The older set may remember going to a novelty shop and buying a balloon along with amyl nitrate “poppers.” For the uninitiated, you discharge the gas into the balloon, then inhale it to get a pounding head rush that lasts about a minute. (Do enough of these and you’ll also get a pounding headache!) It’s kind of like the poster child for “cheap thrill.”
Anyway, I bring it up because I think back on that now and it seems so immature and sophomoric, like a “Beavis and Butthead” activity that’s best left in the distant past.
And here’s the punchline: after just 40 days of the “straight life”, I’m beginning to see ethanol, weed etc in exactly the same light: a cheap thrill better left behind.
My Sunday morning meditation…