Crappy cake and why I don’t sleep enough

Not all who stumble are misguided. Is that how it goes? Does it actually matter? I doubt it. Do I actually matter? Some might doubt it. I don’t. Although it really falls to contextuality and perspective. I am a tiny speck among galaxies that live and die in a scale of eons, that is true. But in terms of how I see my own self, yes, I matter a great deal. I dispute that conclusion sometimes. Some days are better than others. I have always gotten by, so far.

Last night I ate some birthday cake that was hiding on the back of one of the shelves in my refrigerator. It was probably scared of me. Who would want the end to their meaningless existence to come in the form of humiliatingly brutal mutilation by yellowing, tombstone-like incisors before plunging on a freefall through slippery tubes leading into a vat of nauseating and visceral acids? Not me. I’m really glad cannibalism isn’t a big thing where I live. I’m a hypocrite because I like cake. I don’t care much for how the cake feels about being my meal. It did not scream. It also had no last words. It died silently, as so many have throughout history. Snatched away in the night by a mysterious assailant for no perceivable offense. In any case it tasted horribly artificial. More like food coloring and additives than any ingredients you might use to make a proper home made cake. Then again I’m no chef. I suck at cooking. I also dislike cooking. I am guessing my disinterest leads to a mediocre skill set and if I took the time I could be better. I don’t really care. My friend Miles is a chef, or chef-to-be. His real-life name isn’t actually Miles. He’s 20 now. We’ve been friends for over 2 years. He cooks food for me sometimes. It’s usually fairly good. What the hell do I know about culinary efforts? I am a consumer when it comes to the food industry, not a professional in the loop and up to date. That cake tasted like s**t to me. I proffer my fiscal token and receive a good or service of adequate value in return, like I learned in my Econ class. I didn’t even pay for that specific slice of cake. My parents paid for it, I assume. They didn’t get their money’s worth in any case. That was some s****y cake. It was for my sister’s birthday party, I think. My full sister, not my half-sister. My full little sister. She just turned 15 a couple of weeks ago. I am a senior, she is a freshman. Numerically speaking, she will be only 2 years younger than me until July. Then in early July, in terms of simple numerology, I will, again, be 3 years the elder. The cake from her party that I did not attend, I assume that is where the cake originated from, tasted quite unappealing to me. I ate it anyway. Then I got stoned not too long after that. I got by.

I got by last night too. I medicate myself with marijuana pretty habitually at this point. Three or four hits of THC wax through my vape pen every night right around 10:30pm as I lie in bed. I usually get depressed at night. Last night was the eve of Wednesday, May 15th, 2013. That makes today the morning of Thursday, May 16th, 2013. It’s a block day again. I’m in my journalism class again. As luck would have it, I’m tired and bored and a little bit pissy again. Who would’ve guessed. I’m pretty temperamental sometimes, especially towards people. It is only exacerbated when I get less than an adequate night’s sleep. I’ve punished by body an immeasurable sum of times with the deprivation of a good REM cycle. Some of it I attribute to a fast lifestyle, some to a modern lifestyle, some to sheer laziness. The fast lifestyle I attribute because of my previous dabbling into the intertwined worlds of hard drugs and electronic dance music. There were many nights I was kept sleepless by the embrace of ecstasy or LSD. I would lie awake in bed with gargantuan pupils, teeth working furiously to reduce my lip to a bloody mash, firing away at my keyboard as I discussed politics and current events with those scattered across the globe yet united in a theoretical forum by social media. On those nights I never slept. A lot of people choose to allow themselves to come down from the marvelous high and drift into sleep, but my brain chemistry fought that gradual descent to normalcy. As long as I had any amount of drugs left, even if my brain was dead set on regaining its previous balance, I would consume them and extend the high for as long as possible and the dark shadows of night would always give way to the first twinklings of the rising sun.

I used to sell the stuff, too. Ecstasy, I mean. I really shouldn’t have done that. My “boss” was my friend’s boyfriend, a now collegiate-level Jewish boy at a prestigious university in New York. He would give me between 50 and 100 pills of the purest and most potent quality, imported via shady corners of the internet from the far reaches of the world. I was to sell the good for at least $12 a piece (eventually it became $15) and return all proceeds to him, following which he would reimburse me as he saw fit. It was inefficient. It was tacky. It almost got me in a lot of trouble. I don’t mean to propone stereotypes, but that guy was out to make every penny he possibly could. He would not accept me striking deals with customers, even bulk sales. Most people find $10 to be the highest price range they will negotiate into, so it was sticky to begin with. To make things worse, I am susceptible to bribery and wheedling and have no talent in the field of sales whatsoever. I had to plant my foot sometimes. Sometimes I didn’t and ended up paying the guy out of my own pocket. The real problem was me, though. I mean, I have always struggled with self-control and instantaneous gratification. Imagine having as many as 100 of the purest ecstasy pills you have ever encountered in your life slumbering in a drawer 10 feet from where you sleep and you didn’t pay a dime for them. I’m sure it’s not so hard to guess what happened. I ended up taking some. By taking some, I mean I took a lot. There were multiple nights where I would stay up through the night, neatly compacting each tightly-stamped press into a small and straight line of pink or blue power placed next to the keyboard of my computer every hour or so. I think the fact that I snorted the pills rather than crushing them ties back to the fact I like to feel good NOW. I don’t like waiting for things. Popping takes an hour to hit, snorting (railing) just a few minutes. The intensity when it does is incredible. It was highly efficient, and I actually liked the physical act of the thing. It was clean, it was smooth, and it burned like the fire of the gods. I began a crusade of nasal abuse that lasted well over a year. This was in my heyday. I would roll up the nearest scrap of paper into a cylindrical tube, shove it deep into my nasal cavity, and draw the finely ground power up, much like a science-fiction style alien abduction you see in the old movies. Kind of like Billy Pilgrim was abducted. It was drawn from the ground and stuck somewhere. It took root in my brain. It got stuck there for a lifetime. It skips around sometimes. Sometimes it makes me see the past, but not so much the future. I try my best not to go back. I want to live in the now. I’m not who I was back then. Actually, I am. Things have just changed. I loved the burn. The feeling before it hit me, the scummy chemical residue trickling hotly down into my throat. The giddy anticipation. Then that fluttering feeling, the rising excitement as the first teasings began to come on. Then it would hit. It would hit hard. Almost like a sledgehammer clocking me square in the head. My eyes would start to physically expand outward from their centers. My head lolled to the side and my jaw went slack. My eyes rolled up in my head, sometimes, depending on how much and how many I had taken up to that point. I never really kept track, but I know that it was always a saddeningly high number. I don’t love it any more. The choices I made took a lot away from me. They didn’t give me much, either. I can’t say right now that what I’ve done has give me anything positive today. They gave me experience, but it’s left me bitter at best. I guess that’s pretty sad. I threw a lot away, then. At least I’ve grown up in an accelerated timeframe, though. When most kids start experimenting in college, I’ll be past that point. For that I am thankful. I know firsthand the evils of drugs. I have met the devil inside of me. I f*****g murdered him. He killed me a thousand times. I am a shell of what I once had the potential to be, but he is dead now. I starved him to death. If he is still alive deep within the recesses of me, he hides himself well.
He must feed on rats and stomach acids. I don’t care. He will rot down there for eternity. I got by. I always get by.

That only covers one of the three reasons I find myself in want of rest on such a regular basis. The second two are as commonplace and intertwined as they come. I’m a teenager in 21st century America. I have a computer. I have a smartphone. I have internet access and a saddeningly unchanging abundance of spare time. What more is there to say?

Author's Note

I would love feedback on this in general. Writing style, consistency, how linearly (or not) it moves, whether it's even a valid idea.