When it came to drugs, I was at the peak of my powers from 2010 (as a 20 year-old) through 2013 (as a 23 year-old). If there was a point in my adult life that I would consider to be The Dark Age, it would have been then. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that such a timeframe spanned the absolute prime of my vast array of recreational substance abuse — because, like, in retrospect, how could it be a coincidence? — but mainly I think about that as The Dark Age because nothing was happening in my life. There was nothing really worth remembering, or writing about… except for doing drugs.
My favorite weapon was prescription painkiller medication even though I never held a prescription for any of it. I got my wisdom teeth removed in the summertime of 2009 and the oral surgeon gave me a Valium to consume on an empty stomach beforehand, but afterwards they gave me a little plastic orange container — you know the ones, with the white cap that one picks up at the local Walgreens or whatever — featuring inside of it twenty tablets of Vicodin. But I didn’t need those for the pain. The same night after I got my wisdom teeth taken out (which actually happened in the A.M. hours) I was playing basketball with my friends, and the following day I began working in data entry at the auto auction company I was at for almost three years.
Sometime at the end of that summer, however, that little orange container was staring me down in my mom and dad’s restroom, and at the time I happened to be brand fucking new in the game of sadness, and depression, so I popped the bitch open and took one. It was only then that I realized all the smack I’d spewed over the years about various drugs and the people who used them was patently false. The truth was, drugs were pretty great. I think it took me like fifteen minutes to understand that.
Not only did I begin to look at people, in general, differently, but also I looked at drugs differently. I guess I believed hitherto that every time somebody did drugs they had this giant flashing sign draped around their neck that read: I AM USING DRUGS RIGHT NOW, or I AM A COMPLETE PIECE OF SHIT, but that wasn’t reality. I began using Vicodin in private at all times of the day, both at home and at work, and none were ever the wiser. It was a pretty awesome revelation for someone such as I who had barely begun dipping his toes in the water.
And I got away with it. Nobody ever knew until after the fact, when I confessed to my mom that I thought I was going to die one night because my heart was beating out of my chest. I vowed to never do those drugs again, which (of course) was a lie. It wouldn’t surprise me if I was high in the precise moment that I told her I would never use again, because that’s who I was. I was the prime example of someone with drug-seeking behavior, not entirely different from the lazy stereotype of a homeless person asking for a dollar so they could buy some ‘food.’
Anyway, I checked off a lot of boxes between 2010 and 2013. Marijuana was obvious and predated my trials into painkillers. Cocaine came later on, and perhaps because it was harder for my friend and I to get our hands on it but it was never in the regular rotation. Together the two of us probably did it only a handful of times. Ecstasy, sure — here and there. Norcos were a staple for me, and were definitely my number one all-time drug of that particular genre. Morphine in pill form I tried once and it made me feel disgusting. Oxycodone I tried once and it made me feel quite similarly to Morphine. Pvrcacets were very mid, but they came in handy when nothing else was available. Same with Codeine and Promethazine: I mean they were cool and everything, but it wasn’t a high I was ever looking for.
My favorite non-opioid was mushrooms. I think it was June 21st of 2011 when I tried them for the first time. They were these very strange looking things, mushrooms were, and the friend whom I did them with was the same friend I did everything else with — from smoking weed to doing coke; he did not partake in painkillers — and he admitted beforehand that mushrooms tasted like shit, so the two of us went to McDonalds and bought cheeseburgers to put them in to help mask the aftertaste. We did that, and then I ate a couple on the side and realized they were actually all right. During future mushroom trips I ate them like a piece of beef jerky and quite enjoyed them a la carte.
To say it was a fun and life-changing day and evening and night would be an understatement. I happen to credit mushrooms for making me appreciate my parents, and brothers, and life in general. I don’t think I have ever been the same person since June of 2011 (whatever specific/irrelevant day it was), which is to say I changed for the better. I entered through the doors as a rather unappreciative individual and exited with the perspective of a lifetime.
The beauty of my friend, his name was John, is that he was a serious guy. Like he really felt strongly about trying to figure out that thing called life we were each so interested in, and had a unique point of view, and so when we agreed to do mushrooms together he encouraged me to bring a notebook and write down my thoughts. He was not one of those who was like oh my god I saw a neon orange elephant charging towards me, or wow-wee all the colors are so crazy right now — even though that element certainly existed with the two of us at various points of the high — and instead we just chain smoked cigarettes and blunts and carried on the best conversation in the history of all conversations.
I remember walking with him up a hill into the area of an abandoned home which featured an abandoned swing and an abandoned pool filled with muddied water and all manner of disgust, and probably because we were straining to walk uphill that our blood was pumping quicker and harder and so the mushrooms kicked in with potency all of a sudden. We were together, overlooking the city of San Bernardino CA, where the trees which were supposed to be green actually were purple, swaying like waves with the breeze, and then we blinked and we were all by ourselves, experiencing nature on our own terms. Then we reconvened, and then we broke apart once more, and so on.
When night fell and bled into the A.M. hours the two of us sat outside talking about our parents in the front of his sister’s apartment complex in San Bernardino CA. We spoke about how much they have done for us, and how it was our responsibility to make them proud and carry on tradition. The drugs wore off, inevitably, and John and I hopped in his Acura Integra and drove around aimlessly for miles and miles, stricken by a type of munchies that is indescribably more impressive than those with which one experiences after smoking weed or getting really drunk. I think we stopped at a Del Taco on our way home.
I woke up the following day in my bed at my parents house in San Bernardino CA and was feeling some type of mushroom- and weed- and booze-induced hangover. My brain needed a break and simultaneously missed the psychedelic sensation it was in just a handful of hours prior. It was nothing. I was fueled by the adrenaline of the night before and the knowledge that I was a person who had been redeemed, by his own thoughts and realizations, and had never been more earnest about practicing the changes that were incumbent upon me to change and put into practice. I opened my notebook, excited to see what all I had written down in the heat of the moment from the night before. I don’t know if I was disappointed, or if I felt myself the most profound individual who ever existed, when it read only this:
We’ve been here before.
Dynamics of my drug-usage altered significantly during the latter half of The Dark Age. Most notably John and I’s relationship began to flounder, and I started more frequently hanging out with my estranged best friend from high school named Trey — who was straight edge and thus did no drugs whatsoever — and it felt to me like I couldn’t make both worlds survive. The more there was of Trey, the less there was of John. Eventually Trey and I were just together again every day of the week like we were both in high school and well into our 20’s.
Another thing was: I wasn’t depressed anymore. The better I felt about myself, and life, the less I saw the necessity for drugs. Since John and I’s friendship was predicated so exhaustively on drinking and getting high, and since Trey and I’s friendship was formed before I ever dabbled with either, or anything, really, it was never a serious decision that I had to make between the two of them. My foundation with Trey was just too strong.
And that’s kind of the moral to this particular story, at least insofar as it relates to me. I argue that drugs are a young man’s game. They are what one turns to when they have nowhere else to go. They are what one uses to escape when they have nothing to lose. My life started to really take off in 2013, what with beginning casino dealer school and later getting hired at the end of the year, and so it was the first time in my adult life — ignoring my original love affair and year-long adventure at Virginia Tech when I was 18 — that I had something concrete to live for and look forward to.
Because, speaking from personal experience, when I was 19 I had nothing to hang my hat on. I had no money in the bank (because I had never before had a job). I was a college dropout from my dream school on the east coast. I had recently been broken up with for the first time after believing with an exceptional amount of naiveté that my first girlfriend was going to end up my wife. I did not care, clearly, whether I lived or died. Thus I was willing to push the limits and boundaries and mix this with that, and that with this, and it was an incredibly liberating experience never having to worry about the repercussions.
I imagine it was when I began to truly worry again that I understood the journey was over, in a manner of speaking. I got like super fucking trashed one night on my birthday because I had spent the day doing an unconscionable amount of Norco’s and combined them with probably a fifth of Jack Daniels and so at the end of the night my head was spinning and I was making my peace with God out on the patio at John’s parent’s house and I ended up throwing up something fierce. Then I woke up the next day.
I spent an entire day taking painkiller medication and thought I was going to die, and so I curled up next to my mother in her bed and told her I was having an anxiety attack. This was months after I confessed to her that I had been doing drugs but that I wasn’t anymore. And I remember thinking I would rather die than admit to her that I was still doing the same dirty painkiller medication shit I had been doing so often before that.
And then the final one, the last of the mohicans, so to speak, actually arrived during a trip on mushrooms. Surprisingly enough. Mushrooms had become that thing that was like a comfort food to me. Not like it was an all-the-time sort of endeavor, but every few months I went back to them — with my friend John — because mushrooms were that thing that took us back to our homeostasis.
It was me, and John, and Trey’s brother, the late Brad — who passed away almost four years ago to the day — and the three of us were really looking forward to doing mushrooms together. We decided on my parent’s house, in San Bernardino CA, and they really were the perfect sort of coupling for doing mushrooms with. John and I had been together in the trenches for so long, and Brad always felt like home to me. He was with me during the entirety of The Dark Age.
And it was one of those things that I knew immediately was going awry. We took the mushrooms, and we laughed hysterically at an episode of Family Guy, and then I got completely stuck for an extended period of time. I was in my head and I couldn’t get out. I convinced myself that life was going to be like that forever. That I was stuck and I was never going to make my way out. It was the first and only mushroom trip I had ever been on that didn’t go entirely according to the beautiful plan that mushrooms had always provided me, and it was the very last time I partook in my favorite drug. That was it.
But I did make it out. Obviously I made it out. Brad eventually went home, and John and I went outside and sat on the swing that I always did my writing on. We were certainly on the come down portion of the mushroom trip, one where I was probably extremely apologetic for ruining John and Brad’s experience, but John didn’t care. That was what made him so great and so, like, worthy of doing mushrooms with in the first place. He was, much like I was (notwithstanding that night), somebody you wanted with you in moments such as those. He was great company, first and foremost, but if things went sideways he had been through enough to let you know that it was only temporary.
We looked out at the stars, John and I did, and it was like we were staring directly into them. They appeared almost green. Like they weren’t actually stars but rather very tiny distant translucent organisms and their nuclei were colored green. John told me to open my laptop and play a blues artist named Buddy Guy. The following day I asked my dad about him, Buddy Guy, that is, and he was impressed that my buddy John knew who he was.
And I suppose that has always been the lasting impression I’ve carried with me of John. The two of us spent such a crazy amount of time together between 2009 and 2011. We went camping with one of our mutual friends in Santa Barbara CA one weekend for no apparent reason other than to do it. I went over to his parent’s house every Sunday for like two full NFL seasons back when the Chiefs sucked and watched football and smoked weed all day and did shots of Wild fucking Turkey with his stepdad. We used to alternate Fridays and/or Saturdays every weekend at my house and his to play beer pong with our group of friends.
When none of that was going on, sometimes he would just call me up and we would drive out to La Verne CA, or Montclair CA, to hang out at the park and smoke weed and shoot some hoops. We stayed fucking active, John and I did.
Yet for some reason it always comes back to that particular night in the backyard of my own parent’s house in San Bernardino CA, looking out at those somehow green-lit stars while listening to Buddy Guy. Maybe I knew then that John’s friendship with me was soon to go the way of the Dodo Bird. For all I know that was the reason originally why I was tripping so hard that night. Because mushrooms’ll do that to you. They will illuminate what is not so obvious on the surface. They will reveal your subconscious and get you completely outside of yourself. There is nowhere to hide, and nothing left of what has been so consistently swept beneath the rug.
I would never say, and never have I regretted, that somehow I made the wrong choice by choosing Trey over John. I do think John deserved a lot better from me, but it felt then just as it feels now — some 15 years later — that neither John nor Trey was ever going to exist in my life unless we were best friends. In the same way that I don’t believe I would have ever existed in theirs unless I was their best friend. We were not some troika of buddies and we were never going to coexist as the three musketeers. I chose what I believed to be the right path, and none of us ever looked back.
I don’t know if you know — since it is one of those things that, as Pusha T once said, if you know you know — but drugs are pretty fucking cool. They make you feel good. They are fun to talk about. They generate bonds with individuals that otherwise would never exist. It’s a ladder one climbs, where someone mentions an experience, and then I one-up that with something else, and then someone one-ups my own one-up, and we all get the chance to laugh about it.
In other words, it never ceases to amaze me how many minor acquaintances inevitably turned into friendships, and how many friendships inevitably turned into strong friendships, based simply off these shared experiences — whether with weed or coke or pain pills or psychedelics. As much as I don’t volunteer a ton of information publicly about my personal problems with addiction and substance abuse, once somebody else opens that door to me I am able to say that I, too, have been there. And it’s kind of a lovely sort of thing. To be able to say that I’ve been there but I no longer am.
And this particular brand of irony is not lost on me: The fact that The Dark Ages, in historical terms, is defined as the era in World History ‘marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline,’ and yet my own era which I labeled in the first paragraph as The Dark Age — where nothing important was happening in my life — has actually been responsible for so many friendships and so many stories and so many moments where I have been able to connect with people. It is responsible for the amount of empathy I have towards others. It is responsible for making me more human.
Which is funny to think about, because for me being 20 and 21 and 22 and 23 was a lot like being an infant. Nothing of so-called importance was happening, therefore I was incapable of making memories. Or that’s how I look back at it, anyway. I guess when you look at yourself every day in the mirror and see a loser, who is nowhere, and furthermore going nowhere, you are one day going to rationalize how pathetic you were, and how you weren’t making any money, and how you didn’t have much of a plan, and therefore it was an awful time in your life, etc.
I’m not here to argue that it was somehow a good era to be alive, but I have always had a difficult time giving myself any grace or any passes or any anything, really. I know for the overwhelming majority of my days on earth I have really appreciated being here. Even when it’s been bad it hasn’t been so unendurable that I ever intentionally made the decision to take my own life through these vices that were once so inescapably part of my identity.
I happen to be very fortunate that I never expired unintentionally, because then I never would have been able to share my story with so many people who, believe it or not, have been through similar experiences as me. I kind of imagined that I was going to write a blog about drugs, and to remember my once very special friend named John, and yet here I am nearing the end and realizing that The Dark Age deserves at least a little bit of credit. It helped bring me here, after all.
And it may sound quite stupid but in some way that is why I love so much to write. Sometimes I have a clear message and point of view I am trying to convey. Sometimes it doesn’t show itself until the middle, or the end, or the very last sentences. Sometimes there is no point at all.
The best part: It doesn’t matter.
Future Bets 
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