I also worked full-time. The hours I spent in the office I was strung out on this “supplement” from GNC called Ripped Fuel. It had many ingredients, but for the purposes of this anecdote the primary one was ephedra. I also drank a lot of iced coffee.
It sounds awful and I’d beat Bean if he did something like that, but I was focused, efficient and had plenty of energy. I was also mostly happy.
Until the beginning of September, when instead of driving to Ithaca for my seventh semester of college, I flew to Paris, where I spent the first half of senior year.
You don’t want to know about me and packing. I started early. I packed for six weeks. One night, shortly after I got my tongue pierced, I was in my bedroom, sorting through a pile of jeans and thinking about Sisyphus. For once, I wasn’t high. I was trying to let my tongue heal. And my mom was hovering. She was hovering so low that she got all aggressive, confronting me about being stoned. She wanted me to know that it was pretty sad, she thought, that I had to smoke “pot” or I couldn’t stand to pack. Meanwhile, it was the first time in months I’d been totally straight while talking to her.
I laughed in her face, which didn’t help my case.
