Oh, I get it

There’s this invisible pleasure index. Nobody knows the numbers, but everybody knows there’s a place somewhere that if you have that much pleasure you’ve crossed a line and it’s probably illegal.

Used to be that way about sex, except now you can have as much of that kind of pleasure as you want, just so long as it doesn’t involve people below a certain age, which can vary from locality to locality so check your local listings.

The issue never came up with alcohol. Alcohol caused and causes a zillion problems, physically, socially, whatever, but it never was about pleasure. It was about escape from pain. If you took enough of it you could, and of course still can, kill yourself; the ultimate escape from pain. But any pleasure that came out was and is only a byproduct of making a path to oblivion.

Much like if you were driving a bulldozer, making a path through a field of stumps. The stumps and everything else you pushed aside would be analogous to pleasure, and you’d be waving at it as you rolled through the field. But it would end up at a cliff face and you’d be so into waving at the pleasure that you wouldn’t notice you had to stop, and you and the bulldozer would go off the cliff and drop 100 meters to a rocky tidal beach where you’d become food for the fishes and the bulldozer would become a tidal habitat for one thing and another that lives there.

So it’s not about sex (provided the age limits are observed), there’s no need for it with alcohol, so what is it about then? Oh, of course: drugs. Too much pleasure, folks. Sorry, way, way too much pleasure. Got to nip that in the bud before it catches on and great numbers of people start not taking politicians seriously.

I’m that way about music to a certain extent. I start singing something, my body gets taken over by the song, to the point where I’m having such a good time it flashes through my mind, “I wonder if this is legal?” And then it occurs to me that I don’t give a shit one way or another about the legal thing because it’s all just a trip and what’s happening is what’s happening, not my commentary or the politicians’ commentary about it. You get caught up in that bullshit, you’re missing the real action … on your fingertips or in your retinas or on your eardrums or on the nerves up your nose and in your mouth. You can’t do the trips without sacrificing the senses and vice versa, so the politicians do have a point, don’t they. If they didn’t keep making laws to make people miserable, people would stop paying attention to them. And then what?

There’s a lot more to it, I’m sure, but at least I get that much.