14 DAY TRIAL // Alcohol abuse seriously damages health. Tobacco consumption seriously damages health. Food abuse seriously damages health. Politics abuse seriously damages psychic integrity. Books, movies, people, philosophy abuse seriously damages health.
All abuse seriously damages something. I think there could even be made a chart of drugs according to how much you need to abuse in order for it to start damaging your health. In such a chart, probably about 90% of us would hurry to put on the first positions common places of critique: alcohol, tobacco, usual drugs. If in the case of alcohol you'd have to talk about "excessive consumption", for the others you wouldn't even have to mention the excess. Consumption itself seriously damages health.
That is, we live in a world of addictions. And we couldn't live with it unless there were a helping hand to mildly pet us on the head (in a first phase) and tell us before going to sleep, as some kind of "Good night children!", the famous phrase about alcohol, abuse and health. This way, you have a chance of sleeping tight! If you consumed no alcohol, you just know that your health is the way it is supposed to be. If, God forbid, you drank one or two bears, it's pretty bad, but still all right. You still have a chance.
Abuse is the problem here. What does abuse actually mean? Well? it's a kind of "too much", "enough", "I'll never drink again in my life", and so on and so forth. Is anybody satisfied with the answer? Does anybody rightly understand what it is about? Because I, for example, do not. I have absolutely no idea about what it means!
If we were to be sincere for just a second, it would be easy to realize that we are in the middle of an addictive life. Some are to be blamed, morally or legally, others are not. How do we distinguish between them? No one knows. So we are not even one step ahead from where we were last paragraph. Same midst surrounding us.
As a matter of fact, it's addictions that surround us. Just that it's easier to talk about some of them. Because they are more obvious. Physical, that is. You can actually "touch" them. Some others, you cannot touch. Because they are psychic. And even if some have already proved that there is no such thing as the psychic, I'll still follow my refractory idealistic line of thought, holding that there are psychic dependencies. Moreover, if we made a sum of all these addictions, we'd surprisingly hit the "I", that weird thing we are always looking for, about which we wonder when we have no true problems to wonder about, and whose lack of knowledge about we often mourn.
If I started to count the things on which I depend, I'd probably be stuck to this chair forever. Air, water, my old guys, the phone, X calling me, the thought that X loves me, the thought that I love X, the idea that things do change? I tried to start up the list. However, I give up right here. I am not that dependent on endings?
Now let's go back for a second? why do we need the helping hand to pet us on the head and to show us the way? Because the Hand knows! It knows there are some acceptable addictions, and some that are not. The general criteria for dividing are not accessible to us but we do not even need them. For if we knew them, then the Hand itself would be futile. And even less we would need its petting?
Right now we can no longer avoid getting back to the ticklish issue of drugs. It's not that I would suffer from some kind of defining-obsession, but it is just normal to wonder this time too which drugs are actually? drugs. A smart and versatile guy from the beginnings of surrealism, rebel artist and opium addict, shortly put - Jean Cocteau -, used to say: "Drugs act on periods and change the scenery. This change of scenery, these different stages of a phenomena cycle do not happen all of a sudden. The transformation is done gradually and creates and intermediary chaotic space. Everything goes on the other way round, and ends by creating new shapes." (Jean Cocteau, "Les enfants terribles")
If we were to trust Cocteau, and not because of the authority argument, but because the way in which he lived justifies our trust in his words, we might get to say that life itself is a drug. It "acts" on periods of time, it changes the scenery, you are addicted to it, it's most often chaotic and it ends by creating new forms of being. Life abuse seriously damages health, i.e. life itself. And here close the circles in which we spin in case of excessive consumption.
An old friend of mine fell in love. He excessively consumed his love and in the end he woke up alone, with his psychic health seriously damaged. Another one studied logics. He excessively consumed symbols, quantifiers and logical relations and in the end he hit the ground in front of the house for he had gone mad. He stood up, woke up and started to search for his next addiction. Another good friend of mine excessively consumed his loneliness. His capacity of using language, whether verbal or nonverbal, suffered serious damages and he could never get out of his shell. He'll probably stay in there for good.
The upshot would be that? we are all addicted, sir! We make abuse of whatever comes to our hands, we devour and we tear apart each piece of booty, weather it is alcohol, tobacco, love, books or any other drug. So, for the sake of controlled excess? cheers!
