We're all mad here

I hate it when people accuse my favorite writers of having been drug users - as if people who are creative and intelligent enough to come up with something so thrillingly original must be using performance enhancing drugs. As Stephen King has said, "The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers -- common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words." He goes on to say that writers who claim that they need to be high to write are just making excuses for their behavior.


However, would the Late Beatles have existed if not for drugs? The pre-drug Beatles wanted to hold your hand. The post-drug Beatles changed the definition of rock and roll. Paul McCartney has said that drug use was so very much more innocent then. He says today's drugs are a different breed, they destroy lives and kill people. But would The White Album have been The White Album if not for the green? Would the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s have been as revolutionary? 


On a completely tangential note, the more I hear Revolution 9, the more sense it makes to me. That worries me. It kind of makes me think that the subject of the song is wandering through a train station that is also his life, his history and his future and a voice constantly pestering him to move on. Or it could just be that The Beatles said "Hey, let's make 9 minutes of incomprehensible garbage and see if people are suckers enough to listen to it and think it means something." I suspect some modern artists and poets of doing the same.


Heath Ledger supposedly got hooked on drugs while taking stimulants to enhance his creepy jittery performance as The Joker. I loved the man and the performance, but do people who take performance-enhancing drugs deserve Oscars for it? Maybe you do need drugs to understand some characters. Maybe that's why I didn't cut it as a theatre major. That and, you know, the painfully embarrassing over-acting.




And I don't know about you, but I can barely write when I'm very sleepy. Drunk Brigid writes things like "There are some things you  can only undersand when youre durnk. ill tell you later." Stoned, I don't think I could hold a pen.

This is a picture of what my cat would probably look like if you were high. I haven't tested this out, so fair warning.