Curse This City: Cocaine

It's everywhere. Still. People at bars and parties slipping each other little flaps, giving each other handshakes on the sly.

At a party and people are leaving in threes down the stairs. On the sly, of course. Coming back up with bulging eyes and dilated pupils, black as Satan's bowels. Eyes relaxed and focusing on nothing. Grinding their jaws, slowly churning 'em. Lolling back their heads like they're struggling to keep them up while some forceful gust of wind is pinning them backward.

That goddamned cocoa. The definitive symbol of all that is rotten in this world. Right down to how it's harvested, in the blistering fields of rural Colombia. And these people are shoveling into their faces by the eightball.

"They're all high out there," I say to my friend, who is looking in the mirror in another room.

And I see a finger picking at the crust of the nostril and, maaaan, my face turns red.

See, I'm the weird one, isolating myself from the social circle because I hate that drug more than anything else on this planet. I have lost friends – and am in the process of losing others – because of it. I have seen the world through those eyes and it's a superficial landscape. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.

Bottom Line: I wasn't long for that partay.

Bottom Line: .