/lit/ - Literature

Drugs are only good when you're young and stupid. When you become older, you realize how stupid they are and grow out of them. Drugs are for degenerates.

>>4537395
> Drugs are for degenerates.

Keep the dark light of reaction burning, my redpilled neo-feudal acolyte xD

Me, I smoked weed for 10 years every day, and I wonder whether there's enough of me left to resume my career of reading and writing. I think what weed did primarily, other than leading me into an easy indolent lifestyle, was to sap my concentration enough to make me read only the things I was predisposed to read, that is, not to challenge myself. I read little, but I did not read entirely badly.

>>4537499

>smugly retorts against anon's assertion that drugs are for degenerates

>then continues IN THE SAME POST to say that drugs have degenerated your faculties to the point where you no longer wish to challenge yourself

As an occasional weed smoker I must say that you are an insanely bad spokesman for it.

I was a very "clean" kid who was intellectually fascinated with drugs and substances in general. I was the "edgy" kid saying after health class in my upper middle class left-of-center white community school "while I don't choose to use drugs because I don't need artificial help to make my life interesting, we all know that weed, LSD, etc. aren't really bad for you."
In college I didn't go out of my way to be around drugs or substances, but once I had established a group of friends, I was always open about the fact that I was curious and "up for anything."

Since then I have had the opportunity to try various substances. I enjoyed smoking cigarettes when I tried it, but there is so much social stigma against them that I have never used them regularly. With some of my friends I used an exotic middle eastern tobacco popular in the UAE, apparently, which allegedly contains "five times as much nicotine as a cigarette" in each hit, and which brings on a short but intense body high and headrush. We liked it collectively and I still use it maybe about once a month.
Of course I smoke marijuana with some frequency. I don't feel like I get high every time, and when I experienced that several times in a row before truly "getting high" I almost came to conclude that weed wasn't as good as pop culture likes to pretend, or whatever. But then I tried a different strain and found the experience much more satisfying. One time a friend from out of town visited and we snorted some lines of white powder off of the side of my bathtub using a little metal tube he carried for this purpose. I don't know what it was but I was told it wasn't cocaine. I was game but afterwards and even for the next couple days I felt scared that I had made a mistake and was going to regret it somehow.

So I guess I'm still just an overprotected white boy. Nevertheless, I certainly feel less contempt for regular drug users than say, Quentin. I wouldn't negatively judge an artist if I knew that they used drugs, especially if they were drugs I have used or would be comfortable using--in fact, that might even make me more sympathetic to them.

I'm still fascinated by the convenience of using substances in general to alter the way we feel. I get a kick out of taking sleeping pills when I can't sleep, or TUMS when I have heartburn, or drinking coffee when I want to feel caffeinated, to say nothing of alcohol.

>>4537530


>I get a kick out of taking sleeping pills when I can't sleep, or TUMS when I have heartburn, or drinking coffee when I want to feel caffeinated

m8 you are fukin crazy for real this is next level

I've done a lot of drugs and have no clue what it did to the way I view/create art. For awhile after I got clean I'd space out doing normal everyday stuff though, like pouring orange juice into my bowl of cereal or pissing on the toilet seat.
Maybe hallucinogens made me less willing to scoff at abstract art, I guess, if it's clear somebody put effort into it then why not appreciate it as design or just move on.

I used to deal/use bud and acid and molly and research chemicals in college.

Fun stuff. Created a lot of "art" during that period. My dick was the paintbrush, dem faded raver chicks' pussies were the canvas. What can I say? I am a lover of beauty.

Now I work a shitty desk job and my only drug use is binge drinking and chainsmoking cigs on weekends.

It's quite sad. I am quite the autist so being high as fuck used to help me overcome my social inhibitions and have wonderful experiences with friends.

Nowadays, I am suicidally depressed and only have conversations on 4chan. Ironically, I used to only use 4chan back in high school. I had imagined myself to have conquered that part of myself. But I suppose I have regressed back to my old angsty self.

um im only 32% conscious if i dont drink 3 coffees so

I've taken just about everything, habitually used psychedelics for about four years and smoke pot regularly. I don't find it made me very creative, but I'm more of a consumer than a producer anyway. It drastically changed my taste in music and to a lesser degree, films. The LSD has effected me behaviorally an emotionally.

>>4537535
I just think it's really cool how we have these "remedies" that actually DO something. It seems like such an amazingly modern concept to me. We're not just hoping or praying that drinking this potion will make us feel better, we can actually predict with some accuracy what it is going to do! Some "recreational" drugs and some functioning remedies have been around for a long time, and in many cases their use was revered as a religious or quasi-religious experience! I can understand why.

I'm not trying to get some kind of "cred" here, I just think it's an intellectually cool thing to realize--that we can just change our mental or physical states at will by ingesting a substance.

>>4537548
have u taken ur dads semen

>>4537266
i took a bunch of benadryl nd now i am schizophrenic

>>4537550
>It seems like such an amazingly modern concept to me.
It observably isn't, and if you think it is modern in that we understand the long-term effects, we largely don't.

>>4537550
>I just think it's an intellectually cool thing to realize--that we can just change our mental or physical states at will by ingesting a substance.

I understand what you're saying, but it's a scary concept to me, mainly mentally, not so much physically.

>>4537566
Well I mean, c.f. Brave New World. Of course it's scary. That's part of what makes it so interesting.

Was pretty much completely sober until I was 17. Tried weed once then didn't touch it again until a year later. Smoked like 2-3 times a week freshman and sophomore year of uni. Haven't touched it in two years now. Got very, very into drugs of all kinds freshman year and sophomore year. RC stims and dissociatives and psychedelics, the classic psychedelics, had like 1.5 grams of DMT at one point that I did semi-regularly for about three months. Loved opiates and benzos.

Throughout this heavy drug period, my alcohol use was pretty moderate. Would only get truly drunk like twice a month. Once I stopped using the "hard" drugs (stopped liking psychs, stims were too hard to get a hold of regularly, and opiates are expensive), I got into drinking pretty heavily. Was drunk about 2-4 nights out of the week for a good 8 months. Still drink now, but nowhere near as much.

I pretty much only stick to alcohol, snus, and the very rare opiate/benzo. Despite all my drug use, all the experiences never did much for my appreciation of art (well, music is a different story actually) or spurred me to be more creatively productive.

Alcohol has actually been the most instrumental in me actually writing more and appreciating more art. Alcohol just makes me a complete creature of extremes in that I can be rapt with beauty and intellectual charisma but also, pretty much drowning in an existential crisis, bawling my eyes out and wondering what the point of living in such a cruel world is. I guess both of those extremes are pretty instrumental in me seeing art and my creation of art as bearing the extremes of my soul though.

>>4537569
>I got into drinking pretty heavily. Was drunk about 2-4 nights out of the week
I just realized that I am an alcoholic.

>>4537576
What do you feel? Is it beautiful?

>>4537579
I guess. I've accepted that I enjoy being sad. It carries beauty with it, and appreciation for happy things.

I'm pretty sad most of the time.

>>4537583

>I've accepted that I enjoy being sad.

I'd bet cash that you haven't even taken the time to seriously focus on diet and exercise.

>>4537266
Drugs, man.

Honestly, the most that drugs really did to "change the way [I] view/create art" is to make me write about drugs more frequently than I would otherwise wish. Had a bunch of friends go down the rabbit hole in all of the wrong ways (arrests, addiction, jail time, etc.), and the stories of their failures are what have come out in my writing more than any "insight" gained from consuming the substances themselves.

I regret this fact. This is because the best work that I have produced has come not from
>muh amazing revelations about life and the universe that I had on LSD, man
but from diligent, arduous research and meticulous crafting of narrative based upon that research. Wallace Stegner really captured my view on things in his "A Letter to Wendell Berry"
>"One doesn't have to be crazy, or alcoholic, or suicidal, or manic, to be a legitimate spokesman to the world, and there is more to literature, as there clearly is to life, than aberration and sadomasochism."
I wouldn't agree with the pejorative word choice of "aberration" and "sadomasochism" because I think it just makes Stegner sound like a crotchety prude, but he's absolutely right. You'll notice drug stories are only interesting if the person goes to rehab and starts living again.

Much of what's important in our lives, in the governance of our society, in our economy, etc. happens while we are sober. You're not going to get corrupt politicians voted out of office, or do rigorous research to stop a proposed development that will be an ecological disaster, if you're high. You just won't. You'll be navel-gazing in a room with other people doing the same substance as you.

The last time that I smoked weed and tried to write, I was overwhelmed. The books that I had read over the last couple of years felt like they were spilling off of my shelves and inundating me. I couldn't make sense of or provide structure to the thoughts, or look up the allusions that I wanted to make. As I wrote, I recorded vital signs like pulse, body temperature, estimated reaction time at regular intervals of 30 minutes. All abysmal compared to sober. I wrote that typing felt like playing a mirror image of a piano, and I was hindered, and slow.

When I was younger, I used to think that I was having such deep insights when I got high. Laughable. Even the most intense shit I've done, ayahuasca, ketamine, peyote, LSD, though a wonderful experience, didn't provide me much. About all that every person who has done LSD has to offer is "everything is one, man." Wow, you had an ego death. Such philosophy. Much insight. Wow.

I'm over it. I'll still do drugs recreationally from time to time, but don't delude yourself, they offer little to your art. If you think you're having deep insights, you're really not. Much more eloquent and erudite individuals before you have either had those experiences and recorded them with care, or come to your insights and deeper...

>>4537266

Smoke weed occasionally, drink even less often, and tried shrooms recently.

Shrooms were the best by far and because of them I now understand how people can become addicted to drugs because holy shit that was an awesome experience. Not to claim it was actually spiritual, but it sure felt like a spirit journey.

Doesn't really change the way I write or approach art, as far as I can tell. I've never tried to do anything while drunk and weed actually makes me less creative.

captcha: 420 byaiou

wow

>>4537668
...through protracted reflection, and not just substance abuse.

I could be wrong. I've read Burroughs, and Ginsberg, and Leaves of Grass (ostensibly Whitman wrote this while chewing calamus root), and seen what drugs can offer. Maybe I just don't have the capacity, even though I do always record my thoughts in some fashion or another while high. But I think that we leave a lot of necessary art uncreated, and a lot of avenues of personal satisfaction unexplored, if we don't try to work sober. I'm just so over all of the darlings of postmodernism. We need to build anew.

/rant