Needles

Number 2 of 100 from the same meme that Knives is from. Warning! This has some language in it that might not be suitable for young kids.

I have a bad habit. It's particularly bad in this day and age, when the tools are easy to get and the stuff itself is on every corner. I've been in and out of jail for my bad habit, in and out of the hospital for my bad habit, and in and out of sanity for my bad habit. I'd love to stop, really. I would.

But some habits are just hard to break.

There's a vein that runs along the inside crook of your elbow, called the median cubital vein. It's pretty big, pretty easy to spot. You get to it best when you have your elbow bent. This vein goes straight back to the heart, a clear shot to that big wiggling muscle inside your ribcage that makes you tick. That's where the game starts.

One tiny little pinprick, and then you've got a full-access doorway to that marvellous crimson stream people so often waste. Into that doorway, you know, I'm quite fond of introducing various things. I'd done the usual rounds of drugs-- ketamine, opioids, depressants, you know the lineup. Nothing really did me the good song, though, like Red Sunrise. I don't remember who it was that showed me the first time, because I was probably high off my bucket, but after that, man... After that, Red Sunrise was my new god.

In its base form, my dealer said, it's a strong hallucinogen used for ages by old monks and priests to “contact God.” Well, I knew that whatever it was that caused the geezers in monasteries to write the crazy shit they did was going to be good enough for me to get a ticket on the electric flapjack, and I dropped a wad of bills on this shit every time I saw the guy. It came in little bottles, almost like test tubes, with rubber corks jammed into the top. The stuff itself was a dark green, almost black until you held it up to a bright light. Reminded me of when you put a shit-ton of Kool-Aid into a tiny bit of water.

And it hits you like a brick to the temple, man. You go out for hours of real time but it feels like years of your life go by in these fucking sick trips. It turns your arm green for a while, but that's a small price to pay for what you see in these walks, man. With me, I'm always walking through this field of flowers, but the flowers are thousands of tiny human faces, and they are all screaming and biting their tongues off but I can't hear them because I'm not listening, and the ground is made of bone dust and the air is heavy with a sickly-sweet smoke. And man, every time, I always meet this dude with four eyes, two on top of each other on both sides of his face, and he's got these teeth, man. Fucking wicked teeth.

And he tells me secrets. He tells me where to find more Red Sunrise, always the same guy selling it. He tells me who people are and what they do. He's like a fucking voyeur's dream. He tells me where to go and where to look to see the hottest shit go down, he tells me which girls are hot to do what I like. He makes me promise to him, every time, though, that for every secret he tells me I have to give him a pint of blood.

A body only has like 5 or 6 liters of blood at one time, so that's only like 34 secrets for a liter. And a liter is a lot of blood, you know? A lot to drop all at one time.

So I got wise on this, yeah? I started stocking up.

...what, you think I'd use my own blood? Fuck that shit. Better yours than mine, fucker.