#54 "The Ones That Mother Gives You" April11, 2013

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When I was a teenager and everyone started experimenting with drugs, pills weren't part of the regiment. Of course there were pills circulating the subcultures since forever, but for some reason, pills weren't part of the cocktail. We were more interested in getting a couple of beers, some pot, and the occasional psychedelic. But pills didn't come until later. Prozac was brand new, Ritalin had just been introduced and Adderall wouldn't come out until 2002, the year I moved to New York. Of course there was other pills to take in the 90's, but they were a rarity until 1998; at least with my friends and I. Although, I feel like if you were doing some graphing of recreational pill use, 1998 would be a point where the graph spikes sharply. I remember my last couple years as a Phish head (yes, I am fully recovered, thankfully) the scene changed so much that it was hard to score marijuana in the lot. Even mushrooms were gone and it was all replaced by pills, predominantly Ecstasy and Molly. But there were stories of kids easting a ton of Molly at night and then chasing it with mood stabilizers in the wee hours and in the morning. That would help you with the crash. These days, the Molly culture is shadier, because the pills come in capsules filled with powder that may or may not be Molly. When two kids overdosed and died at Randall's Island last summer, they thought they had taken Molly, but probably more likely took a pill that had all sorts of crap in it including Bath Salts. I'm not saying that taking pills from strangers back in the day wasn't as sketchy, I am merely saying that these days, there are more sophisticated designer drugs out there for you to take, and a lot of them are not the highest of quality (pun intended?).
In fact, when the Silk Road was busted and shut down late last year, some people saw that as a bad, and dangerous thing. The Silk Road is an online drug store, literally. You can buy anything from Weed to Coke to Heroin to Molly. The DEA shut it down in October 2013 and arrested a couple people involved, mostly because there had been vague posts on the site about being able to buy "hits" on people from the site. That information will come out during the trial, no doubt, but in the meantime, the Silk Road was up and operational a month after it was shut down. Some people feel that buying drugs from that site is safer than buying from strangers or small-time dealers. The reason is that it is a meritocracy for drugs, meaning if you are selling some Heroin on the site and it is bad, or weak, people will complain about it and give you a bad review. It's like Amazon for the drug world. So, in this instance, the drugs you buy from it are more pure, and safer because they come with instructions, almost like a real prescription drugs. There are recommended doses, purity levels, and even a doctor available online to ask questions about the products. Of course, doing drugs is dangerous no matter what the internet says, but everyone knows that dealers on the street are cutting their drugs to get the most for the money. That goes back as far as time itself.
Kids have always experimented with drugs, whether it was booze, or drinking a bottle of cough medicine, there has always been the interest in altering one's mind state. This probably dates back to when we were still hunting and gathering and every once and a while someone would ingest something that wouldn't necessarily kill them, but make them sick and vomit and then see some crazy stuff in the form of hallucinations. From there, they would remember that plant or mushroom and it became a spiritual thing. Nowadays, it's more about having a wild night and less about getting closer to some sort of god. And now it's more about pills than ever before. You can tell just by the commercials that play during the Super Bowl. When I was a kid, the anti-drug commercials were about pot and cocaine and "Just Say No" and all that. Now, they are about knowing what's in your medicine cabinet and keeping your adult pills away from your teenagers.
Of course, not everyone wants to experiment with drugs, as the prospect of doing so is sometimes kind of scary. You see Uma Thurman overdose in "Pulp Fiction" and drugs are the last thing you want to try for the first time. But I feel like some people are inherently drawn to drugs and alcohol from some deep code hidden in the genes. That, plus an adventurous, rebellious streak. However, a lot of kids are on drugs from a young age these days because of medical conditions. Asthma, Attention Deficit Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, dietary problems, all of these are conditions where kids as young as 10 are starting to take pills on a daily basis. When you are taking pills that sometimes drastically change your bodies chemistry, every day from the time you are ten, taking a couple Molly pills when you're a teenager is going to be easy. 

#52 "Down in the Mouth" February 16, 2012

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This one is reminiscent of a bad dream. The kind of dream where you take out all of your teeth one by one and don't even mind doing it. You wake up and the rest of the day feels wrong, like there is something hanging over your head, or just beyond your peripheral vision that you can't describe, and when people ask you what's the matter, you reply, "I had the weirdest dream last night and I can't shake it." and they nod and say that they understand. Most of the times, people don't like hearing about your dreams because they are too personal to you and they don't corollate with the real world. Sure, sometimes your dreams are taking place in "real life" situations, in real cities or in real places, but most people just zone out when you tell them about your dreams. The only time people are really engaged in your dreams are the ones that these people are in, or least have a bit part in, and when you are recounting the dream,  you start off the conversation with, "You were in my dream last night."  But even then, these people assume that the two of you were having sex or something kinky, but usually intrigued and want to hear the whole thing. Then you start telling them about how the two of you were stealing acorns from a giant squirrel in Central Park and the listener soon loses interest.
The staff at the restaurant certainly has their fair share of work dreams and personally, I never bore of them. Not mine, of course, if I never have another work dream, it'll be too soon. Because when you have a work dream, it's never the happy times at work when you and the crew are sharing a good laugh or a smooth night where everything went great. No, it's always a chore and the work seems real and it's always the worst situations. I have very common themes in my work dreams and it's usually the same old crap from real life, but skewed and twisted so that it's even more annoying in the dream. And, like I've mentioned before, at least when real life is annoying at work, you are still getting paid. Thankfully, I rarely have these dreams, as I have heard that some people dream about work all the time, or at least once a week. That is too many times a week, as far as I am concerned.
My favorite dream that I have heard from the restaurant is from my co-worker Gary who had the most elaborate dream. In the dream, he was waiting tables, like normal, when his table ordered some drinks. He took down the drink order, went outside, and caught the crosstown bus on 14th Street. He took the bus crosstown to the East Side, and got the drinks at the bar, now located on the other side of town. Once he had the drinks, he loaded them onto his tray and got back on the bus, this time with a full tray of beverages, balancing the whole time back to the West Side. In typical customer fashion, when he delivered the drinks, one of the people in the party said, "Oh, that looks good, I'll have one of those as well." Gary then pleaded with the people saying, "You don't know what I had to go through to get these drinks!"
I personally love this dream mainly because I didn't have it, although it is one of the more amusing work dreams that I have heard. Mine are mostly drudgery and running out of glassware. I had a great one about dishes, but I have to save that one for later, because it was so funny that I integrated it into one of these drawings. You won't be able to read about it for sometime, because I think it's part of #81 or something. No, my work dreams are annoying even to me and so I rarely tell them to people outside the workplace. I think that telling people about your dreams is similar to telling non-coworkers about work. I am alway amazed when people come into the bar and start bitching about work. Granted, that's what bars are good for; you tell the bartender your woes and he or she can commiserate with you. However, I don't know your coworkers and the situations that present themselves on a daily basis at your job. You might be the jerk in the story, but since I am only hearing your side, I can only make half a judgement and agree with you that yes, work sucks an maybe Jimmy is being unfair in his treatment of you and your team. Because of this, I rarely talk about work outside of the restaurant except on this blog. Even on this blog, I try to stay positive about the workplace and try to look at even the negative parts in an objective light. This way, I can look at work from a new perspective when I am there and try to keep a positive attitude while working. Otherwise, I will turn into an embittered old man prematurely. Like, say, next year instead of two years from now.
This, however, will not make my work dreams cease to exist. No matter how positive I stay at work, I will probably always have dreams where I am in the weeds at the restaurant. Even if I left the business today, and never worked in another restaurant, I'm sure these dreams would resurface every once and a while. In fact, I recently had a dream where I started working at my first restaurant job after not working there for 20 years. I was the new guy again and I didn't know where some of the stuff was even though we were already busy and I was expected to know my way around since I had worked there in the past. It ended up evolving into some other nightmare, but when I woke up, I thought it was kind of funny, that 20 years later, I was still dreaming about my first restaurant job. I'm sure I had plenty of dreams about the old place when I actually worked there, but the restaurant had evolved and turned into the new places of my life. Then, all of a sudden, I found myself back there, where nothing had changed and I was out of glassware, the customers kept appearing out of nowhere, the dining room was angled at a dangerous pitch,  and I was right back in the weeds where I started. But you don't really want to hear about it anyway.