Dopamine Unhinged

1990.

I clear my sinuses and swallow hard, leaning back with a smile as my throat goes numb. My brain is humming with good feelings and peace of mind; all is right with the world. I look around and admire this fine apartment, the bright and vibrant television on with a tape of Platoon in the VCR. This is a masterpiece; maybe the best movie ever, I think to myself. I am subjectivity, my own inner voice. I am intoxicated with concentrated happiness, itself a loan paid for with the torrent of sickness and misery to come. The interest on this loan is compounded by the minute with its dopamine drain, but payment isn't due quite yet. And nothing else matters "in the now."

You see a shaking man-child hunched over a rapidly diminishing mound of lumpy powder that lies on the CD jewel case before him. You observe him chopping up his happiness intently with a credit card, carefully partitioning off three thin lines and hoovering them up his nose with a blood-streaked rolled up dollar bill. You catch him occasionally mopping up the crimson dripping from his nostril with a matting of toilet tissue, the roll spilling out onto the living room carpet and the used wads littering his feet. You smell the stench of the place and feel the filth crawling. His hair waves wild and soaked with sweat. A damaged VHS tape plays on the TV, occasionally skipping over mid-scene, picture and sound coming and going unwatched, unheard. You are objectivity, the unseen fact collector; steely eyed sober, equally unaffected by life's ying and yang of morality and depravity.

I admire the costume I've assembled in the mirror: Charlie Manson, complete with fake beard, hippie wig and jailbird striped jumpsuit. I'm in the bathroom at my friend's Halloween party, a damp finger dabbed ever so slightly into the thumb-size baggie and then up the left nostril, white and anesthetized. I breathe in hard and deep through the left with the right pinched closed. But quietly! Flush the toilet; mask it! Ahh! An instant blast of life-of-the-party and contentment shoot through my toes and up into my eyeballs, closing the loop with a wonderful tickle around the inside of my skullcap. Be sure to check the Manson beard and make sure it's clear of tell-tale residue, I remind myself. Looking good, indeed! Now, back into the party! For once, I can nurse rather than chug my beer. And I can gab! I'm king of the small-talk, master of the back-slap, a gadfly personified. Conversation after conversation, I enthrall them with ease for hours. Oh, need to get some fresh air and blow my nose. Then it's time to reload my beer and my brain!

You see the wild eyes flashing from beneath his Manson get-up, all deep black pupil drowning out the white. The rat-a-tat-tat of his speech is aimed at no one, the telltale repetition of his thoughts in close proximity apparent to them all. He mingles staccato wired for sound and bouncing off the walls like a pinball. You bear witness to his sniffles growing more pronounced by the hour, an equation of addiction multiplied by bathroom breaks and tissue paper. You catch him dash to the back porch holding back his head, tissue pressed against the geyser exploding red above his lips. You hear him mutter, "Time to switch," as he stumbles for the bathroom. The left is shot for the evening, time to reload through the right.

And so it goes. Facts in clear-eyed 20/20 hindsight seem altogether different from their counterparts in the moment, wearing rose-colored glasses with dopamine unhinged.