Vices

I’ll start by saying that I really want to escape this life.  I want to live on a West Virginia mountaintop, in a Joe Bob Briggs TNT Monstervision-era trailer, and just vanish.

But that’s not really practical at this point in my life, so I have to look towards alternate means of escape.

I’ve long had alcohol, but it lacks the particular charm necessary to make escape meaningful.  It’s hard to step out of my life if I have to wake up in the morning and face a long commute with a hangover.  It’s free, at least, thanks to my weekend job.  So long as I don’t have to pay for the booze, I’ll embrace it.  Though my new plan is to stop going out to drink with my spendthrift friends who think bar tabs are cheaper than the in gas spent getting to my apartment where I have more booze than a liquor store piled up in the second bathroom, kitchen, living room, and closets.  I’m currently moving into a phase where booze isn’t fun if it costs money.  In fact, nothing’s fun if it costs money.  So screw social gatherings.  Come sit in the dark with me and drink the finest booze known to man… Or known to the type of people who have ,000 weddings.

Then there’s caffeine.  Coffee.  My hateful friend.  Caffeine is my one serious addiction – I don’t enjoy it, and often resent it.  But, for the last four years, caffeine has become my bedmate because I’m getting about three hours of sleep a night, which will kill me.  (Why so little sleep?  Look, just buy my books.  And if you don’t want to pay full price, then buy them from me through my Amazon storefront.  Here are the links: Secret MF, Secret Fires, Secret DJ available after September 1st.)

With no book coming out in 2009, I might be able to return to normal life.  But I think the real problem is having to work for a living.  I don’t miss the pain, from back in those pre-brain surgery days, but I do miss being bedridden.  Those were great days.  Weeks, sometimes months, spent in cringing agony at home.  No commute, no crazy co-workers, no idiot customers!  Just a wall of pain.

My current goal is to work like crazy for three years, build up the coffers once again, and then freak out and take a year off where I’ll live in teepee and eat locusts or something.

Recently, I added a vice.  I decided to take up smoking.  Because I’m a mockery of a man, I got a corn cob pipe and some English tobacco.  Which, I suppose, is just Virginia tobacco, except it invites me up the hill for a pot of tea and talks my head off about the Roman villa they’re trying to raise outside of Shrewsbury and isn’t it a shame that swing bridge 12 on the Oxford Canal has been out of commission all summer?

Sadly, tobacco isn’t fun.  I don’t feel any different, it tastes bad, and it really is a dirty habit, except without the dark, secret joy of other dirty habits, like jacking off onto public toilet seats.

Since the hard drugs don’t really call to me, I’m left without a constructive and/or mood-altering vice.  So I’m in the market for ideas.  Currently, I’m considering taking up the following vices:

(1) Pissing into my co-worker’s potted plants

(2) Whenever someone takes a day off, eat lots of beans or whatever and fart in their office all day.  Maybe move their desk away from the wall, take a shit on the floor, then move the desk back.

(3) Injecting milk into all the office chairs every Friday evening.

(4) Creative, Captain Haddock-style cursing.  All the time.  Basically, adopt his passive-aggressive, Tourette’s Syndrome-style temperament.