So, saturday evening there was a dinner party at my place, but Aaron (with Andrew’s assistance) did most of the cooking. How bizarre. =) I made some impromptu zuchinni/mushroom/spinach saute thing. Though I think the dill weed was a little odd to toss in there, I think it came out pretty well. I left for an aids ride fund raising party (where I donated nothing, same as last year, I think. I feel kinda bad about that). Meanwhile the other partiers rented a movie. Which I just watched. Requiem for a Dream.
It’s a compelling movie. Very well done. Very sad. Scary, too. Not big bad monsters gonna eat me style scary, unless your own nature counts as a big bad monster. Over the top, certainly. In more than a few ways. But I could see just about all of it happening.
But it reminded me of a point that was made in yesterday’s abstinence presentation. Hitting bottom. I don’t believe in hitting bottom. I think the only floor you reach is death. And you don’t bounce off that one. While you’re breathing, you can always “sink lower” or “climb higher”.
But it isn’t really about sinking or climbing. Yeah, those are useful analogies, and they work for the people that they work for. Go them. It does crap for me.
From birth on, we’re working to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Constantly organizing and incorporating information, action, planning, reason, experience, perception, intuition, etc. We build our sense of self, our view of the world, our behaviors and habits (with a little help from mom, dad, siblings, friends, random strangers we see pissing on the street, etc).
Drugs, at least the ones we care about, (I have yet to see someone’s life ruined by chamomile tea) are powerful, intense experiences, with psychological and often physiological ramifications which can really fuck your shit up.
If someone spends their saturday evenings watching tv and sundays helping grannies across the street, and then discovers the weekend E scene, and start rolling every saturday night, crashing on sundays, leaving the grannies to risk the roads alone or on someone else’s arm, then they’ve made a decision regarding drugs, and changed their habits based on the E. We can replace E with just about anything you like and the point remains. It changes your life. Maybe in little ways, maybe in giant reworkings, but change isn’t always along a linear scale. Life comes in grays. Dark grays, light grays, sure, but precious little, if anything, is unsullied white or black. Not all pleasure seeking behaviors are self-destructive. And all self-destructive behaviors are not created equal.
Stupid rambling, there was a profound point about the way the human mind works, and failure of the falling down, hitting bottom, and climbing out model to address that. And its failure to make evident that even from self-destructive behavior there are useful/positive lessons to learn. So long as you stay alive to put them into practice.
In one of Niven’s Ringworld books, a major character of the series becomes a wirehead (directly stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain through electricity. Funfun. And in Niven’s world, this is an addictive behavior.) and then pulls his ass out of it. And later he is incredibly tempted by a biological imperative to do something completely suicidal. And he resists “as only an ex-wirehead could”.
Someone else’s profundity, but there it is.