Endangered Speedsies
With half the country out of work and annoying the fuck out of me by getting to lie in on Monday mornings, I’m hardly going to say that this bloody recession isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. Partly fabricated, maybe. Accelerated, certainly. But I must admit that what happened to me on Saturday night really hammered home the last nail on the Celtic Tiger’s coffin, really left me in no doubt as to how awful things have become for us, how desperate the times, how desperate the measures.
I was offered a line in a club toilet.
“Ah, the synthetic generosity of a coke binge,” said I, sagely, as my buddy gestured towards the cistern chopping block (cocaine users tend towards McGuyver-like resourcefulness; it’s something we should really utilise, as a nation. Times are tough, like).
“Oh, it’s not coke,” she said. “It’s speed.”
Speed. SPEED? I was mortified on her behalf, on the clubbing scene’s behalf, for the party animals, the Just Say No brigade, the politicians, the bouncers … for fucking everyone. Speed. Cocaine’s inbred cousin, more tragic in every sense; speed is so fucking pathetic it couldn’t even get Class A status. If cocaine makes you think of attention-seeking bipolars in media jobs or gangsta rappers on holidays, speed brings to mind scholarship kids, and part-time hand models, and weekday crusties. Speed is manky, kids. If you tried to talk to Frank about speed, he’d pretend he couldn’t fucking hear you, that’s how embarrassing the whole malarkey is.
I left the toilets fucking sharpish, crying for Ireland’s lost affluence. Also because I’d stubbed my toe on the cubicle door.
Now, let me make one thing clear. Had it been coke, I still would have refused the line. The only things that I allow get up my nose are good, fresh air, the smell of buttered toast, and the misogyny of Hollywood directors. I’m not a fan of cocaine. I don’t like what it does to people; it has a habit of turning them into insufferable cunts. Cocaine isolates the parts of you that common sense keeps tethered, and exaggerates the shit out of them. Which don’t impress me much, as I tend to have a very low tolerance for loud-mouthed gobshites (for fear they’d nick me spotlight). Cocaine can fuck right off.
But speed? Oh, Buddha. Speed is … well, it’s diet coke, isn’t it? Even its supersized version, crystal meth, is fucking tragic; it makes crack look like Moet. What hope for Ireland’s weekends when we’ve regressed so far as to think speed socially acceptable, for fuck’s sake? Five years ago speed was redundant – at best a specialised fetish for the terminally spotty. Now? Oh, I dread to think what comes next. Sniffing aerosol behind the bike sheds?
And this comes as Mexico starts the ball rolling on decriminalisation? If the Mexican government had witnessed what I witnessed clubbing in Cork on Saturday night, they wouldn’t have bothered their arses. Speed. Fucking speed. The dealers should be ashamed of themselves. Ireland might be wallowing in a recession, but that doesn’t excuse letting standards slip that fucking much.
“If you tried to talk to Frank about speed, he’d pretend he couldn’t fucking hear you, that’s how embarrassing the whole malarkey is.”
That’s fucking aces right there…..
Oh god, the country’s doomed. I come from the land of speed, San Bernardino County, the original home of speed and the bikers that cooked it up. Long, long before anyone else ever heard of speed, it was getting cooked up and dried in fiberglass bathtubs in trailer parks. Speed is awful, truly awful. Say what you want about coke-heads; at least they contribute to society. Speed fucks people up, fast. And heroin junkies? At least they’re mainly out of commission. But speed squirrels? Fuck no, I just came from a late-night trip to our local Wal-Mart, which was full of toothless tweakers picking imaginary bugs off of their pustulant sores and shiftily eyeing people up to see who would be good to hit up for change, or were they possibly an alien overlord, all the while shrieking at their snot-nosed, unfed, unwashed offspring.
Speed is bad. Unlike coke, it’s hard to know what they’re cutting it with, and every single thing in it is a hazardous substance.
Dammit, does that mean when I go over, you guys are going to have the same stupid ban on all the good cold medicine, like what we have?
And you know what? Never mind what they’re cutting it with, they were doing lines off the top of a toilet tank? Eeeeeeuuuuuugggghhhhh! The germs! Doesn’t anyone carry compact mirrors anymore?
Thanks, Mr. Waiter.
We’re really not all that discerning with how we get our illegal substances into ourselves, Sparra. Considering the speed was probably cut with powdered Brasso and engineered in the wheel well of a rusting tractor, you really can’t be.
Ha, I see your rusty wheel and raise you speed scraped off the side of a fiberglass bathtub, no extra charge for the fiberglass, of course.
What the fuck is this shit?
Get yourself on some PCP, bitch! It’s the way of the future. I killed a hobo in a fit of rage on it the other night. At least I think I did, might have been a phone box, or a cow, or a hallucination.
PCP?
How 80s of you! That retro shit is soooo hawt right now.
Fucking recession-beating chemists and pharmacists… barely into a row with the HSE and they’re churning out speed!
Oh
My
God.
That makes perfect sense, Conan. You think they could be behind it? There’s definitely something very Irish about manufacturing illegal substances but not bothering to do anything of quality.
Do people still do Angel Dust, I know it was big with my Gran and her bingo buds, but it seems to have died out. She used to get as a fucking kite. She once broke a priests jaw with one punch when he called out the wrong numbers. She was livid. Anyway, twas the highlight of their week to go the hall and get fucked up.
Fucking typos get right on my tuts.
Once they start with the whip-its, all hope is truly lost for Ireland.