Tranquilizers, Talk & Torture
One: K-Fed
A suburb of
With her newly-issued driver’s license, the one where her face looks like a potato and hair dyed like a pirated DVD seller to celebrate her liberation from the style-fascism of Malaysian government schools, she combs the small mound of white powder before her into three lines that were probably too thick for her own good. She licks her driver’s license clean. With a tiny straw, she snorts the lines up her nose in swift, sweeping motions before tilting her head back to make sure that every bit of powder goes into her system. She feels the kind of sting one usually feels when something goes through one’s nose the wrong way. Her eyes water a little. She feels the substance drip down her throat. It tasted bitter and she figured it was irony at work. This is sweet, if you know what I mean.
She waits for the Ketamine to take effect. She waits for that rush of nothingness; for that dull buzz to take over her perception of reality, to dampen, mute and drown every irritating, loud, glaring sensation that is an inevitable byproduct of being alive, no, that is a condition for being alive. But she’ll show them. She’ll show them all she can beat the system. It doesn’t happen, not yet.
Repeat twice. Then two more lines. Just a little bit more. Now she’s done.
“Fuck woman, you’re like a pro!” her friend exclaims.
No, not pro but a natural. Absolute fucking natural. This is what she really is. Useless? Why so? Because she has nothing on paper that would qualify as an achievement? Maybe. She has done nothing, nothing at all, yet another fortunate youth unfortunately wasted to fruitless ambition. But she is a consumer. Consumption is everything; all else is its waste emission. This is what she is. She is high, fucking high, high above the dull grind of actual creation. Her head must have crashed to the floor. Not that she would have felt it then. Oh, she felt like a Care Bear laying itself down on a fluffy cloud, rainbow on its chest. Care Bears……… SHARE!
She hands the straw over to her friend, along with the Ketamine. “Knock yourself out,” she said. And meant it literally. Snort, snort, and her friend’s head join hers on the floor.
To quote
Time passed, how much, she can’t say. Was she breaking the unnaturally strict curfew her parents had set for her? Who cares? She didn’t. Not at that moment, not a care in the world. She’s numb as you can expect a human being on horse tranqulizers would be. The numbness is isolating, she feels alone but is not lonely. It’s a selfish feeling. Her face curls up into a smile and it stays that way for a while. She doesn’t know what she’s smiling about. In fact, she doesn’t even know that she’s smiling. She can’t feel her face and is therefore unable to form a more suitable expression. How can you control something you can’t feel? And how can you be blamed for something you can’t control? In any case what would be a suitable expression for such an occasion? It’s all good, all good. Aaah, tranquilo. Layan siiot. Laaa---yaaan.
She hears a distant cry or what sounded like a distant cry. The voice seemed familiar, as if she was just having a conversation with it a moment ago. Indeed, the voice sounded a lot like her friend’s. Her friend. Where is her friend? Where did her friend go? She turns her head or more accurately, her head flops to the other side. Nope, no friend. There was that cry again. Some banging. More like a beat, deep pulsing beat of some ancient ceremonial dance. It came from the bathroom door behind her. Her friend seemed to have accidentally locked herself in while taking a piss. Our girl, if she was sober, she would be laughing. And then she would be helping. But no, she’s high, fucking high, high above the hilarities of minor, day-to-day mishaps, high on a “dissociative anaesthetic” – what else could she do but dissociate? Her friend’s trapped in the bathroom but well, hey, it’s hard to give a fuck. Whose friend was it again? Hers? Who is ‘her’?
Then, like a knight in faded t-shirt, her friend’s boyfriend come running out of nowhere with a flying kick aimed towards the bathroom door. It swings open. And you thought these things only work out for Jean Claude Van Damme. Cue chorus of angels and beams of light. All the while, our girl remained on the floor, staring at the ceiling. As it turned out, the friend decides that she likes it in the bathtub and wants to stay there for some time. Mr. Boyfriend was sent off to get food. After all, if a good deed is its own reward, then sure his good deed towards them called for another good deed towards them.
The food arrived and Mr. Boyfriend was made to disappear. Our girl still lay in a state of near-paralysis on the floor as her friend, fresh out of the dry bath, stuff bits of fried chicken into her mouth. She could choke. She could very well choke and the beautiful thing was that it didn’t seem like a problem. She says or slurs to her friend, “You could remove my kidney right here, right now and I wouldn’t give a shit.
The friend broke out in laughter. “Who would want your rotten, druggie’s organs, wei?”
“Eh, my kidney probably thinks more than your brains, okay?” she replied. “And I’m not a druggie.” No, perhaps not an addict. But indeed, a druggie. You could tell by the way her kidney did the thinking for her. “Take my kidney, take my fucking kidney! I don’t care, man.”
Then her phone rings. Her previously limp, immobile body shoots straight up at the sight of “Mama” flashing on her caller ID, like she was Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction and had just been stabbed with adrenaline through the heart. She answers the phone in near-perfect speech, “Hello, ma. Oh nothing, I was just in college finishing up some work. What? Ok, Ok, Driving home soon. How soon? When I’m done with work. What? Why are you yelling at me? Fine, fine, I’ll go home now…”
And just like that every irritating, loud, glaring sensation that is a condition for being alive returns to our girl. How poetic (if not completely cheesy) that it should be brought upon by the woman who gave her life.
“You’re going home?” the friend asks “You sure you’re okay enough to drive home and face your mom?”
Our girl nods and quotes what Dorothy from Wizard of Oz really said when she found herself back in
And just like that, she started to care again.
Crap.
** Epilogue (of sorts): After an overdose on Ecstasy pills which landed “The Friend” in the ICU unit with tubes coming in and out of every other orifice in her body for five days, “The Friend” has apparently sworn off recreational drug use. And though nothing of that sort has ever happened to “She”, she is retired from the world of pills, powders, crystals and inhalants nonetheless. “She” reckoned she simply grew out of it. But one could say that something that starts with the letter ‘G’ and rhymes with ‘Uilt’ helped the process along. “She” remains the proud owner of two kidneys.
Two: Voice of a Generation
If art imitates life, then the media imitates (and to a certain extent, shapes) youth. It would only make sense then that the first step towards acquainting oneself with a generation’s general mindset is to examine its popular media products – TV show for instance. After all, nothing becomes famous without a decent amount of support and interest from the public. And no one really has interest in supporting something that isn’t in part, a reflection of themselves and their aspirations.
I was watching a re-run of that Gen-X era MTV animated series, Daria and I realized that MTV programs used to be able to contain some semblance of intelligence and substance. Even Beavis & Butthead, which had the titular characters mostly sitting around doing nothing, could still be described as a rather cleverly subversive vehicle for social criticism. Of course, I was born at the tail end of 1985 which means I can’t even begin to pretend to be a Gen X-er. It suits me fine. They were much too stylishly miserable and whiny for my liking anyhow. I can’t help but think the reason why the Gen X-ers complained so endlessly was because they had so much to say and no one to listen to them say it, allowing MTV to capitalize on that and launch itself into the stratosphere as a cultural youth phenomenon.
But now that Gen X-ers have grown up, quit their whining, started taking showers, made money off the internet and become yuppies, it’s time for us Gen Y kids to step up and say whatever we have to say in the wonderful world of mass media. And what is it do we have to say?
I don’t know; let us look at a couple of popular current MTV programs for starters shall we? There’s
What about popular youth-oriented TV shows on other networks? There’s that phenomenon called The O.C. where we again, see a bunch of rich kids (this time, fictional) spending money, partying, stealing each other’s boyfriends and then talking about the bitch who stole their boyfriend. There’s the Simple Life in which we celebrate the stupidity of the very rich Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as they get even richer by exploiting our own stupid fascination with stupidity.
Could it be that this generation, really has nothing to say but much to buy?
The Gen X-ers, they had Cobain among others, as their icon of sorts. Who do the Gen-Y kids have? No, really, god-forbid, could it….must it…is it… Paris Hilton & Co.? Well, why not
You might disagree (or be in complete denial) with the opinion that Paris Hilton could possibly be the voice of a generation but say that no one else comes along before we reach 30, say that she is - What does the voice of generation-Y have to say to the rest of the world? “Stars are blind”? “Lindsay Lohan is a firecrotch”? That’s Hot?
My intent is not to attack
The New York Times recently revealed that Abu Zubaydah, the first Al-Qaeda member captured after the September 11 attacks, was kept in a freezing cell until he went blue and later assailed with Red Hot Chili Peppers music at full volume as part of the CIA’s interrogation methods. I suggest that if the CIA were really serious about cracking these terrorists, they should get their hands on a Hillary Duff record. There’s nothing like being made to listen to a talent-challenged bubblegummer listlessly squeak her way through professionally produced nursery songs. The thought of her laughing all the way to the bank would make anyone crack. But of course, that might really prove to be some serious human rights violation now wouldn’t it? Personally, I feel that the only thing anyone is going to get out of me by playing RHCP is a, “Hey man, I love this song!” and a sing-a-long.
Not that I think the state of pop music today is a more serious issue than torture and a lack of regard for the Geneva Convention. I can’t find the link for the NYT article but you can read about the matter in the Guardian and Slate Magazine and seriously ponder away……
