Get Offa My Reality

     You got a problem with this world? I mean, other than the fact that I'm in your face getting ready for some heavy duty moralizing that only an Objectivist phil major could spew? Go ahead. Create your own little reality. Drop a little acid. Smoke a little weed. Run and hide from the cold facts and stark beauties that this world offers, but don't try to rationalize it something right or better yet, some great ascetic crusade.

     One: Recreational drug use is moral. Right. Morality is a code of behavior designed to help humans conduct their lives productively and fully. Unfortunately, our lives take place in this reality, we need to eat in this reality, and any method or madness that creates another one is not good. Choosing to play little games with your head that will alter your perception of the world and existence is morally wrong. Period. In all circumstances.

     Oh, what's so bad about a little trip now and then? The joy of uncontrolled flashbacks aside, trips open up great vistas of Dorito men chasing you and bruises breathing, or so I've heard. I've never heard of a good trip that accomplished anything, including strange music and numbers poetry. The body and the mind provide these little escapes nightly, naturally. And with a little practice, you can control dreams, or so Queensryche and Stephen LaBerge and Jayne Gackenbach tell me. No chemicals necessary.

     Oh, I forgot, it's an aesthetic ascetic crusade. I love crusades. It is an attempt to get some Dionysian ecstasy out of a pill or off of a tattoo or out of some smoke. Didn't dionystic cults like to pull people and animals apart? Minor detail. I could care less if someone on recreational mind openers just killed himself, but I'm afraid of getting caught in the crossfire, and that would be morally wrong.

     Oh, it's not a crusade, it's a quest. For something that you can't get out of 'white bread America'. What does that mean 'white bread America', other than a cheap almost racial slur against the American ethos that says work for your life and take what you get? Guess I wouldn't know, being baked in that oven and all. What I think it means is looking for something you can't get out of American society. Easily. It's hard to live morally and to earn happiness by working for it. Harder still to find 'something' when you can't even define what that something is. Settling for whatever drugs gives you is easy, and it's hardly a 'search'. But it's something.

     Oh, but excuse me. Of course I am just a moralizing free-market, libertarian capitalist with a grip on reality. What the hell do I know?