Why Drugs Are Good: an essay
Two years ago, at this moment, I was sitting in a crowded train depot in Kansas City, waiting for a train home after being in New York for a week with Mikka. The train, which was suppsed to be there by eight, was late. There was a sudden confusion of air travelers desperate to get home after their planes were grounded, like mine, for an indeterminate amount of time. I was so tired I could barely think, but sleep was impossible, because all day long the television news kept replaying footage of bodies falling from the burning towers of the Trade Center, the tinney televised sound of distant screams almost as subtle as the tearing of paper in another room. I wanted to be home. I was so scared and exhausted, and with the world in a turbulent, Hollywood-style Twilight Zone, I thought I wouldn't make it there. I had never missed Santa Rosa so much, even our asshole neighbors. I was so depressed I felt just as Sylvia Plath described: as though I were enclosed in a bell jar, unable to hear, unable to function as I normally had. Surrounded by nothing, but something kept me there. I hate this day. I am made to remember it every time I pass a news stand, by people saying, 9 11, 9 11, oh my god, everywhere I go. The train didn't arrive there until midnight, and my accidental traveling companion was a sulky, morose teenage girl who from Iowa or Missouri or some such place, going to search for her runaway boyfriend in Los Angeles. Throughout the 2 day trip a strange, Canadian, self-proclaimed model hit on me in various ways which made me doubt his sexual preference; an overweight, Republican, conservative housewife yelled at me for being both a homeschooler and a "non-conformist"; I met a record producer who worked with various rap artists, including P. Diddy, and I fell in a sad, lonely kind of love with a Frenchman I would never even say hello to. Eventually I would discover that one of the trains I was supposed to take had collided with a freight, and another derailed. I was going to die, I thought, and then just felt numb. By the time I got home, I was quiet, underweight, unable to listen to the news without becoming nauseous, and full of a deep sadness I still can't completely shake (at least while GWB is still in office). If anything, that day made me appreciate air travel a little more, while somehow simultaneously preventing me from doing just that since then. Interesting how that works.