Green is some really weird shit. I've heard of people going through eight hours of hell and then crawling through glass to buy thirty more hits. One woman performed what she thought was the climax of the development of modern dance (the thing would have gone on for a full three days but she ran out of green and collapsed). I heard of a guy who did green and then bought and traded enough stocks in such a way that the economy of Guiana or Namibia or some other shit hole country like that was destroyed and he was arrested for crimes against humanity.
Green is funky, like those 90's wonder drugs, Prozac and Viagra, doing sort of the same thing in everyone but causing wildly different side effects, depending on who took it. One thing always happens, the person thinks they have achieved absolute understanding, discovered the secrets of the universe. I knew a piano player who once tried some green and for the next eight hours he pounded and slammed, tinkled and dorked, diddled and bopped. He made me record some of it and I tell you it was some of the stupidest, most annoying noise you have ever heard. He didn't believe me when I played the tape for him. He was so overcome by his "symphony" that the guy actually stopped playing and eventually stepped in front of an Ell a few months later.
I even heard of a lady who cooked for two days on green and then ran out before she actually tasted her meal. The police found her passed out on the floor and arrested her, which probably saved her life. Some bright reporter decided to see what the latest green binge had produced and had her meal analyzed. It was laid out in a massive style in a sort of Picasso mode with an impressionist blurring thrown in. The food was found to contain twenty nine toxic chemicals, some of which were dioxen, benzene, 3-T-C, and several varieties of PCB's, three abortificants, two sources of E. coli bacteria, a teratogen, a mutagen, violations of twenty state laws and even nitro glycerine for God sake. I have no fucking idea how she could have even gotten her hands on the nitro, let alone some of the tribal delicacies she had mixed in, violating a couple of U.N. world trade bans.
Green is some amazing shit. One time when I took it I wrote what was going to be the most incredible program to come down the pike since the employees at Microsoft revolted and blew the place up. Remember the "Office" suite that Mr. Bill shoved down our throats for ten years? This was going to be a "World" suite, as in blow the shit fucking out of. Anyway, I had something like 146,000 lines of code written before I ran out of green and decided I might be hungrier than I had thought.
It was, of course, shit. I still have a copy of the file around some place, sort of as a piece of art from my wilder period (so many of us have our little green mementos hanging around these days). One Sunday afternoon, I was so fucking bored, I fired up the old vi editor and thought about trying to clean the code up a bit.
I finally realized how monumentally stupid green makes a person when I figured out that the first line was five screens long. I had defined thirty constants to be the results of calculations on about two hundred variables that were defined elsewhere in the program or just assumed. Some of it was actually in computer language, ten to be exact. I know there was R (regular and ++) a bit of Java, some Quiril, half a function defined in ML, and even some Ada my college roommate's father had taught me on a whim.
That wasn't all, though. I had nine direct quotations from the Bible, two separate morality plays of my own invention that made no sense but have an interesting surreal quality about them, and a plagiarism of my next door neighbor's answering machine message. I also found a binary string that turned out to be the faked picture of Clinton and a naked Jennifer Flowers that Al Gore used to have Ken Star deported (I really have no idea if I actually typed it in or just imported it as data).
I used nine different spoken languages and even though I know Spanish is not the language of Computer Science (the language of Heaven, maybe; the language of romance, certainly) I wrote what appears to be code for a three dimensional First-Person-Shooter. And even though n~ are hard to type and I never really got the hang of accents, I created a whole system of convoluted data structures that depended on whether the accent is on the first syllable or the second.
That whole section is completely in Spanish and I mean that ningun plalabra es en un otro linga, except for three lines of Portuguese that seemed to be calls to Java applets (if I remember correctly; by the time I had read that far into the code I was half way through a bottle of Jack).
There was some in Russian, a bit of French, and even some Gaelic that I had picked up from an IRA terrorist, one night in Boston.
Needless to say, it wouldn't compile.
I guess the main reason most of the straights are so angry about green and lock away from society those of us who use it is that people (usually quite well intentioned; green is a happy drug) can be dangerously purposeful while at the same time dangerously out of touch with reality.
Always, you think you are onto something, even long time users like me. Every time, this time is it. Eureka, and you are off. Never in the same direction, of course. That is part of the charm and a random charm it is, especially after the first time. It might be tattooing your body with a ball point pen (shudder, I've seen it done; after that I always got rid of my pens before I took green) or discovering that it is time to build that fourth story you always wanted on your two story house. I once thought I had played the greatest concept album any rock musician ever conceived; I don't play guitar anymore, though my hand healed up pretty much completely.
It is hard to believe that I haven't done a green trip for six whole fucking months. They wanted me to give up alcohol too and they even have me on the anti-depressants. I guess that is fine; I still get tremors from caffeine and every now and then when I get the right amount of non-dairy creamer and a pinch of toner, I can just taste the beginnings of the green starting up.
I don't know if they are going to let us out or not. Frankly, I couldn't care less. From what I hear, things are pretty much fucked to hell and gone anyway so might as well stay here. Free eats, free Prozac and no chance in hell of getting any green.
'Cause in the end, I figure next time I take green if I don't forget to get rid of my pens, I'm liable to wonder if I can count my blood cells and start cutting to find out, sort of like that dip-shit who came in mostly dead this afternoon.
Nine million, six hundred seventy nine thousand, seventeen, I think he said. But greenies are full of shit, ... everybody knows it should have been an even count.
Copyright March 1997, Robert G. Werner
robert@inreachtech.netYou can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.