My life’s getting happier and happier right now, and I do believe that by the end of 2006 (or 2007 at the latest) I will have begun to declare a “happiest time of my life”. However, because I feel like it, I will replace “happiest” with “most care-free” and answer. This is late August to late December of 2004, BTW.
Disclaimer: The following post is mostly about past use of illegal drugs. None of these drugs have been used (well, by me) in a while, and I’m not advocating the violation of any U.S. law or law of your place of residence, etc. Stay in school, don’t do drugs.
- Wake up at God-knows-when, usually sometime by 11:30 AM but sometimes not.
- Strongly consider going to 11 AM Philosophy class, but generally don’t. Sometimes meet up with Matt, who has the same class (total coincidence, we didn’t meet through the class) and ditch with him to smoke pot. (T/Th)
- Eat ramen loaded with Arizona Gunslinger hot sauce.
- Go to 12:30 PM PoliSci class, probably only if I’m out of pot. (M/W/F)
- Smoke pot.
- Cruise the Dope.
- Round up Pat (another coincidental out-of-class introduction to a classmate) and go to English class. This was the one class neither of us missed, ever, because the teacher was cool as shit and I always talked to him about drugs after class.
- Get back to the dorm and do some more SDMB cruising.
- Play GTA: Vice City.
- Matt knocks on my dorm room window (first floor dorm), which is the signal that we should both walk to the door in through the kitchen and I should let them in.
- Matt and I round up the crew for either (a) a hookah session with flavored tobacco outside the dorm [with subsequent cop questioning, and proving to the cop that we’re not getting high] or (b) a dope-smoking session. Latter usually at The Ditch, a monsoon wash dug into the ground a couple blocks from campus.
- Come back home, high as a kite. Go across the hall to Derrick and Jeremy’s room. If Derrick’s not there, shoot the shit with Jeremy until we didn’t have anything to talk about anymore, then go back to my dorm room and crash. Derrick knew all the alcohol people and I knew all the drug people (and always had drugs), so usually I’d get Derrick high and then he’d bring me to one of his friends’ places of residence where said friend would get us and a bunch of other people stinking drunk.
The first month of the semester was a little different because I had a girlfriend and I spent a pretty good amount of time over at her dorm room servicin’ and a-gettin’-serviced, as it were. (Turns out that was the only thing we had in common, hence the relationship only lasting a month.) When we weren’t doing that, we watched Family Guy in my room and maybe fooled around a little if my roommate was out. Oh yeah, we went to The Cellar (the nasty, greasy on-campus place you go for a tasteless breakfust burrito after a night of partying) at 10 PM on Tuesday nights to see an improv group, too. I went once after we broke up, but I sat with the regular group plus the guy she’d been cheating on me with, and it was too much for me. Nobody really had much interest in me anymore because I wasn’t dating their friend. My ex had no interest whatsoever in talking to me because she was preoccupied with her new guy. Her best friend, who I had a doped-up makeout session with pretty soon before that, refused to acknowledge me.
The last month of the semester was different, too, for three reasons.
One was that I had no money anymore, so I never had drugs, but I still had connections. I don’t know how I did it, but I was just a bloodhound for drugs. I either sniffed 'em out by going to parties and figuring out (by body language etc.) who the stoners and dealers were, or a great connection fell right into my lap. The latter happened A LOT that semester. It was kind of weird. Anyway, a lot of my friends put up with me never buying the drugs during this period, because I was well-networked enough to hook someone up with one of my connections if they were in an unwanted dry spell. (Plus, I ordered pizza if one of my friends brought dope.)
Another reason was that I started to hang out with someone who had no friends but had a lot of wild and crazy prescription drugs he was happy to hand out for free to anyone who would be nice to him. I was actually a friend to him and didn’t take advantage of that offer (except for once, which is my Klonopin story which has probably been told in other threads). The funny thing was that he was simultaneously both of the kind of people who liked me most at the time: perpetually dry user looking for connections, and stocked up with drugs other people wanted (he had no interest in his own pills). Anyway, after we started hanging out, 7 out of 10 nights he would call me and beg me to convince another one of my connections to get us high for free. Most of my other connections came around to this once they realized that my friend had cool pills.
Another reason was that an otherwise empty house came into my legal supervisory care for reasons I won’t expound upon here, one block from campus. Once this happened, most nights I ended up rounding up the crew and walking down to the house, where we would drink rum/vodka/cheap wine, watch Family Guy, smoke incredible amounts of pot, order pizza and sometimes take whatever other drugs we’d gotten our hands on at the time.
Looking back, I really was happy sometimes during that period. But a lot of the time I was a pretty sad bloke, less because of the drugs than because breaking up with aforementioned girlfriend hit me pretty hard. This in turn was because I had gained a lot of weight while going out with her (yeah, there’s another reason she dumped me) and by the time I was single I was unattractive, had no confidence in myself and in short had NO chance of landing a date. I didn’t even hold hands with or kiss another girl until the semester ended, I dropped out of school and came back to CA.
It was definitely a lot of fun. I had a blast, even when I was depressed from my romantic situation. The great benefit of being connected was that I always had friends to unwind with–fellow users wanted to hang out with me because I was their only hope to get high on more than one occasion, and dealers wanted to hang out with me and give me free stuff cause I brought them a lot of referral business. It was great for me materially; as long as I hooked people up and bought pizza for my guests I could get high/drunk whenever I wanted for not one red cent.
I think if I did it again I would have stuck with my classes, gone to class every day, and done my frickin’ work (instead of dropping the classes I had to do work in and barely scraping by in the others). Would I have still gotten drunk and did all sorts of drugs? Absolutely. But I would’ve taught myself to balance it out. I got loose from my parents and instantly turned into College Druggies Gone Wild, shirking all my responsibilities for whatever the thrill of the moment was. I think a lot of people would blame that on the drugs and the alcohol and the parties and the friends. I think I could’ve handled all those (although I guess my choice of friends would probably need a couple key tweaks here and there) if I had known what I know now: you never know if you’ll have a second chance or what you’ll have to do to get it. I’ve been lucky in that I haven’t undergone serious hardship to fulfill my second-chance opportunities, but I’ve got a much better understanding of what it means to get a chance at life–and how easily the first chance slips away.
It really, really, really hurt to think about my wasted opportunities in 2005. I think almost every day of that year, I would’ve done anything to get a chance to go back to the UA and do it right. 2005 was a long year of regret and pondering at what could have been.
But then I shed my former life for good, and I enveloped myself in school and in late Dec 2005 I met my current GF. I hadn’t thought about this until I came upon this thread, but I realize right now that one of the things I like best about her is that now that I’m with her I don’t spend a second of my day thinking about how things could’ve gone differently. This is the first time I’ve thought about it since I met her.
It would be nice to think that I could go back and fix it all. But now I’m kind of happy in my life routine, which is nowhere near as interesting and really, not interesting enough for myself. But I’m back in school (at a community college) and I’m doing really well, and I’m dating a great woman who makes me forget about my past problems.
