The Free Thinker

As many of you know, the last eight months have been fairly tumultuous. I've been partying a lot. I run on a weekly cycle:

• Monday, regret. "I feel like crap. I'm definitely taking next weekend off."


• Wednesday, recovery. "I feel so much better. I don't want to go out this weekend and mess that up."


• Friday, the itch. "I really want to dance. Besides *blank* is spinning this weekend, I can't miss that!" Which is why Toronto is great: almost every weekend there's some big DJ you can hitch your habit to.

And so the cylce continues

Since July I've skipped maybe six weekends. Pretty good, eh?

Which makes me wonder: where do you draw the line? How much is too much? Surely many of you would say that popping a couple of pills and dancing for eight hours every weekend is excessive. But by many Toronto standards it's not. It seems like every twenty-something I've talked to had some period of years where they were messed up four days per week. There's really a culture of mutual enabling here: keep everyone else in the cycle and you don't feel so bad about yourself. And what's the best way to do that? To remind them that no matter how bad they are, there's someone worse.

The problem is that there will always be someone worse.

Knowing when you have a problem is a hell of a lot harder than TV and the media make it out to be. The line between having a lot of fun and self-harm is fuzzy. Most people out there partying aren't messing everything up. Most of them are holding down jobs, are on good terms with their families and are not the messy pile of wasted flesh represents the stereotypical addict. It'd actually be a lot easier if that were the case. Because addiction is a slow decline to that state. Slow enough that it's hard to notice. Like global warming for the soul.

If you haven't noticed yet, I really don't know what the answer is. I don't know where the line is, or where I sit on it. Sure I didn't go out this weekend, but I did way too much K at a little party last night. I don't even like K. Why did I do it? Because it was free.

That's not a good sign is it?