Idealist; one guided by ideals;

I took a drug the other day.

It cost me just under AUD$2000.

I am not normally accustomed to such expensive thrills, such momentary pleasures – yet this was one I’d been planning for a while – months even – the seed of desire germinating slowly through long and endless days of corporate video-work and semi-permanent alcohol consumption.

The effects were … not without their pleasures. I can even say with a fair degree of certainty that I will consume the drug again, having been (not unwillingly) signed up to my dealer’s “preferred customer list” – an elite group in which the only condition for membership is a willingness to dabble in this drug … repeatedly. I even have a membership card!

I took the drug on a cold Wednesday evening some weeks ago, expecting fantastic visions and smells, incredible hallucinations of the ‘Other’ … unfamiliar places, wondrous sights, strange tongues – I expected nothing short of a total ideological overhaul.

The effects were … not immediate. It seemed as though I had been sold a dud. Hours past, and I began to feel worse, not better.

Twenty-nine sleepless hours later, I emerged from my climate-controlled cocoon into the blinding light of day, still clutching hopelessly at the ever-diminishing possibility of a drug-induced epiphany. The American-Indians took peyote medicinally to propel them into wild, enlightening ’spirit-journeys’ where they conversed with animals. But I didn’t feel any wiser, any more enlightened, and the only journey I had been on was a quick romp through pages 1 to 784 of the final Harry Potter book.

And then, without warning, it hit me.

Colours were brought out, made permanent, fluorescent – flickering in their intensity. Space had depth and was filled with movement as background and foreground danced together, compressing themselves into a single plane of glorious, Dali-esque surrealism.

Figures moved at speeds too quick for the ordinary firing of synapses to keep up, and motion was constant and exponential. Everything was right and wrong simultaneously, neither real nor unreal, but Hyperreal.

The hyper-real is about the excess of sensation (or perhaps the sensational excess?) – it is about being more real than real. More vivid, more intense: sensations too perfect to exist in the real world erupt in Technicolor beauty and Dolby Surround Sound.

Sleep-deprivation; serotonin-depletion; the interruption of my body’s circadian rhythms and homeostatic impulses; these were but a few of the side-effects (and perhaps causes?) of this hyperreality. The world washed over me. I was swallowed up and overwhelmed in its excess as my frazzled brain fought valiantly to maintain the Natural Order of Things.

But all I could do was fashion a puzzled smile, look bemused and shake my head at the complexity of it all….

… Jet-lag was the best drug I’d ever taken, and all it cost me was an airfare and 29 sleepless hours.

I have several cards in my wallet now – credit cards, bank cards, library cards, etc. But there is one card I carry as a badge of honour – proof that I belong to this exclusive club of drug-takers and junkies: my Frequent Flyer membership card.

My name is Michael Clay, and I am a jet-lagaholic.