Countdown to What I Do Not Know

A few days days ago I set my all time record for staying awake--41 hours...in my psychology class on sleep that I took years ago I had learned that after three days (or 72 hours) the subconcious is actually forced into conciousness as REM sleep is the only way to relieve thoughts or images caught in the subconcious YET after three days I was told that hallucinations can occur and dreams can come to life as it were.


The only way I was able to stay awake so long was the use of stimulants which have both highs and lows. Once I was down, I had to increase the use of stimulants or route of administration in order to get back up and this was damn near impossible to maintain as I would have had to mainline amphetamines to stay awake and that was a whole other beast to which I asked myself WHY. I was alone and without needles albeit skin popping was a choice but goddamn there is nothing I fear more than getting so high that I never want to come down--it's just not possible in this city(Sacramento). The city is a dangerous place to experience euphoria at any great length or level. Atleast that has been my experience on my own. Maybe it could be done in a group but why? The odds are still very much stacked against both you and your gang of merry pranksters. The city has no sympathy or mercy for those that don't live by it's law and it's law is economics.

It's one thing to be a clean cut business man fueled by intraveneous amphetamine use and quite another to be someone out on the town looking to experience a different mindstate(as well as being unemployed or a freelance journalist/writer). The business man so long as he knows his business well can do just about anything in regards to pharmaceutical or drug use just so long as he is in the left side of the column with a few zeroes to fall back on--this is all cliche and...the city is just a bad scene all together. Sacramento has never seemed to welcome me with open arms nor have I felt that I belong...I don't know if anyone here does except for the few that are so beyond there means that they are not only living in Sacramento but another reality all together different from the huddled masses.

The rich and the poor and the middle class--there is an ever widening gap between the rich and the rest of us and the middle class is finding it harder and harder to climb that ladder and the poor have been left for dead. There is a war going on here at the home front. One much more savage than the one in Irag. One that has blinded people to their existence not only as human beings but as part of a human race. The public has become the enemy and it's people are more scared of each other than they are of a nuclear attack. These are bad times indeed and they are on an oil slicked high percent downgrade towards what I do not know only that it will be the first of its kind. I don't want to say civil war or class war or war. What is going on is much more covert? An invisible or stealth mind washing of the masses...maybe too extreme, but look around--how many people look like you? Say "hi" to somebody you don't know on the street and that will be your answer.
I live in Sacramento so my point-of-view is very limited--a microcosm of a microcosm. How is it that I live in a city but remain in solitude? I see people, I talk to people, I have dinner with them but my home is in isolation among hundreds of other units like mine with neighbors that say hello as if they are rushing to get to the toilet for fear of having their bowels explode before my very eyes AND what if this were to occur? Would they be any less of a human for being sick--no, they would be more human.
There is no thesis or main thread or point to all of this nor will there ever be but while trying to stay awake as long as I could I learned that a high school kid stayed awake for eleven days for a science fair project without the use of caffeine or any other stimulant. His name was Randy Gardner. The whole time I was up I couldn't help but think to myself how funny it was that a seventeen year old boy could stay up eleven days and for what else but a science fair. Randy Gardner is truly my Horatio Alger.