Gentleman and Scholar: Don’t drink the kitchen cleaner

I vividly recollect speaking with a close friend concerning his prolific use with hallucinogenic substances, endorsing their “spiritual” qualities and how they are loose affiliates with the “all-pervading” divine that exists in this world. He went on to explain his ventures of riding unicorns, speaking with prodigious, mythical krakens and obtaining the ever-sought-after spiritual enlightenment from God. It was a fascinating visit, and after the orderlies, dressed in their pristine cream-colored apparel wheeled him off to his solitary confinement, I left the Woodcrest Mental Health Hospital in Johnson City, Tenn., to begin my journey home.

What a lovely spring break it was.

Upon my departure and subsequent journey across the interstate to my native land of Jefferson City, my mind gradually began to ponder hypothetically. What if there is some metaphysical validity to my esteemed friend’s rants of the supernatural and divine? What if I, too, can be one of the chosen few who dare to venture to a world where humans howl in ecstasy at their existential liberation, all from the effects of reasonably priced, lab-cultured psychedelics?

The internal conflicts and thoughts started to grow until they were agonizing; each instance spent with friends, loved ones, drinking a beer, going to class, living life, I was consumed with the idea to finally free my mind and let loose the deluge of serotonin and psilocybin that would course through each synapse, leaving me in a state of self-actualized enlightenment, silently praying that I would be lucky enough for the substance to completely shut down my mind, altogether. I would be a vegetable, but an enlightened vegetable nonetheless.

I oftentimes find myself biting my thumb at fervent proponents of the United States “War on Drugs.” Drugs are what make the world revolve. Drugs are what make you happy when you are sad, or calm your nerves when you are much too happy for people to deal with you. Drugs help you lose weight, gain weight, become smarter and dumb you down. They help you when you are lonely; they kill social anxiety. They make you throw up. They force an erection, relax our muscles, negate a child and regulate menstrual cycles. So, I must ask my respectable colleagues this question: when will you come off your self-righteous pedestals and just let a dude do a little recreation every once in a while?

Be it heavy drinking, womanizing or kicking back in the hammock with a nice book, I have always been a creature that has been attracted to multiple facets of emotional escapism, and the prospect to completely destroy my mind and intellect through the habitual use greatly appeals to me. I am much too smart, intelligent and physically appealing that it simply would not be fair to the rest of society to continue to traverse through this world in such a manner. I should be a gentleman by leveling the playing field and bringing myself down to the level of my drug-ridden contemporaries.

So, a wise word to my friends, if you are seeking to shed some of that excessive potential and self-worth due to the over-encumbering expectations that come with it, I would advise you to do as many mentally, physically and emotionally detrimental substances as possible, and further separate the ever-broadening intellectual gap that exists within today’s “cherished” youth.

Or you could be the first generation in an age of adversity to overcome the sterile passivity that so many choose to embody with their indifferent lives steeped in discontent and dissatisfaction. You could be the generation that reigns sovereign over the pen, or becomes subject to the hypodermic needle.

Instead of broadening the intellectual gap, you could be the ones that built the bridge for those who were products of their environment, who life dealt an unfavorable hand to, and allow them to cross over. No chemical can achieve such a feat. No drug can successfully fill the void of discontent that resides within the mind’s eye of every man, woman and child.

So, do not drink the kitchen cleaner. And if you do, make sure you have friends in the poison control.

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