Coffee and Heroin - Ari
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Coffee and Heroin<br>Being-in-bed
Ari<br>Aug 10, 2026
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There is a slight despair in knowing that nobody can live long enough to have all the answers.<br>I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee lately, it seems to be the only thing that keeps me motivated. Otherwise I’ll only ever work barely enough to remain in a state of comfort, spending most of my day alone in my room. It is relaxing as much as it is depressing, having no object. Most people have kids or work, but I have no kids, and I do not find my work particularly meaningful.<br>The comfort and pleasure in resting does not lie in sleep itself—sleep is a variable activity, full of horrifying sights, sexual thrills, and, more often than not, vague unease, uncertainty. The pleasure is in falling asleep. In that limbo, when the TV is playing, when your mom sits by your bed side and reads you a story—an ex of mine was particularly fond of Raymond Carver—and you begin to nod off; feeling conscious life, with all its daily concerns, slipping away into a dark interiority.<br>I write the above after reading an experience report on Erowid about heroin, and it seemed oddly similar to that pleasure that I practice,<br>We tried to talk, but the conversations would fade in and out as our consciousnesses faded in and out as well. I had the nods, something that I had never before experienced. I was awake but drifting in and out of a twilight zone. Short, strange dreams would fill my head space when I was out, and then I would come to to realize that those dreams were not my reality. This state was truly blissful...I liken it to that state you sometime achieve right before you fall asleep, when you hear sounds drift in one ear and out the other, and when nothing could be more perfect than your current little world of snuggle around you. That is the nods.1
one where I have no object, when I don’t drink coffee.<br>It is an easy thing to avoid the basic fact of life, that it is a question whose final answer awaits all of us. And I doubt it will be a satisfactory one. Plato wrote of a Socrates who claimed that existence is a prison. Experience is a trap that everything existing is ensnared within.<br>It’s easier to settle it at that, remain a pessimist. After all, pessimism is an objectively factual, nay, scientific position to hold. It is cold and hard and comforting like a fridge, and easy to latch onto. Then, dreams are merely electrical signals in the brain and the universe is simply the play of forces. But we always dream when we sleep, we just forget them, sometimes. There is no non-state, no off-button. Only the transitional periods, the twilights, and the pleasure of momentarily forgetting that you’ve forgotten something, before it comes roaring back in its full spectrum, and you try desperately to return to that lost time, where there was no pain, only because you cannot remember it.<br>Instead I can drink my coffee and forget that I can forget for a moment, and pretend it’s getting me closer to an answer.<br>I suppose it still is.<br>1Poppy Girl. “First Injection Felt Like A Bubble Bath: An Experience with Heroin (exp105692)”. Erowid.org. Nov 17, 2017. erowid.org/exp/105692
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