I Am A Disinformation Agent

A cautionary tale, by Rusty Shackleford.

"May you live in interesting times." -Ancient Chinese Curse.

My editor has asked me to write a piece for Modern Mythology this evening. That is fine, but making this fit into the format of the site is his dirty job. I should mention that I think JC is a professional social deviant with a sadistic sense of humor, he is SCUM, a complete freak of a man, and this is why I like him so much.

Classic example: it was only after I informed him that I have been smoking black tar opium all day long and eating Kratom, popping Rozarem to help "bring me down" (?!!) that he insisted I run a piece. Insisted.

“And it has to be this evening,” he said. “Don’t worry. You won’t remember it tomorrow.”

I think this is his idea of a joke.

I have known him for nearly a decade now and he just told me this evening that "You've become the Diety representing intoxication in my personal pantheon. You should feel proud."

I do. Either proud, or very, very scared.

So I am going to fill you in on an important conversation I had at the apex of the evening tonight. At some point before reaching the end I may nod out from a pill that makes me think it is a good idea to go for a midnight drive in a stolen car at 3:30 AM to a soundtrack of obscure 70s kraut rock. For all I know, this is my last message to you. If so, I hope that you are deeply moved.
(There may be a number of free resource articles online that could shed light on some of those substances, but they are probably nowhere near enough to paint a pretty solid picture of the damage they can actually do.)

(Note: Yeah, I thought it was a joke at first too, but it is now 4:52 AM and it turns out that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I did in fact go on a joyride at 3:30 AM this morning, ostensibly to get laid, and promptly forgot where I was. Couldn't find the house I had been to a million times that was about 5 minutes away- Thanks, Rozarem. I drove around on an adventure I will never remember for an hour trying to find the house. Sexually frustrated, mortified and humiliated, I resolved to call it a loss and drove to an undisclosed fast food restaurant open at 4:30 AM to pick up a breakfast burrito because I am a consumer whore. I don't remember much of this, other than driving through the exit eating the burrito spilling hot sauce all over my khakis which at the moment look like I just menstruated all over them.)

Meanwhile, I'm hashing out the details of this "piece" with JC. Talking about the "conceptual continuity" of this piece right now is a bit like doing push hand martial arts with an alligator... An alligator with 30 hands made out of black tar heroin.

So I'll just cut to the chase and save him the trouble of having to wade through another 8 pages of this: have you heard of the drug JWH-18? Most people haven't, even though they have consumed it. (What does that say about the mentality of self-made "urban shaman" who readily swallow or smoke anything handed to them?)

JWH-18 is a synthetic cannabanoid. To me, it sounds uncomfortably similar to the Zombie chemical in the "RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD" series (245 trioxin- within the mythos of the series it is a chemical the army initially used to spray on marijuana, ironically enough, and is ultimately responsible for reanimating dead corpses. Bear with me here, I am building up to my master's thesis on the zombification of America that will ultimately decompose if you pardon the pun and disintegrate into the gibberish of the cold light of morning and sobriety.)

Of course, you could just go with cannabis seeds. Who am I to judge?

I myself have NEVER tried any sort of legal drug sold at a headshop before, so I wouldn't really know, but word through the grapevine is that we - and I say that in a very general sense, the "we" being the general public because I would never knowingly consume a dangerous unknown substance - are all sort of guinea pigs. Canary in the mineshaft. Enter cliche here. The point is, we have no fucking clue what the long term repurcussion is of any of the legal or illegal chemicals we’re pumping into our bodies at unfathomable rates.