JAKE CLELAND

They Are Probably Not Alright After All.

Around the time of the third hallucination of being blasted through the atmosphere at supersonic speed as the passenger in some horrific dogfight, you begin to take stock of the night that started at 7 when you walked through the fly-screen door of a sleepy bungalow in a town so small it’s essentially a strip of cafes, pizza shops and a Safeway, but started in earnest around 10 when, out on the verandah, because inside was occupied by high school acquaintances watching a football game, a friend of a friend is regaling you and your friend, harmlessly smoking menthols, about the virtues of ‘shards’, which you finally work up the nerve to confront your naivete (and you don’t have a phone capable of searching erowid) to ask what, exactly, are shards, to discover it’s crystal meth. You remember all the times you’ve heard about shards before: the kids you worked with at the pizza shop who were in 11th or 12th grade who’d go on about smoking them on the weekend, and you think some of the people one of your sisters used to hang out with had mentioned them once or twice as well, and it begins to dawn on you that kids in your town are using meth like they’re supposed to be using MDMA or hell, even Red Bull and vodka, and the paranoia begins to set in from years watching those ads they used to screen before movies at the cinema of the guy overpowering nurses and slamming a garbage bin through a glass window, so you check yourself, because the hysteria never matches the facts, but actually meth seems like a pretty bad deal and for the first time you realise sensible people probably made those ads for more than the amusement of careless teenagers. And at 2am you’re about to inhale more nitrous oxide for the fourth time when you remember the text the friend sitting next to you sent two days ago when you said you’d come for a while but leave pretty early because sitting in a dirty lounge room doing speed and whip seemed like a bad look, which said “That’s not the Jake I know,” and how it was the catalyst for a lot of reflection about life in the suburbs, not to make too much of it, which is hard when the currency of a young writer is in justifying the hand-me-down myths of youth, handed down by the previous generation that is, who had them handed down to them by the Beats in the first place (who made it all up because culture never existed before the 50s as we all know), including the myth of the claustrophobic seediness and inertia of the suburban spirit. This is where you’ve always lived and only recently has it begun to occur that it’s not actually where you belong, so you put down the can and walk home.

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