Amsterdam: Because You Need A Sobering Reminder
It will shock and awe you to discover that I'm sick again, so I'm working from home today. And by "working from home," I mean, "writing on Blogger and eating chocolate biscuits." I never should have discovered the joys of chocolate biscuits.
So, I've returned from Amsterdam, which is in itself rather heroic. I learned an important life lesson when I was in Amsterdam, which is that I stopped doing drugs for a reason. Also, I am allergic to hash, which is a life lesson all its own.
I swore off drugs of all kinds (except OTC and legitimate prescriptions) when I was 22 years old; coincidentally the year I both got my first full-time job and totally withdrew from social contact. I was living in my hometown, which I hated, and having excommunicated myself from the prominent drug culture I was left with no friends and no desire to make new friends. This unhappy situation lasted until I moved back to Minnesota just before I turned 24 -- I went back to social interaction, not so much the drugs.
Fast-forward to Amsterdam, on Friday. We arrived in the evening, took the worst tram ride ever, checked into our hostel, and then went out and had dinner and a joint. (I had decided to take a break from sobriety while I had the chance.) We walked around for a long while and then smoked another joint, walked a bit more, then went to bed.
Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast, where I saw Rachel just long enough to swear at her, and then we went to the Anne Frank House. It was kind of depressing but certainly not as bad as Auschwitz. They had more space than I thought, but it was still far too little space for eight people for two years. After the Anne Frank House we went to the Heineken factory, which was pretty awesome. For 10 Euro we got entrance, three free beers and a free gift. The exhibits are well-planned and interesting and I'm all about free beers, although I did force ("force") Chris to drink my third because, sorry to the Dutch people, I just don't really care for Heineken.
After the Heineken factory we had lunch and then went to a coffeeshop. This was where the mistakes really began. Tory, Chris and Brittany smoked another joint, while I opted to purchase a hash space muffin instead. (In the years since I was 22, I'd forgotten how much I dislike smoking pot. It makes my face feel funny and uncomfortable and it constricts my throat.) I happily ate my muffin, and then some indeterminate amount of time later we decided to go shopping.
Luckily, I'm not the shopping kind, which saved me a lot of money although I was not excited about wandering through a bunch of stores when all I really wanted to do was chill out somewhere. My space muffin was taking its sweet time creeping up on me, but everyone else was pretty much gone. Chris was buying everything he could find that was purple (because purple is the new black -- read a Vogue every now and again) and Tory and Brittany were just sort of wandering around looking at everything. I got really paranoid that I was going to get lost so I was just making a supreme effort to keep track of everyone. I don't know how long this went on, I just know I got more and more disorganized and hungry as the minutes dragged by.
Some time later, probably about two hours later, we stopped into another coffeeshop and smoked another joint. This was a bad choice on my part as I was already pretty much boned by the hash muffin. I can't really remember what happened after that, except that I know at some point we ate some dinner, and then I passed out in my bed at the hostel at not later than 8:30 PM.
I woke up several hours later to the alarming fact that I am allergic to hash. See, I'd smoked hash twice before, and both times I ended up vomiting, but I'd been drinking both times so I assumed that's what the problem had been. This is apparently not true, as I'd only had two beers on Saturday, but I threw up many, many times that night. My head felt as though my eyes were shrivelling and my skull was trying to implode. I drank some water but I just threw it up again. I finally got back to sleep much later, but when I woke up at 9 AM for breakfast my head still hurt quite badly. We wandered up through the red light district on Sunday before we had to catch our train, and my head hurt so much it was blinding. Tory delivered health care in the form of Excedrin, and I breathed in the fresh cool air outside, and I started feeling a little bit better, although I was thinking quite seriously about throwing up in the street. We stopped at a coffeeshop that miraculously had a chair in front of an open window. The window was set in a wall that dropped straight into a canal, so I knelt on the chair and leaned out of the window and thought "If I'm going to throw up, this is the best place to do it." The wind from the water and the coolness of the air, plus the pain medication, finally made me feel remarkably better, and by the time we got onto the (what would turn out to be the first of many in a slowly spiralling nightmare of) train(s) I was feeling pretty well.
The point of that long story was that I am done with recreational drug use. Amsterdam is a good place to learn this lesson.
It will not surprise you to learn that right now I have the hiccups. There's probably a lesson in that, too.
*****
EDIT: Christ, I'm tired. It's 3 PM and I think I'm going to bed.
So, I've returned from Amsterdam, which is in itself rather heroic. I learned an important life lesson when I was in Amsterdam, which is that I stopped doing drugs for a reason. Also, I am allergic to hash, which is a life lesson all its own.
I swore off drugs of all kinds (except OTC and legitimate prescriptions) when I was 22 years old; coincidentally the year I both got my first full-time job and totally withdrew from social contact. I was living in my hometown, which I hated, and having excommunicated myself from the prominent drug culture I was left with no friends and no desire to make new friends. This unhappy situation lasted until I moved back to Minnesota just before I turned 24 -- I went back to social interaction, not so much the drugs.
Fast-forward to Amsterdam, on Friday. We arrived in the evening, took the worst tram ride ever, checked into our hostel, and then went out and had dinner and a joint. (I had decided to take a break from sobriety while I had the chance.) We walked around for a long while and then smoked another joint, walked a bit more, then went to bed.
Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast, where I saw Rachel just long enough to swear at her, and then we went to the Anne Frank House. It was kind of depressing but certainly not as bad as Auschwitz. They had more space than I thought, but it was still far too little space for eight people for two years. After the Anne Frank House we went to the Heineken factory, which was pretty awesome. For 10 Euro we got entrance, three free beers and a free gift. The exhibits are well-planned and interesting and I'm all about free beers, although I did force ("force") Chris to drink my third because, sorry to the Dutch people, I just don't really care for Heineken.
After the Heineken factory we had lunch and then went to a coffeeshop. This was where the mistakes really began. Tory, Chris and Brittany smoked another joint, while I opted to purchase a hash space muffin instead. (In the years since I was 22, I'd forgotten how much I dislike smoking pot. It makes my face feel funny and uncomfortable and it constricts my throat.) I happily ate my muffin, and then some indeterminate amount of time later we decided to go shopping.
Luckily, I'm not the shopping kind, which saved me a lot of money although I was not excited about wandering through a bunch of stores when all I really wanted to do was chill out somewhere. My space muffin was taking its sweet time creeping up on me, but everyone else was pretty much gone. Chris was buying everything he could find that was purple (because purple is the new black -- read a Vogue every now and again) and Tory and Brittany were just sort of wandering around looking at everything. I got really paranoid that I was going to get lost so I was just making a supreme effort to keep track of everyone. I don't know how long this went on, I just know I got more and more disorganized and hungry as the minutes dragged by.
Some time later, probably about two hours later, we stopped into another coffeeshop and smoked another joint. This was a bad choice on my part as I was already pretty much boned by the hash muffin. I can't really remember what happened after that, except that I know at some point we ate some dinner, and then I passed out in my bed at the hostel at not later than 8:30 PM.
I woke up several hours later to the alarming fact that I am allergic to hash. See, I'd smoked hash twice before, and both times I ended up vomiting, but I'd been drinking both times so I assumed that's what the problem had been. This is apparently not true, as I'd only had two beers on Saturday, but I threw up many, many times that night. My head felt as though my eyes were shrivelling and my skull was trying to implode. I drank some water but I just threw it up again. I finally got back to sleep much later, but when I woke up at 9 AM for breakfast my head still hurt quite badly. We wandered up through the red light district on Sunday before we had to catch our train, and my head hurt so much it was blinding. Tory delivered health care in the form of Excedrin, and I breathed in the fresh cool air outside, and I started feeling a little bit better, although I was thinking quite seriously about throwing up in the street. We stopped at a coffeeshop that miraculously had a chair in front of an open window. The window was set in a wall that dropped straight into a canal, so I knelt on the chair and leaned out of the window and thought "If I'm going to throw up, this is the best place to do it." The wind from the water and the coolness of the air, plus the pain medication, finally made me feel remarkably better, and by the time we got onto the (what would turn out to be the first of many in a slowly spiralling nightmare of) train(s) I was feeling pretty well.
The point of that long story was that I am done with recreational drug use. Amsterdam is a good place to learn this lesson.
It will not surprise you to learn that right now I have the hiccups. There's probably a lesson in that, too.
*****
EDIT: Christ, I'm tired. It's 3 PM and I think I'm going to bed.
spit at you by Nil at 5:49 AM
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