Today I’m not in nearly so much pain–a little sore, not much. Will probably take a Vicodin this evening and that’s about it.

Last night around midnight I took two of them together, and a few minutes later I was feelin’ no pain at all, just that woggly body buzz. James steered me into bed, and claims that as he was trying to fall asleep, I would snore, then say something nonsensical, such as “If you had fourteen heads, you’d be two heads short of sixteen! Hahah!”, then snore some more.

The thing is, while I am very grateful for its pain-dampening properties, it’s just not that much fun. I don’t really understand why people get hooked on things solely for the buzz–I don’t like the buzz. It’s annoying. It makes me feel as if my innards are inside a giant speaker. During my misspent youth, I took plenty of drugs that make you see interesting things on the ceiling, and a few of the ones that make you social and giggly (including alcohol, which is the worst of the lot by far), but I never had any desire to take the ones that just made you twitchy and high, and generally resented the jittery side-effects of the others. If there was a way to see things on the ceiling while the rest of the brain stayed cold sober, I’d have been delighted. I’m probably a poster-child for letting people figure drug use out for themselves, for that matter–having researched all my substance use thoroughly in advance, and having had no noticeably bad experiences, I nevertheless take no drugs beyond caffiene today, including smoking, and I drink maybe a half glass of wine once every few months. Who has time? It’s like useless but interesting electives in college–fun, glad I did ’em, but god, when would I find the time to study the history of alchemy now?

But anyway, the nasty buzz reminded me of the time or two I smoked opium. It’s interesting. It’s sort of like being falling down drunk–you’re bombed, you wouldn’t want to do it more than a handful of times, preferably while you’re young enough to feel no real ill-effects the next day, but it’s interesting once or twice. Very…hmm…disassociative. Your consciousness gets rammed down into a narrow band behind your eyes and along your spine. But that reminded me of the interesting thing about opium, which is the smell. It smells like a bizarre combination of wildflowers and diesel. And the smell of wildflowers reminded me of the single greatest substance on earth, which has nothing to do with drugs of any stripe–wildflower honey.

If you have never had wildflower honey, go out, find a seedy little hippy organic food place, and drop five bucks on a honeycomb of it. (It has to come in the comb, and they’re usually packed in little plastic tins. Yes, you have to pick wax from your teeth. It’s all worth it.) It makes regular bee-farmed honey taste like corn syrup with delusions of grandeur. It tastes like wildflowers smell. After a fresh rain. In springtime. It tastes like what people think spring meadows would taste like, when they don’t stop and consider all the mulch and bugs and deer poop. It’s like a platonic ideal, with waxy bits.

I recommend it highly as a Christmas gift for people that you don’t know what to buy something for, but have to get an inexpensive token gift for, by the way–that’s how I first ran across it. And if there was a 24-hour co-op around here, and if I weren’t Vicodined to the wind, I’d be skulking out to get some as we speak. Oh, well…