God, let there be gambling and drugs in heaven!

The storm was on its way as I exited the car, and I felt that sudden hush in the air as if I was living in a country where everyone was ready to run.

We're always ready to run. We have to be. This is what it's like living in a nation that is not free. Get used to it. Soon, in order to survive, we're going to have to be able to run and jump as well as Terrell Owens and Shaun Alexander. What King George is going to be preparing for, just as a heads up, are those open-field hits on receivers over the middle. He's got his best men dressed from head to toe in executive order protection from investigation or even second-guessing, and those guys are ready and waiting for runners like you to run into their zones, with your eyes set firmly on the ball, and, whether you catch it or not, they're going to take your f***ing heads off. Talk about pain and depression.

From my car I crossed the parking lot to the pharmacy. Everyone has their drug dealer of choice. Mine is the CVS.

One of the most common prescribed drugs these days are the SSRs. Selective Seratonin Reuptake Inhibitors. These are for combatting depression, angst, the pain of life. They prevent your brain from diverting some of its natural seratonin, so that you are more likely to feel happy on a more regular basis. There are even television commercials about some of these SSRs. They are all basically the same, but they work in different ways, selectively this or selectively that, more this or that, fewer or more side effects.

One of the most common side effects for most SSRs has to do with sexual performance. You either don’t want it, can’t have it, or don’t feel a damn thing when you do. There are plenty of drugs to deal with that, as well, unless you are lucky enough to feel comfortable taking one of the couple of SSRs with a low risk of sexual side effects. There are television commercials for those sexual appetite and performance medications, too. You've seen them all. There are no more jokes available in that arena, unless the audience has been imbibing in what doctors and politicians like to call "illicit" drugs.

Illicit drugs can be just as much or even sometimes more fun than prescribed drugs. They rarely come in pill form, however, which means that, in order to ingest illicit drugs, you've got to pass them, in some raw state, through a part of your body not meant, necessarily, to come into contact with things like that. Needles in arms, powder up noses, smoke into lungs, etc. If these drugs came in pill form, most of the seriously harmful side effects, other than what doctors like to call "euphoria," would be completely eliminated.

And with illicit drugs, you're mostly on your own. There are no bottle labels or warnings. It's most difficult to get reliable information about counter-indications with illicit drugs -- specifically, how different illicit drugs interact with one another. Fortunately, in most cases, by using a little common sense along with the too-little common sense of adventure, and some moderation in experimentation, a user can figure out how best to mix these illicit drugs. Soma, when combined with vicodin and high doses of caffeine, for instance, can induce a more wonderful feeling than any of the three taken separately.

Aside from depression and sexual problems, the most commonly prescribed medication is painkillers.

The sky looked bad tonight. Tornadoes south and east. Lightning flashing into thunder all around. People moving slowly through the parking lot, talking and laughing and packing things into bags. Aside from the thunder, there was no sound at all. Overhead, a helicopter I couldn’t see, or two or three. You never know what you're going to see out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes it's better not to turn your head. Sometimes tunnel vision is a blessing.

I've felt so good with my knee sometimes, after I've dosed things up a bit, that it's easy to believe that God sent an angel down to push me into the next big adventure, tackling it head on. Between the dizziness of pain and the euphoria of hydrocodone, it’s easy to want to go back into the bottle a bit too early. They type so many things on those f***ing labels. It’s impossible to fathom that they could have left anything out.

If you take too much hydrocodone, it's not the opiates that get to you. It's not the nectar of God's sweet flower that will do you in, evil as the politicians make the poppy out to be. It's the overdose of acetaminaphine. The same thing will happen if you dribble too many Exedrines into your mouth on a bad-head day. And if you're ever sad, the happiness rendered strong as a side effect of God's happy gift can really make you want some more.

This f***ing war on drugs. This war on steroids. They want us to think that all the bad things that can happen to us can be legislated out by heavy-handed moralists with selfish interests and a fear of the exciting. They want us to think that everything they say is true. That between the doctors and the pharmacists, following the rule of law, things which are legal are also safe.

And that things that are not legal are not safe at all.

Is it really Terrell Owens who is the one so hard to believe?  Did Shaun Alexander not really hear from God about his foot?  When is the last time you saw your national politicians hitched to the truth wagon?

It's easy for your favourite athlete to act shocked when presented with accusations that he:

1. Tried to commit suicide.

2. Took steroids.

3. Tried on women's underwear.

If there is no proof, there never will be any proof. You can’t go back 10 years and administer a drug test, and unless someone was snapping pictures at the time, or had gone forward in time to get the technology required to read someone's mind and then go back in time and determine the state of mind of someone at the point of overdose, we'll never know the truth.

What value does the truth hold these days, anyway?

This fighting over truth and justice and the trustworthiness of our favourite athletes, each of whom, at any time, might be stupid enough to step on the head of an opponent anyway, is like insisting that none of us is human. None of us can do any wrong.

There had better be gambling and drugs in heaven, or I don’t want any part of it.

The rain sent a flooding rush over the street from the shallow creek by the playground. I don’t know who to trust on a night like this. The radio has bad-weather reports and tragic news from overseas. We're melting into the bad parts of all the world, and all the world is melting into me, and I never felt so alive before, and it feels a lot like a night to get really stoned and watch some football, in the privacy and safety of my own home.