tramadol fucks you up, Monday edition

does tramadol fuck you up
will tramadol get you fucked up?
tramadol hcl will it fuck you up
can tramadol fuck you up
cani get fucked up on tramadol
will tramadol fuck you up
does tramadol fuck u up
can tramadol mess you up
will ultracet fuck you up

all together now, kids: yeah.

will two tramadol fuck you up?
will 50mg tramadol get you fucked up
will a tramadol 50mg get you high

well, alright, not at those fucking doses. fyi, you're not gonna drown if you jump in your paddling pool, either. now isn't Heroes on TV or something?

tramadol fucked me up for 24 hours

oh, sure, come around here flaunting your obvious lack of tolerance for it. you lucky asshole.

tramadol fuck you up
tramadol fucks you up

that's our slogan. don't wear it ou - oh, wait.

fucked up on tramadol

that's you guys.

how many tramadol will mess you up??

i dunno. why don't you start taking some and find out?

why throw up tramadol

i don't know why someone would do that, little drug quester. i just don't know.

peace, love and tramadol

L

choose personal control: surrender it to us.

so i was chatting with a couple straight edge kiddies, and got pointed to the sXe faq over on MIT's usenet archives. i noticed that the movement keeps describing itself as about standing up to the peer pressure and taking back personal control.

has anyone else noticed how fucking ironic that is?

we, the drug-using tribes of counterculture, don't tell you what to do. if you hang with the alt.crews here, you don't get a spliff shoved in your mouth; i pop pills, i don't make you pop pills or imply that you're not cool if you don't pop pills. they're my pills. chacun a son gout; we're all about bodily autonomy here, which means we can all choose to do or not do whatever the hell we like.

so explain to me again, sXe kids, how joining a movement that emphatically tells you what not to take is about taking back your autonomy?

L


edit: from the FAQ, 1.7 Why do kids get into straight edge?
"It doesn't FEEL good to OD."

look, you screeching pseudomoral moron. it does feel good to OD, something you'd know nothing about because you've never been in any real physical pain and needed real medicine. it feels incredibly good to overdose on an opiate - it is being pulled down into deep cushioned sleep as your pain dissipates and your mind clears into void. that's why people OD on it in the first place. that's also why it's called the white angel.

oh, but what would you know? you're too hardcore for pain meds. you can take it. you stand strong.

let's see y'all stand strong with CP. let's see you have abdominal surgery and still 'resist drugs', you sanctimonious assholes.

OMIGOD U GUISE

firstly, i must be doing something right, because R. U. Sirius likes my blog. that's almost as good as having St. Gibson's stamp of approval - i'm totally fucking star-struck here. i can't imagine why cybercult kings would possibly want to read the cesspool of Tramadol and bad pop culture references that is Sapiens Anonym, but hey. i'm not complaining.

second, i'm writing an article for the fall edition of H+ magazine - a screed on "junkyard transhumanism", which is what i do, and the allure thereof.

sometimes i could swear i've been sitting in an asylum for years, shot up with happy hypos, and this is just my brain trying to come up with the best "What if my life was totally fucking awesome?" scenario it can. i'm so fucking glad to be alive.

tramadol fucks you up, Monday edition

will tramadol fuck you up? (2 times)
does tramadol mess you up? (2 times)
will tramadol mess you up?
can i get fucked up off tramadol?
tramadol get you fucked up?
will ultracet fuck you up?
does tramadol fuck you up?
can norflex and tramadol mess you up?
can tramadol fuck you up?

YES, for fuck's sake. it can, it does, it will. it's WRITTEN ON THE FUCKING TRAMADOL BOX, you goddamned morons.

get fucked up on tramadol
tramadol fucked up

that's easy: take four, then wait for them to kick in. when they do, keep taking sets of four every half hour until you pass out and get taken to hospital, where they will take all the rest of the Tramadol away from you. Lepht solves all your problems, see?

kap ake codeine

it is indeed. that's a 30mg / 500mg paracetamol dose there.

would skinny dipping hurt my straight edge?

i'm too tired to be snide. yes, it will hurt your puritan little straight edge. go and do it anyway, you straight-laced freak; you might learn something about what it is to live life without arbitrary sets of restrictions hog-tying your brain in the guise of "morality".

L

drivel

the pseudo-novel now boasts close to 30K words of drivel about a dead priest in Hell. some are pressing me to get it published, although i doubt its calibre is high enough not to be used as kitty litter by any respectable publishing house; in any case, i will let you junkheads decide by posting bits of it once the first draft is completed.

in other news, yes, 240mg of codeine will fuck you up, Google-searching drug-quester, unless you're like me and you're already fucked up. the codeine by itself wouldn't be so bad, but it's probably cocodamol, and you're talking 16g of paracetamol there, which your liver DOES NOT WANT.

interestingly, paracetamol is one of the most hepatotoxic compounds we prescribe to patients nowadays, as i learned from my biomedical buddy. i bleev it's one of those drugs that wouldn't pass modern safety guidelines, although that might be an urban myth. i have a lot of those stuck in the lobes.

end drivel. expect Mask excerpts sooner or later.

L

w00t

unconditional acceptance to the University's Honours programme. score three for Blofeld.

I, arch-villain

that's right, it's time for more information than you wanted about Lepht's fucked-up relationship with its ex. i write it down because it makes me feel better, so go 'head and ignore it.

i've been informed - and looking at his LiveJournal (yes), my source was entirely correct - that w3dyt has become rather obsessed with this 'beating me at grades' idea. i'm told he no longer even tells people who he means to 'win' against, or how - it's ingrown into his head that i, Lepht Anonym, am the academic equivalent of Blofeld, stroking my pet gimp as i hog all the best jobs and grades, laughing at him, surrounded by a cadre of cronies i've hypnotised into following me. in this scenario, w3dyt is of course James Bond, who is going to beat Blofeld because he is the hero and that is what always happens with heroes. it would seem that success on my part has been needling him ever since he decided that the break-up - which was a joint effort in failure - was to be my dain-bramaged doing.

this frightens me, and makes me sad. frightens me because there's more opportunities for him to be angry when i do well coming - the CSD welcome address, for instance, where i'll be up on stage in front of him recieving prizes i won and he didn't - or class, where i'm fairly sure he is going to find out about the forementioned pet gimp and try to do something about it. as we've seen, if he decided to, the question of who'd be crying in the back of the ambulance isn't a hard one.

it makes me so sad because this is so far from what academia should be about. i hear ya - how can someone who writes in all smalls possibly tell us what academia is about? - but i didn't get the idea on my own; it came from the open-source scene here, and from the University itself, and from the guys with doctorates i hang around with these days, of whom i ain't one yet. w3dyt says he's going to 'win' because he thinks of what we do as a contest, where if you didn't get the highest marks, you lost. but it's not like that - we're not here to fight. we're here to collaborate. we're here to help each other learn, get degrees, go out into the world and use that knowledge to help other people who have different knowledge, because in turn, they help us.

it makes me sad that a guy with so much potential - not to be top of the class, but to act as any smart human being can, as a collaborator to help other human beings - is wasting his energy on this futile, puerile inferiority complex. he's not going to 'beat me'. if he did, i wouldn't care - if he got a research job that i didn't, it would mean that he was the one who could contribute more to computing science in that particular post. if he got a first and i got a second-class degree, it would mean that he worked harder than i did, and in contrast to a year or two years ago, that would impact my self-esteem not in the slightest. i am less fragile, now, than he thinks.

i hope this obsession fades from his mind once term starts. i hope his friend on LiveJournal stops placating him by telling him it's OK to have a bitter commitment to tearing a person down, even one that will never work. and i hope he gets a boyfriend or girlfriend who really does love him, who'll distract him from thinking about me, because if it doesn't, the friend doesn't and he doesn't, i can't see that this is going to end healthily.

L

PS. i retract what i said about the novel. it occurs to me that having a literary penchant makes me a verbose, pompous motherfucker, and possibly isn't therefore all that 'sweet'.

holy shit

i've written 24,250 words of a mutated story, and i have no idea when i'ma be done with the fucker. sweet.

Milanese stars

i still can't believe they sent my streetscum butt here. i'm at the visiting scientists' residences of the Mario Negri Pharmaceutical Research Institute, in Milan, which turns out to be not a pompous and preening fashion capital but an industrial wonderland full of huge open factory spaces, lamps hanging from wires bundled down the middle of the streets, tram lines crossing every space of the sky. the Institute's HQ is new, and where i'm staying is essentially a fancy city apartment, or the best goddamn student dorm i've ever seen. there's air conditioning in here, and a power shower, and lights around the bathroom mirror, and ice water in the fridge, and a double bed, and goddamn i still can't believe they sent me, Lepht "Charity Shop" Anonym, here.

i'm writing from right in front of the open windows, looking across the Institute car park where you can see white pools of light on soft grey stone and the words "Istituto Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri" in huge neon letters, and the scientists' office balconies all lit up, and at first i thought you couldn't see any stars - this is Italy's most industrialised city, and the light pollution is pretty bad. i was wrong - you can see them if you're not looking directly at them, faintly, like the Pleiades in Scotland. they're still there; you just have to look for them in a different way.

uplifting, when you think about it.

guilt

poppy tea is a strange, pseudo-legal substance, made from Papaverum somniferum, the opium poppy. you cook it up from either the straw, or the seeds; the straw is gotten by putting poppy pods into a coffee grinder, and you can get the pods from any craft shop, cause they're pretty, natch. or you can grow your own and dry it yourself, which is also legal. cooking this dusty stuff properly results in a small amount of Pepsi-coloured, stunningly disgusting liquid, which needs to be done as a shot, since you'll likely vomit trying to drink it normally.

that is, you get low-grade opium, what they call the peat angel. it's an effective painkiller and sleep inducer. in daily life, it's pretty invaluable: takes away your pain at night, cures your insomnia, lets you sit on the floor or at the table and study without having to stop every five minutes and go lie down.

or it would be, if it didn't carry a huge burden of guilt. not because of the questionable legality - you can ask Uncle Wiki about that - but because of where it comes from. see, the opium poppy is one of Afghanistan's largest crops, and the Taliban control its production. i can't help feeling like every time one of us pays for a sack of somniferum heads, that money is going to someone who thinks his wife is his property, who murders unmarried lovers, who wants us all to be slaves of his god. i'm paying that guy money.

but i still accept cups of peat when someone brews some. i feel like a total douche for doing it, but it's hard to decline when someone is offering you free painkillers. i honestly don't know if it's ethically acceptable to drink the imported shit. then again, i'd have a hard time growing my own, not having any garden and being the Death of Houseplants.

i'm in a bind here. thoughts?

L

accolades

turns out i won two prizes in CS this year, one for first-year AI (which i don't think i shoulda got since i'm in second year, but they really liked my article on using AI techniques in security, and i got the best grades in the exam, natch) and the other the O'Reilly Prize in Computing Science. they're giving me a mystery parcel that i gotta go pick up, and apparently at the welcome session this year the prizes are good for £150 worth of books. (the mystery parcel is taunting my curiosity by waiting in a Department office until Thursday.)

i'm gonna be able to afford textbooks!

L

PS. who knows, maybe i will make top of the class in something next year.

revenge on Lepht

right now, ladies and gents, i am one sick-ass motherfucker. my stomach's roiling like the North Atlantic, i'm only sitting on the floor because to get up is guaranteed to make me hurl and i personally just want to jack in to my beautiful cluster and not ever look at meatspace again.

why, you ask? well, competition.

i don't like competition. and it's nothing to do with not liking to lose - in fact, i'd prefer to have the competition be in a subject where i know i'll lose, like sports or chemistry. (you're listening to the virtual voice of Dr. Rubber-Legs Can't-Catch What's-A-Reagent itself, here.) what's sparked off all this sickness is, once again, my last ex.

w3dyt, in his wisdom, has decided that he is going to take revenge on my dain bramaged ass. i'd thought that a relationship during which: i got jealous and got between him and his new flame; he punched me, a guy literally half his size, in the damaged kidney; i seemed like a total binary-flipping psycho because i don't even know my own mind when it comes to proper relationships; he posed my unconscious body in 'funny' positions and took pictures without my consent; i told him i loved him when i couldn't possibly know that; he ratted me out to the legal authorities for doing implants as soon as he wasn't the only one i was doing them for and coldly told me in Starbucks that he did it for moral reasons; etc., etc. - i woulda thought that a relationship like that, which i should never even have started with him, would be revenge enough for both of us.

apparently not. whilst i take a lot of the responsibility on myself - for not ending the relationship as soon as i realised i was in over my head, for allowing myself to play at having emotions i'm just not really capable of, for getting jealous, a million things like that - not all of it belongs to me. we both did awful things. in w3dyt's mind, though, it seems that it was just me.

so he's decided that he's going to try and - i quote, from a twenty-year-old man - "work my ass off to beat [Lepht, academically]". he says competitiveness will give him "the edge". i break no sweat over this happening - i've been selected for a dozen things over him, including the research job i'm working right now (he didn't even get shortlisted) and founder President of the CompSci society at the University, plus i'm pretty well known at the Department and my grades are generally a lot higher than his - but it's this i'm-gonna-getchoo attitude that makes my blood freeze.

you wanna know why? because it fosters a hostile attitude towards me in general that's not gonna go away. i am indeed a med-popping, drug-addicted, virtually friendless self-implanting machinehead nutjob, and having w3dyt in all my classes, trying to find out what my grades are so he can crow if they're lower than his and hate me if they're not, telling people he's going to beat me because i'm an asshole who "prides [itself] on being top of the class" (i'm not top of the class, ever, i hover around the middle) - this is not going to make it any easier for me or indeed him to get over what happened.

in addition, i can see it engendering a common practice of grade competitiveness, and from that stems that culture that makes undergrads value themselves on their grades alone. getting a 12 when i get a 9, or vice versa, does not make the higher graded guy the better person. whether he "beats" me or not, we're still both going to be fucked up humans with serious problems to get over.

so far the best practice i can think of is what i usually do, which is to avoid revealing my scores to anyone who isn't in my immediate tribe. i'm still sick as a dog, though. to be honest the fact that he's reduced the whole situation, in his mind, to one where he is the good guy, i am the bad guy, and he will work hard and beat me like some Hollywood high school movie, just hurts. even though i vehemently dislike w3dyt, i'd hoped to see him do something more mature than that.

implant synergy, part 1: reed sensors

a reed sensor is a little component that detects the presence or absence of a magnet. i've been blethering with a colleague about using them in conjunction with the magnets in my hands - it has interesting applications; like if you had three of them (say two on your keyboard and one on the monitor of your laptop) you could use them to interpolate the position of your hands in real time. that is, you could program the laptop to only switch the backlight on when you're actually using it, or to lock the screen as soon as you step away.

what's even cooler is that you can factor in the RFID chip in my hand, too. that is, you could program the book not just to only let people in when they show an RFID tag with my hex code, but also to then make sure they have the same magnetic configuration i do (which would be pretty hard to fake.)

i'm gonna have to get some of these things to play with. sayonara, wages.

things i shouldn't laugh at at 20 years old:

that armpit-fart noise you get when you're both all sweatied up during sex; wheely-chairing across the lab because i can't be arsed to get up and walk; the lives of the local overprivileged emo children; the horrified facial contortions of the Jehovah's Witnesses i wave at when i see them coming out of their Kingdom Hall every so often on my way to work; toddlers' mothers whose frantic attempts to silence their children as said wormbabies point at my junkie ass (asking loudly why that man has things drawn on his face like Captain Jack) are utterly useless; the fact that my flatmates bought my pet gimp a dog bed that says "good boy" and has pictures of happy bone-clutching yellow labradors on.

i'll be 21 in nine days. doesn't seem like it's gonna bring much maturity with it, no?

L

six months

so ten minutes or so ago, we got an 8-node Kerrighed Beowulf cluster working with Bio-Linux. i've never had access to this sort of computing power before; 18Gb of RAM, 3Tb of storage and 10 Opteron CPUs - it's a behemoth made from nothing more than off-the-shelf components. it's utterly fucking stunning.

working this job mostly makes me think i've died and gone to hacker heaven. there's the little perks, like i can wear what i want (facial skin divers? circuits and vines drawn around my eye socket? no hair? fine by these guys) and the canteen food is somehow both dirt cheap and delicious (strawberry meringue cheesecake in a box = 50p), and the free coffee and my own goddamn lab - yep, they gave my streetscum ass a lab of my own, and i still boggle at that - but more than that, there's all the shit i'm learning. i've learned more about networking and Linux here than i coulda done in the entire summer by myself, and i've only been here a month. i can't fucking wait to see what else there is.

as if that wasn't enough, not only are they gonna be paying me in a month what i thought i'd make in the whole term of employment (i'll be able to afford my big ink way sooner than i thought), but i'm gonna get to go to Milan, to help out at one of our partner institutes for a week. i'll get to play with a huge cluster they built out of garbage.

looking back at six months ago, when i was stuck in an abusive relationship, broke as fuck, dependent on escapism and drugs to survive, i can't believe i survived that long with major depression. i was so lucky not to get any more fucked up than i did. i didn't think it was all that bad at the time, even, but looking back on it makes things these days seem like a fucking dream; i just used to always have this sense that something was wrong, that i needed to get away. i'm so fucking happy compared to back then.

if i'm asleep, i don't wanna be woken up.

L

the curve, or why i'm glad i'm not dead

seems like the learning curve for your first research job is pretty steep, especially one where you're expected to be almost completely independent - here, i've just been given an overarching task ("see if this cool clustered Linux workstation idea is viable for what we want to use it for") and a lab full of hardware to set it up in, plus a knowledgeable superior to ask questions of if i need it. this is my third week now, and in two weeks i've learnt:

- better bash scripting
- the structure, merits and disadvantages of cluster systems Kerrighed and openMosix
- how to use Debian-based systems, especially Ubuntu and the NERC's BioLinux
- practical (i.e. kludge) networking
- Beowulf cluster theory and architecture
- how to patch and recompile the Linux kernel
- how to use vi
- not to fear machines without a monitor or keyboard
- all about PXE booting
- how to SSH into remote machines without being a floundering idiot
- not to fear setting up your own servers
- way too much about NFS, GlusterFS, and XtreemOS/XtreemFS
- how to get around a crappily-written government wiki and edit it without the European professors who contribute to it kicking your ass for being retarded
- how to use skype (yeah, i didn't know how before.)
- how to build machines from scratch without shorting anything out or electrocuting my part-metallic ass
- the difference between IDE and SATA drives (yeah, that's another fucking duh thing i shoulda already known)
- how to network printers under Linux

...and how to use a filter coffee machine that's older than i am.

my head is so full of new stuff, i'm fairly sure i'm gonna lose a language or something to make space, like all the Japanese or Python is gonna drain out of my brain because it's full of init.d commands. this has got to be the steepest learning curve i've ever encountered, and it's fucking brilliant - i have never learned this much in two weeks, ever. the best thing is that there's so much more to go - i've got another two and a half months of this, and next week a cluster guru from Milan arrives so i can pester him with questions he'd expect from his seven-year-old kid rather than his twenty-year-old colleague. and as if all that wasn't enough, i might get to go to Milan myself to go see said guru's research institute and help him build a cluster like my prototype - Linux and hardware and a chance to practice my Italian and my favourite summer food in the whole Union, delicious chocolate semifreddo!

the downside is that i've been getting up at six and going to bed at one, so i look... frightening. i'm as white as my coffee mug and the shadows under my eyes are getting frankly Gothtacular - like i've said before, i look a bit like Bela Lugosi dressed up for an all-night rave. (i'm gonna look even worse after i shave my head for Cancer Research.) i'm pretty much permanently exhausted, but it's so utterly worth it that i wouldn't mind surviving on four or even three hours a night indefinitely if it meant this kind of knowledge access.

knowledge, people, software, freedom and fun - man, i am so fucking glad to be alive.

L

the sorceror's apprentice

working this job is... difficult. the material i study and use here is arcane and obscure; i'm working with Linux distributions i've never heard of before, modifying their kernels and filesystems to do clustering and grid tasks whose theory i've been studying for a week, if that. i'm eyeball-deep in complex projects, sub-developer teams, many-branched source trees and technology i only barely understand. i'm also surrounded by people with an average of about twenty years' education and experience in the top of this field, several degrees up on yours truly; i should probably be depressed at how little of this i get.

i'm pretty damn happy, though. i discovered a method way back in my first year of University that helps you deal when you're on the brink of being overwhelmed by your own crappiness. it's an experience metaphor, a way of seeing your life in analogy; you're the sorceror's apprentice. it's particularly apt when you're working with advanced tech, since 90-node clusters doing complex genomics computations sure as hell seem like magic if you're seeing them for the first time.

the apprentice is a learner in their world. maybe they're one of many, maybe they're the only one, but they're a newbie in the midst of masters, someone whose task it is to gain knowledge from those around them. it's an image in direct contrast to the 'fighter', a metaphor i know a lot of guys use - the fighter's approach is to see others around her as rivals to be competed with in terms of skill level, whereas the apprentice sees them as sources of wisdom.

considering yourself to be an 'apprentice' seems to improve your motivation to learn and to perform better at your tasks. it stops the whole "Everybody's better than me, therefore I'm worse than anyone else, therefore I feel like shit" thinking that plagues you sometimes in situations like these, and it makes you consider your peers as a beneficial force rather than an army of rivals. after you've stopped thinking of them as people who've 'beaten' you, you're in a better position to pool your knowledge with theirs, and you can approach them for help - that way, you help each other. it's also a pretty good way to minimise your own hubris - you can't walk around thinking you're the schiznit and nobody's greater than you if you've been considering yourself a humble apprentice for a week, so you don't get overconfident and neglect stuff.

most people probably don't need this kind of cognitive metaphor, and i know a large percentage of you won't have a goddamn clue what i'm even trying to say because i'm bad at expressing myself. but it sure helps me, and i hope someone'll get something out of using it.

L

straight edge

my crappy, can't-handle-finals-week immune system can't fight off glandular fever, so i've been pretty damn sick this week. illness kinda sucks ass: a week on your ass, losing ridiculous amounts of weight because your throat hurts too much to even swallow liquids, not being able to breathe properly (it was that that made me call the NHS, contra to my advice to other people about not being an over-macho i-can-take-it asshole and letting yourself get horribly ill), dehydration because you can't drink and if you do you vomit and you've got diarrhoea, yada yada.

the plus side was i got an entire stash of Kupkakes* - 30mg cocodamol, an excellent little drug that works excellently for pain.

that got me thinking. i don't use the Kupkakes recreationally, though i sure as hell could - aside from their analgesic/antipyretic effects, they'll calm you down and make you walk around floating on a cushion of chill, but they're far too valuable to me as a chronic pain patient to waste on chilling. i was looking at one the day before yesterday in an attempt to psyche myself up for swallowing it (yesterday was the first day i could eat solid food, and since then i've been fucking golden), and i remembered the stash of Rx Kupkakes one of my exes has.

i have a few ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, but most have been from my side of life - alternatives, sort of. i think i'm just attracted to that willingness to try anything; well, this ex - call him Will, names changed to protect the fucking guilty - was sort of an anomaly. had ink and piercings, sure, less than me but a few, and weird hair like yours truly - but Will's a straight edger.

this was sort of a shock to me when i found out, after we first started dating, but i figured hey, if the man doesn't tell me what i can and can't do with my own meat, i'm not gonna tell him what he should do with his. it was only after we had a conversation in which it transpired that if i got seriously ill and resorted to cannabis for pain relief, he'd leave me no matter how ill i was, that i realised there's something kinda fucked up about this straight edge philosophy.

for a start, i reject the argument that the philosophy bans things because they fuck you up. the SxE list of 'banned' substances is... well, sorta arbitrary. tobacco, recreational drugs, alcohol. some of them are also vegetarian, some don't approve of any drugs at all - no fucking paracetamol with one kiddie i heard about on the grapevine - some just stay away from those Big Three. but why just those three? just because they're common? why doesn't SxE doctrine ban fried food, standing right in front the speakers, skinny dipping, high heels or not taking your insulin on time? personally i believe people have a right to fuck themselves up, and to make their own judgements in what's acceptable levels of fucked-up. it's called bodily autonomy.

there's another thing. i see no reason to make an entire militant philosophy out of not doing something nobody is making you do. you don't smoke? well, i quit too. now i'm more stressed, less broke and no lung cancer. grats. you don't drink? welcome to the United Arab Emirates. i just don't get it why it needs a symbol and vigilantes and a movement.

third, i reject the idea that drug use is always bad and the only reasons people have for taking are peer pressure and thinking it's cool. i don't know a single fucker who's ever used anything because they wanted to be one of the cool kids; the cool kids don't even need to do that shit in my experience. the people i used to hang out with had the same problems as i and the rest of the city did: some were in pain, some had survived awful shit in their lives, some were addicts, some wanted the rush. using whatever was just one solution. all of us did some stupid things, but we sure as hell weren't doing it for acceptance in the goddamn playground. to reject drugs on that precept is over-simplifying to a ridiculous degree.

the lifetime commitment thing bothers me, too. i respect people trying to make a commitment to something, but i worry when i see them trying to make a promise for life. like a marriage, i think you can't enter into a contract like that knowing for sure that you're never going to feel any other way, even if you really don't think you will; so when you've got an X tattooed on the back of your hand and you find that, shit son, you can't pay the NHS for your pain pills and you've got nothing to keep that tide of hurt away, i don't think you can honour a lifetime promise never to do drugs without putting yourself through pain for no real reason.

last up, the militancy - i don't have a problem with SxE kiddies who just don't drink, smoke or do drugs themselves; they wanna protect their meatshells, and we disagree only on the best way to do that and the acceptable tradeoff between protection and other benefits. i have a problem with those like Will, people who look down on friends having a drink together, people who decide to make you pick between them and relief from the screaming abyss of agony where your guts used to be. my personal choices are mine alone; if you think they're wrong, we'll have a debate, but sneering straight-edgers with a squeaky superiority complex aren't good at that sort of debate. if you think my choices should be restricted because people around me are emotionally hurt by them, you can think again. everyone has the right to do legal things without fear that they'll hurt or offend others and be thrown in jail; what i don't have the right to do is physically, actually hurt someone.

if my pain control makes me go off the rails and kill someone, it's my fault and i deserve to go down for it, because i should've been more responsible in choosing better drugs and locking my arse away while i was on them. if i take acid because i wanna know more about myself so i take a bungload of PCP and i freak out and gouge out one of my eyes, i don't get to the top of the waiting list for a new one any time soon, and that's fair. but if i'm not hurting anyone, i don't need a lecture from some sanctimonious, cleaner-than-thou punk.

L


* Kupkakes are called that because they say KAP|AKE on the pill, as well as because when you're feverish, your muscles are screaming and you can't sleep, four of them are the sweetest thing in the Universe save the white angel.

5K

five thousand hits! NOBODY LOVES ME!

snrrt. - L

on squeamies

squeamie, noun: peep who doesn't want anything to do with implanted technology because of the eeew factor. take the guy who saw me submitting a paper at the CSD offices a couple weeks ago, sorting through the pages with the massive paperclip i was gonna need stuck to the back of my hand on a nodule. gross factor triggered when he realised what the deal was, and eeew guy was out of there, making the squeamie face.

it's not a good thing to be afflicted with, the squeam. i remember my first back-of-the-hand cannula - they leave an impression for about a day after you remove them, and i was fucking horrified. i couldn't look at it, kept the whole thing hidden under a dressing and threw up the first time i touched it. i thought it was a leftover needle that had got stuck in there (i think i mentioned it before here, but i forget...) see, i used to have this problem with subdermal critters - still do - and it fucked me up.

what gets rid of the problem is exposure. after that first cannula, the others didn't seem so bad - that kid i used to be, who screamed bloody murder when there were maggots and blowflies in the yard bin, is now me; i've cut out stitches with a penknife and forced metallic bits of crap inside my own flesh and tolerated all kinds of medical bullshit. you can be an ex-squeamie.

so get out there, ladies. show off your subderms, frighten some normals. you're helping in the long run.

L