The Last Natural High

 I've never used drugs in my life, and I realize I'm in the minority of the people in my age group. Luckily for me, I haven't need drugs to achieve highs in my life: I produce them naturally, through accomplishments and working hard to achieve, and to be honest, some luck. But not drugs! Although I'll never understand what drugs are like, thanks to the Omnibus podcast and listening to those who have ventured down that path, I kind of understand the motivation for those highs: those who use crack describe a feeling of deep accomplishment, like being the first person to climb Mount Everest, or the first person ever to walk on the moon, a feeling that goes away almost as quickly as it came once the drugs lose their effectiveness, so each time getting high is an attempt to recreate that feeling, to search for it again, because the rest of one's life is so in shambles and not worthy of living. It's really a vicious cycle for people living in poverty or miserable lives: their real lives don't give them any highs, but the artificial highs that they can get spiral them deeper into misery and addiction, which makes them want to seek those highs even more, and so on. I get it too as a non-drug user: even in the relatively successful life that I lead, certain activities that use to create highs no longer do after the first time, or the first few times: once you've experienced it, it loses its luster, like the first time kissing a girl, or the first time finding out you passed an important time, the first time winning a sports championship, the first time you graduated college and drove in the car west on the road to the rest of your life. The high of those events kind of fade over time as you wonder, exasperated, "I used to feel something!" and now that feeling is gone. 

If I were to start a podcast (I keep saying but not doing!) I might call it "The Last Natural High" podcast, for people desperately seeking to get high (like myself) but without the use of drugs: the use of achievements and accomplishments, of personal satisfaction, and I'm here to say it can still be done! Every time I feel like I've run out of things to get high on, I find something new: I thought I'd never match my glory days of high school chess anymore, but I still find now the thrill of winning just a random pickup game against a worthy opponent can give me an adrenaline rush (and justify the hour-long episode it takes to get to achieve that victory). Every night I achieve a little bit of dopamine rush when I answer a tough question on Jeopardy that's never been answered before (Friday night it was that Colombia is the only one of 13 nations the equator runs through that borders the Caribbean Sea). But everyone can have their own highs! Do I feel low? Of course I feel low all the time. Today after a few summer-like days in the area, it went down to the 50's, cloudy, and overcast, a nothing burger day, a perfect day to be bummed out and feel depressed, moody, and out of it (Oh and MJ and I watched the short film "If Anything Happens I Love You," a heartbreaking film about loss of a child to gun violence), but what got me up was suddenly and unexpectedly diving into a good book, this time (finally) The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time, now apparently developed into a play too. I started as a kid lying down prone (face down) with my nose buried in a book, and I've never lost that page-turning high... it's my anti-drug (a popular marketing slogan when I was a teen but unlike most marketing campaigns, for a good cause). 

Ida B. Wells- remember that name anytime you're in Chicago, she is the namesake of Wells Drive, an important downtown street in the Loop, but for a good reason: Ida B. Wells lost a close friend to lynching growing up in post-Civil War America, and promised when she grew up to fight against racism and racist violence, eventually starting a newspaper and using her reporting to promote feminist and the civil rights movement, eventually helping to establish the NAACP. And now, for a good reason, she is immortalized in history by being referenced frequently on Jeopardy (and sometimes not being known by even Jeopardy contestants, indicating that she is underappreciated and needs to be known more). Just that pledge at a young age to do something noble and actually following through and doing it deserves praise and admiration from young people today, including myself who lacks the discipline to stick with anything for more than 5 minutes, much less 5 years or 50 years like Ida B. Wells did.