Speed was the best drug I ever did. Let me tell you about the time I did it.
It had been a typically exhausting day at work. I felt horrible, like I wanted to die. I'd often feel like this. At maybe 9 pm, out the front of my house, my dealer showed up. He gave me my half a gram. It looked like nothing but it was actually a lot, it turned out, because it was base, which is almost pure. He advised me to buy gum and asked if I had an iPod. I told him I had an mp3 player but not an iPod. I kind of missed the point in retrospect. I never bought gum.
I went back inside and took the tiniest lick of it. I felt no discernible effect. I had planned on sleeping so I decided not to try having more. I smoked the weed and watched The Nines on TV. I was so high that everything looked like neon.
I turned off the TV and went to my bedroom around two am. I couldn't sleep, but didn't mind. I put music on and listened to it for hours. The sun rose. I had work. I took another lick of speed. A big one. This one I felt. It was like everything went from a shitty worn-out video tape to crystal clear DVD. I put on Feeding the Birds and Hoping for Something in Return by Something for Kate, which is not a danceable song at all, and jumped up and down to it like I was on ecstasy.
At work the "buzz" wore off but I realized that I was thinking like a true genius. I was very focused and I was thinking about everything very intensely in a wonderful whirlwind while working very hard. I wasn't talking to anyone but in my head I was Superman. A girl asked me if I was feeling bad. Feeling bad? I figured the intensity of my thoughts were manifesting themselves externally as sadness. For reasons I can't remember, I said I was feeling sad. She asked if I wanted to talk about it after work and I said no because she was kind of gross and pimply and also I would have had to wait a couple of hours for her to finish because I finished earlier than her, but in retrospect I should have waited it out and fucked her anyway.
Work ended. I went home. I took another lick. I was feeling very buzzed from the sleep deprivation now and all the speed was accumulating in my system and all of my thoughts were grandiose and complex and detailed yet manageable.
I became in the mood for creativity. I took out my notebook and started to write. Scenes unfolded. There was no incendiary idea. I just wanted to write - so I did. It was like I'd turned on the idea tap on and all the ideas just came flowing out - clean, pure, perfect. The story I was writing, I discovered, was about a crystal meth addict - her thoughts, her shitty job, her pill popping boyfriend and her addiction. I stopped intermittently for water and coffee and maybe ice cream but for about eighteen hours it was almost all I did. I felt weird when it was done. I wanted to keep going, I had the energy, but the story had reached its natural conclusion and it would have been counterintuitive to continue.
This was the inception of my current writing method. I found my voice as a writer by reverse engineering the techniques I summoned then.
I took another lick of speed and saw part of one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies on TV. I was unbearable.
I put music on. Up on the Ladder by Radiohead caught my attention. I picked up my guitar and figured out the riff. I transcribed the lyrics, then I figured out how to sing it. I didn't know how to sing. I had done a few songs with a vocal, Too Late for instance, but it was all smothered in reverb and delay because it would have been unlistenable otherwise. All it took to figure out how to sing was I recorded myself singing then I listened back to it then I recorded myself singing then I listened back to it over and over for about twelve hours. By the end of it I'd taught myself how to sing.
My memory is nearly empty beyond this. I remember working another shift and being very tired even though prior I eaten all the speed I had left, the biggest lick yet. But that's all. There's nothing else. There's only the vaguest idea there of what happened. The sleep deprivation, I suppose, got the better of me in the end.
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