It is a downer on the whole. Irritable with the children, again. Feeling tired and vacant, and suffering confusion over what is real and what isn’t. Why have I decoupled from the Office, for instance? Is it because: A) the drugs are fogging my brain and rendering me incapable, or B) the drugs are bringing the tedium of the workplace into full bloom, showing me just what a fucking waste of my life it is to sit here every day? No, no, of course, it’s always option C), that for reasons I will doubtless never understand, I am addicted to the escape of getting drunk and high and my every thought and action is directed towards managing this goal in some capacity.
But I am bored with it and its grubbiness; not to mention the munchies, which have jumped by an order of magnitude from anything I’ve experienced before. I have been gorging myself on chocolate-coated shortbread and glasses of milk, Italian blood oranges by the half dozen, buttered hot-cross buns, buttered bread encrusted with wafers of Maldon and chocolate cake with hot chocolate sauce. I am ballooning and just can not be fucked controlling it. I buy it all in in advance, just as I would my fags or booze. And I do it with quality biscuits, premium ice creams and fine chocolate. I am abusing this drug because I know it is temporary. Or is that the biggest delusion of them all?
I have realized that you need to host two personalities at the same time to maintain a life as a managing stoner: one to be your stand-in and the other to live with the guilt and small-time depravity. Take yesterday’s Sunday lunch with the neighbours. I mean, it wasn’t as if they weren’t hungover anyway and nobody could hear themselves think on account of the teething Infant we’d brought. But they didn’t deserve me missing dinner on account of my need to score, dressed up as a trip to the Tesco for some Bonjela. I must have been gone for 40 minutes on my return trip to the other side of fucking town, having set out just as the kids’ portions were being doled out.
I would fucking want to kill a bastard that did that to my food. And the beauty of it all was its utter pointlessness, spending as I was the afternoon in the kitchen of a bloke who can sort things out in an relative instant without my moving so much as an arm to a jean pocket. Remarkably, while driving back in the Sunday sun I was not working myself up with guilt in the distant knowledge that I had already missed dinner; and I had left my passenger to worry about the practicalities, such as: “how would I feel if I had bumped into someone from the Office while I was in there getting my ten-bag?” No, nothing like this at all was going through my mind – just the nagging feeling that the size of the bags are shrinking these days, convinced I’m getting regular 5-bags for the price of ten, possibly a result of my soggy brain perceiving the contents of the bag to be much less than they really are because it knows how much it needs these days to get itself properly high?
So, as it was with my secret transfers of Litre Pantry Smirnoff to Half-bottle freezer Smirnoff one year ago, I am now hiding my dependency even from those to whom it doesn’t matter. The Wife doesn’t know a bit of it either, although I don’t actually believe that’s true. It’s selfish and greedy and grubby, and I am abusing it because I want to hate it and want to be free from it. But fuck, the vast open space up ahead is daunting – particularly since I have just had a glimpse of it and been beaten before I even got there.
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