Karl Klockars

"This...uh...smells funny. Yeah."

Sometimes, strange thoughts from the Universe leave the Ether and enter my head, uninvited.  I have no control over them, and they just Happen.  I was driving to dinner with the Girl last night, and I don’t have any idea what prompted this particular thought, but this particular thought was all about drugs.

Now, I don’t do no drugs.  Up with hope, down with dope.  Which is not to say that I didn’t manage to surround myself with a number of pot-smoking speed-metal fans who indulged in whatever pills and veterinary painkillers they could steal.  So I know my way through drugs and such.  I speak “user.”  I can talk my way through “stashes” and “kits” and “rigs.”  I’m conversant with the lingo of the kids these days.

Vocabulary aside, this thought from the Universe struck my brain, and I can’t get it out.  And that thought is:  What happened to huffing?

An image is in my head – homeless kids sitting in a drainage tunnel somewhere in East Los Angeles.  It’s a Dateline or a 20/20 from around the late 80′s or early 90′s.  And these kids have a thin line of paint above their upper lip.  They’ve been sniffing paint.  They put a tiny can of paint in a brown paper bag, and then just inhale the pure fumes.  Apparently it rots your brain the way that your parents told you that comic books and horror movies would, but for reals.  You don’t see those stories any more, do you?

I remember stories from my weed-hype friends about sucking back fumes from counter cleaners and furniture polish.  I remember people even doing shit like baking banana peels and other ridiculous urban legend “I’ll smoke anything” activities.  They probably even ate a bunch of nutmeg, just to see what it’d do.

Now, I don’t do no drugs.  But I wonder if anyone does that any more.  Does anyone still suck the nitrous off the tops of whipped cream canisters?  Does that occur to any ne’er-do-well high school burnout these days?  Or have they all moved on to mom & dad’s bottles of Prescription Everything?  I think the changes of time and culture have done more than made people forget the bad things about 80′s hair-metal and keytars.  Kids in the 80′s knew how to get high with just the stuff from the garden chemical aisle in the Handy Andy.*

And I wonder – do fads exist in the underground drug culture?  Are addictions as marketable as chewing gum and fast food?  Consider mescaline.  Nobody does mescaline.  Nobody enjoys peyote any more – I’ve had to explain to more than a couple people what a “peyote button” in the center of the HST Gonzo logo was.  They had no idea.  And I know that at least a few of ‘em listen to rock and roll.  So there’s really no excuse.

Consider ecstacy.  Does anyone still “roll on E?”  Somewhere around 1998 or 1999, ecstacy was the be-all end-all of awesome drugs.  People are sitting in jail for life right now because they got caught with bottles of pills.  Do you think they’re thinking, “If only I had sold weed.  I’d have been out months ago.”

Could it be that some overworried legislator making the here-today-mostly-gone-tomorrow pills on the same level as things like heroin and coke is responsible for millions of dollars spent on this guy hanging out in prison?  For getting people to dance endlessly and hug a lot of people?  (Corollary: Do people still go to raves?  When I was in high school, I was all excited to go to college and hang out in some warehouse in an industrial part of town and listen to repetitive music and eat drugs – I mean, watch people eat drugs.  And then when I got there it was over.  Bummer.)

Now, I don’t do no drugs.  And certainly never touched no ecstacy.  But it sure did make everyone around me act funny.  Chewing on straws and rocking back and forth.  I’m sure it was great at the time.  But do you think all the people that poked holes in their brain with that stuff then – have they moved on to eating Oxycontins today?  Do people like that follow around the drug fads like girls get hooked on Hello Kitty and Tinkerbell?

It must be, because I don’t see anyone worrying about restricting paint or hair spray or cans of Glade.  Remember Glade, all you grown-up burnouts?  Remember afternoons of stealing cigarettes from your parents packs of Marlboro 100s and then retreating to your filthy room to spray Woolite into a rag and then breathe through it for a half-minute at a time?  Thems were days, weren’t they?

I wonder what’s coming next.  What kind of ridiculous addiction we’ll all be worried about our teenagers getting hooked on next.  I think they’re trying to make salvia a big deal, but nobody seems to care about it.  Maybe angel dust will come back into style.  Maybe opium will make a comeback.  Maybe it’ll be some sort of Mountain Dew X-Treme Injectable Sugar Rush.  Nobody seems to be messing around with the old standbys, alcohol and cocaine – but maybe they’re coming back in a big way.  Ah, the classics – there’s a reason they always work.

*Do they still have Handy Andy around anywhere?  For those of you playing at home Handy Andy was the equivalent of a Lowes or Home Depot, but with a friendly mascot with a big cartoon mustache.  Wikipedia says it’s “defunct.”  Ah, memories of retail stores.