it’s four in the morning and I am so VERY awake and I have to work in the morning but fuck it
my life rapidly and frequently shifts from “juvenile delinquent” where my dilated bloodshot eyes are ignoring the sunrise and if I sleep at all it’ll be in my car parked outside a 24-hour McDonalds with my makeup smeared all over my face and my mouth as dry as the desert but I’ll probably just stuff some more powder up my nose and face the new day exactly the same as the previous one in a blur of blue and white pills and a slosh of burning liquid as I lay in a graveyard watching tobacco crumble to ashes in the overturned dirt from the slow burn of a cigarette that I don’t even like but a dead man offered me his cancer like a gift I couldn’t refuse so I light another one while I search a stranger’s couch decorated with holes burnt into it and funny-smelling stains for change to turn into gasoline so maybe I can disappear for a day or a week or a month or who cares as long as I don’t get arrested for trespassing or worse but I just want to climb to the rooftops of buildings and put little pieces of paper under my tongue and watch the pretty sparkling stars above and the pretty sparkling headlights below and not care if I fall or fly
to “family-friendly domestic” where I stay at home in the country in my parents’ big house surrounded by meadows and wheat fields and sleep for the recommended 8 hours per night and refuse to clean my room when my mother tells me to but I will clean my laundry that I’ll need for work the next morning and maybe if I’m feeling sassy enough I’ll iron them as well while I’m waiting for the eggs and waffles to be done that I’m making for my brother and I for breakfast and I’ll try to make the waffles into Mickey Mouse shapes and he’ll try to hide the fact that he’s pleased at my efforts even if they end up being mostly square and I’ll eat 2000 calories a day and play with my puppies in the sunshine in our backyard with a porch and a pool and I’ll drink tea and honey from a cute little teapot I bought at a vintage shop for a really great deal and paint acrylic flowers on old furniture that’s been tucked away gathering dust in the attic and when the sunlight catches the rose-petals so they curl out of the wood and wrap around my fingers I’ll wash my paintbrushes and read a novel or half-heartedly begin my homework until I feel tired when the setting sun melts the bright blue sky into lazy purple and orange streaks and my bloodstream has nothing in it but what God himself put there
either way, I find myself incredibly boring
a lot of the time the things I write about at four in the morning contain just as much truth as fiction
Requiem for a Dream is not about heroin or about drugs. The Sara Goldfarb story completely deconstructed the movie as a drug movie. The Harry-Tyrone-Marion story is a very traditional heroin story. But putting it side by side with the Sara story, we suddenly say, “Oh, my God, what is a drug?”
What Selby is saying is that anything can be a drug — it doesn’t have to be smack. It could be TV, it can be coffee, it can be chocolate, it can be food, it can be hope, it could be love, it could be sex. The idea that the same inner monologue goes through a person’s head when they’re trying quit drugs as with cigarettes, as when they’re trying to not eat food so they can lose 20 pounds, was really fascinating to me. Addiction. That’s the human struggle. All of us have our addictions, whether it’s procrastination or workaholism or TV — we’re constantly dealing with that struggle.
That’s why it’s not really a drug movie, because anything can fill that hole. It could be tobacco, food, drugs, and ultimately what it really is is hope.
