barbituventure

this one time i was in Thailand i had the unfortunate or awesome occurrence of finding out that every pharmacy has every imaginable prescription drug out in the market. i was out in chiang mai with nick after a few days carousing out in Bangkok and things had been going pretty well and it was pretty much a night to night alcohol diet. we met up with an ex-pat, tommy, i knew back from in the states who decided to move to thailand to learn some kickboxing the hard way.

he brought this chick named ally from australia out with him and she had a cute accent and ended hooking up with me for the rest of my vacation which was nice, but back to the barbituates.

our little party of four had just finished up a nice thai lunch fueled with lots of beer in the humid heat of the winter sun and tommy dropped casually that "all pharmacies are stocked with anything you want man, no prescriptions needed, just cash" and that was that. i was on soma break for the rest of the trip. anxiety? pill. stress? pill. ennui? pill. anxiety, is that you again? pill. it was an unending cycle which didn't quit til i had to leave the country and boy can i tell you the nightmares i had during withdrawals alone aren't worth me ever going on a binge again, at least not for awhile.

it was during one of these euphoric wavy daze that me and nick decided it was a good idea to rent scooters to travel around town. we rode up and down zipping through the busy streets, faster than everyone. it was like bombing a hill during 2pm traffic in the tahoe mountains, gunning the throttles, always faster in and out of the lead until i low sided at an intersection and thank god i didn't get run over and i was wearing that bike helmet they gave us at the scooter place.

I remember rolling twice with my backpack on and that probably saved a lot of skin off my back and i left the accident with little incident besides some scraped up elbows and knees and even the camera i just bought had survived the accident without incident. after the wreck i stood up and checked the joints and made my side to the side of the road where there happened to be a bar with a bunch of middle aged ex pats and a horde of concerned looking thai ladies who happened all to be working at the same bar.

i checked myself again and i couldn't believe that i was okay and by then nick had hauled and parked the scooter next to me and i ran to a local pharmacy to pick up some bandages and antiseptic since the last thing i wanted was gangrene on vacation.

we rode around some more after that, but i had had enough and the pills in the supply sack were running low so i wanted to get back to the hotel as soon as possible. i knocked on my hotel room after parking the scooter and went up to the room where ally from australia answered the door and asked me what had happened and i told her and then she laughed in my face and i always thought that was kind of a dick thing to do.

it happened to be a pretty okay night though because we kept buying beers from the liqour store next door and ally from australia kept going on food runs so that night didn't turn out to bad. and it didn't hurt either that i got woken up with the next morning either but i am sure it was more sympathy than anything but it kind of absolved the whole laughing in my face thing.

the barbituventure was fun, but once again those nightmares were bad and i couldn't sleep for like 3 nights straight without waking to some terrible trepidation swearing that all the fears, anxieties, and ghosts hadn't caught up back to me after all this time.