3 Day Speed party

Anyone who's spent some serious time with me knows that sleep, and lack of it, plays a big part of my life. When I can't get enough sleep, it goes badly for me, and everyone around, too.

I guess that's why this article about a 3 day bender on shabu - pure methampetamine - sounds terrifying to me.

More Shabu was smoked somewhere in the nether region of time between two and five this Friday morning. Now it's a few minutes after seven. Bonnie is back on the laptop. The weird music blasting downstairs has entranced Jason, who is lying on a couch, eyes closed, fists clenched, doing leg lifts in halved time with the beat. The remainder of the crew -- Sasha, Heather, Emile, a graphic designer, and Ike, who deals cocaine -- have fled upstairs, where they sit in a circle in the Shabu smoking room, jabbering.

They talk over and across each other constantly, their conversations cross-pollinating, topics bursting into side topics and tangents: Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, West Nile virus, Alaskan salmon, cruise ships, Rastafarians, back-in-the-day MTV videos, Schoolhouse Rock cartoons, drug laws, gun laws, cop shootings, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins. It goes on and on, ever-changing, devoid of weight. It is chitchat mania, right up until the discussion turns to why they're doing this, why they're sitting in a candlelit room on a workday morning, geeked out of their skulls.

Shudder. Whilst the idea of oblivion can be legitimately appealing sometimes, this article really sent a shiver up my spine, and confirmed my wholly grandpa status.

Sleep is a precious commodity in my life, to be traded up only grudgingly, and - much like the addicts in this article - something to be pursued at all costs, and desperately imbibed on the weekend; drunk with it, and then my working week comes, and I have to scrape by on the bare necessity.

The idea of spending three days awake makes me feel sick.