Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Inconsolable Grief

You are standing at a party in a corner, looking at your conversation options and feeling bored already. Suddenly somebody you don't know and don't trust approaches you and offers you a pill for $30. He calls it 'IG' or inconsolable grief.

You take the pill, and then once it kicks in you will experience a perfect simulation of inconsolable grief for 6 hours. Then you sober up and you are assuredly fine. It just triggers the exact same nuerobiological reaction as losing something precious to you does. Without the actual loss.

Now, I would have my misgivings about taking that pill. Namely the $30, and better things I can spend it on. Also because I don't know this guy and don't trust him at all. And even my friends that I do trust I don't trust enough to get their drug supplies from somebody who should be trusted. I would also feel misgivings about arbitrarily building some association with something that happens to be around and inconsolable grief. I don't think XTC or MDMA works that way anyways, and if you hadn't clicked I'm more or less describing the exact opposite of MDMA.

The experience has more appeal to me. And I suspect, and know of at least one other, there are persons who like me are more interested in exploring the depths rather than the heights.

Such a drug has medical predecessors too. Namely the practice of mithridatism, which goes way back to it's namesake where you ingested non-lethal doses of poison to build up over time an immunity to poison. Much like fucking honey badgers can't be fucked with once they are grown, even with snakes and hornets and shit, they will just pass out for a bit and then get back to eating those snakes and hornets.

I don't have many good reasons not to try MDMA, I kind of just didn't feel like it in the end. Even if it offered a potential spiritual awakening. The only real reason I'd have now is that I don't like the idea of getting to unwrap all my Christmas presents without it being Christmas day. I don't in other words want to feel what it's like to have achieved something really great, maybe even impossibly great, without having to actually achieve those impossibly great things.

If I had PTSD I might contemplate experimenting with it. But I don't.

I'd have no objection though to experiencing something really terrible, without anything terrible having happened. I would look forward to the Sunday morning, not the Saturday night when I'm crying over a sandwich platter at the party. It would be to wake up the next day and say 'that was horrible, and it was alright.'

And drugs aside, I think we do have in pretty much any given moment a choice between IG and XTC. Not to those extremes of emotion, But generally it's always suffering now, to make the rest of the future easier, or pleasure now, suffering later.

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