“Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache.”

George Orwell, Down & Out in Paris and London

I get high from time to time. Not on heroin, not on crack, sometimes on weed and quite often on beer. Not because my life is boring. But because I need a good high from time to time to keep me balanced. Not a Hunter S. Thompson-esque ether binge, but a decent high where the world stays outside. The world with its mortgages, happy families and plane crashes. The world which I sometimes feel the urge to keep outside with this extra little help, the world like an angry swell battering the dike, waiting for the storm to gather more strength.

A high can mean many things. To sit at home, snug in with the newest Captain Alatriste-novel and not leaving the room before the last villain is skewered by sword and the last page is read. To sit in front of my laptop with three bottles of Beck’s and to read all the blogs that you can’t finish within 5 minutes at work. To rock out with friends in the third row of a Down show. To watch all 195 minutes of “Apocalypse Now Redux” with a big fat joint and enough chocolate bars. To write this text while “Davidian” by Machine Head keeps hammering out of my headphones.

I get high from time to time. I have a good job that enables me to pay all bills and still be able to buy beer and books at the end of the month. All the problems that my friends and I have are made up things, created in the western world, things that the average bloke from Sierra Leone would be very happy to endure. But nevertheless I keep getting mad once I visit some of my old friends in their new 3-bedroom home, friends who not once left the town they were born in for longer than two weeks. Old friends who know me for ages now, but who keep thinking I’ll end up on O’Connell Street, begging for change for the next fix, once I mention the word “weed”.

I get high and read books. I need these 2 hours every three or four days because most people are dull and empty, glued to their everyday-lives and the promise of safety and wealth like dumb cattle. And I have often enough tried to explain my motives and favourite types of beer, but now I refuse.

I get high. And prefer to grab a couple of beers and a Neil Gaiman novel to leave the world outside. At least for a couple of hours.

Image by a4gpa