Am I Happy?

Don't ask questions you already know the answer to.

I can't even begin to get into what I intended to write when I started. That sort of writing is best left for the day time. Am I scared? Hell yeah. Alone with my feelings in the dark-- there are few things, I've come to believe, that could be more terrifying.

So let's talk about last weekend instead. I had some pot, some really high grade pot. I haven't had much-- maybe a dozen or so times in my life, all in the past two years or so. I didn't know that it was possible to react like I did, but apparently it is. For the right person, at the right time (read, under heavy stress and with buckets of trapped emotions) pot can give you as bad a trip as any psychedelic. I spent about two hours completely divorced from reality. I thought I was in Hell. Imagine that? Imagine sitting on your friend's couch and believing, fully believing, that you're going to be spending the rest of eternity there terrified out of your mind. You'll never see anything but you're friend's living room again. No sunlight, no fresh cut grass, no laughter, fresh air, no freedom, no changes. You will never see any people other than the ones who are in the room with you. They may not even be people. You can't even kill yourself to stop it. You're already dead.

So there I am, freaking out on the couch, terrified out of my mind. I'm still sane in there somewhere, and that sane voice is wondering what sin I've committed. There is a moment of panic that the Jesus freaks were right, that any number of little things I did-- sex out of wedlock, using condoms, not being catholic-- could have landed me in Hell. This sounds a little funny here, now, with my sanity back, but just try to imagine that, can you? To think that actions so mundane have landed you in a place where you will be in terror and misery forever; to realize that most of the souls you know will suffer the same; to discover that you've finally found the answers to the ultimate questions of the universe and those answers are inherently unfair. It's real, you may start thinking, Hell is really real and you're there forever. Whatever sense you've ever had of guidance, of a higher power in the universe, whatever connection with another human being you've ever felt, it's all gone now. Forever. Love is no more. Not for you. Not ever.

It's right around now that I started screaming.