefly does the city seem particularly alive.  For the most part it is closer to a battle field.

There may well be others, but that struck me as a whole lot of similarities for two works that are so different on the surface.

So, High Times magazine is sort of amusing on it’s own for being a magazine solely and blatantly about pot.  Their website is even funnier for the fact that it take your normal website with flashing banner ads full of half naked women and replaces them with flashing banner ads for pot and naked women half covered with buds.  What’s even funnier (at least to me) is that not only do they have podcasts, but that they refer to them as potcasts.

Ever want to know what it’s like to do drugs without having to go through the whole nasty bit of actually doing drugs?  Erowid Experience Vaults is a huge catalog of reports from various people who have taken just about every type of mind/perception altering substance there is out there.  These cover the good, the bad, the ugly, the mundane, and the downright frightening.

I haven’t read all of them by a long shot (there’s something like 20,000 articles on the site), but they are sort of interesting to see what various substances do to you, how people’s experience differ, and all the various specifics in each story. Needless to say, since these are user submitted stories, the quality of writing varies wildly, as does the credibility.

The other fascinating thing that struck me right off the bat is the huge variety of things that people will use to try to get high and the absolutely profoundly long list of different substances.  They doesn’t just cover the usual suspects, it covers basically any substance or activity that can notably alter your perception, good or bad, intentionally or unintentionally.  From the standard suspects (cocaine, pot, heroin, acid, meth), to the medically acceptable/endorsed (morphine, nitrous oxide, lithium, paxil, viagra (one of the only times you’ll see that on the web and have it not be spam), and many more), to the physical (fasting, hyperventilation, sleep deprivation, sweating), to the basically socially acceptable (caffeine, chocolate, tobacco, gensing, alcohol), to the “really?” (ginger, cheese rind, tea, vitamin C).

Needless to say, some of the articles are more than a bit distrubing, and most are something less than a pick me up.

Ever wonder how much caffeine is in a cup of coffee?  Or how much more caffeine Mountain Dew has than Coke?  Or how those compare to milk, or Pimp Juice (I am also saddened that that is an actual product), or tea, or any of the other various energy drinks out there?  Here’s a site where you can see the caffeine content of each.  You can also hit the plus signs to add up how much caffeine you have in a day.