I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

(Hunter S. Thompson)

It’s still interesting to look back on my life are realize that far too many of my role models were drug fiends. Jim Morrison and Hunter S. Thompson – two rather influential figures in my development, both with historical personas fully ripped to the hilt on psychedelics. As were Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane. Howard Hughes was addicted to his meds and his need to succeed. There’s a Richard Feynmen and an Ursula K. Le Guin thrown in here and there for balance, and a Lynn Hill opposite a Mia Hamm, but the big influences were famously portrayed as drug freaks.

I’ve often wondered why I never got into the drug culture – that mythical component of society we hear about, are at times fascinated by and sometimes want to imitate. Would Pulp Fiction be half as cool if John Travolta was on a sugar high instead of pumping heroine into his body.

Oh, lord, set me free of my worldly senses and drop my mind down a rabbit hole that I’ll never want to crawl out of.

The thing is, although there’s some sort of dangerous allure, like wanting to take up smoking cigarettes – rage against societal conventions, it just seems like too much work to really get into drugs. Even the dead-head culture, those hippy souls born twenty years too late that wear their colorful drags and talk in aluff tones, the ones you see at the University of Michigan head shops and trip over at any number of open air concerts – that look isn’t by accident. It takes thought and determination to appear that spaced out.

I’ve seen some of the drug scene – you have to go to parties and know people to buy drugs from, and then there’s the paraphernalia investment.

Accessories like three foot Joker bongs don’t come cheap, and what kind of gutter college kid degenerate wants to toke from a plastic pipe? Yes you "can" fashion a pipe from an empty tube of M&M-mini’s (or an apple), but why go to the trouble? If you’re going to take a hit, you want to do it in style – and I’ve seen the prices of those colorful handmade glass smoking accessories. The thought of dropping $50 on a piece of glass to smoke from just doesn’t compute.

Probably the allure is so docile in my brain because I do more or less act like I’m "on" something from day to day. Nothing serious, it just looks like I’m on a mild tranquilizer most of the time. The thing is, I’m just naturally mello, probably due to low blood pressure and a weak heart.

Maybe my body is too sensitive, if you’ve never gotten into drugs in the first place, then a cup of Star Bucks still gives your heart a stiff kick and one beer makes the head swim like a nymph in Bacchus’s cup of ale. So what’s to be gained from escalation?

"Dude, I’m taking drugs to expand my mind."

"Oh, really?"

I’ve actually heard a searching-for-purpose prelaw student drop this line before. If that’s the argument, wouldn’t you want to be expanding your mind on a continual basis? If it’s really to gain some new perspective, wouldn’t it be better to have that ability all the time, not just after you pop a pill? If you rely on a drug to do all the work – you’ll never have any hope of reaching Nirvana, just brief windows of enlightenment that close before you can crawl your lethargic mind through the opening.

I suppose you have to get into the habit of taking drugs. I tried this with cigarettes. I was stressed out doing a Master’s in Materials Science and thought I’d take up smoking to bevel the edges of my twisted head – but I’d never finish my pack of American Spirits and the cigarettes never really fit that well between my lips.

I also smoked cigars for a time – and never inhaled again after nearly vomiting my brains out one fine afternoon while sunning myself on the outdoor patio.

All of this doesn’t really make sense, my parents both smoked for over thirty years and both my sister and I grew up in a smoking environment. Most kids I know in such a situation grow up puffing with their parents, or hiding it when they go home for Thanksgiving. Is this undesire to get my head twisted around a drug addiction just my quiet way of rebelling against my parent’s cigarette habits?

I hear it’s more colorful to get twisted in this world, but my mind has too many turns as it is. I pity the fool who need a hit to see the light – and the equally uninspired pious minion who never even considered the option.

"My attorney had never been able to accept the notion — often espoused by former drug abusers — that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I for that matter."

-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Movie Script

I like to live my life in quotes. Tiny bits of inspiration and demise that ingrain in my brain and refuse to leave no matter the medicine. A woman’s look, a jagged teacher’s scowl, unintended slivers of approval and rejection weave their way through your spider web and form the silk fabric called your life. How to handle the bleak vastness of it all?

Come as you are.

Taken out of context, out of the original environment, placed into a new sphere, movie quotes, lyrics, bits of spoken words, they inspire no matter the journey. Part of getting through life is just figuring out ways to keep your inspiration burning hot and to maintain that lust for continued existence. That clique, that over done plot line, that thing that gets me up in the morning.

The Gods envy us.

How does watching Natalie Portman blow up Parliament with a train load of explosives in V for Vendetta make the challenge of my PhD easier to handle? She’s fighting political oppression in a 1984-Orwellian future London and I’m sitting in a present day office enjoying a well paid PhD job and depressed with screwing things up.

But somehow it works.

Somehow watching her beaten down by V and reborn without fear makes the fool stress and confusion abate.

Abstraction, take an element of one thing, and transpose it onto another. Like tracing an image of the Earth on to the shadow of the Moon.

Where’s your will to be weird?

Take Edward Norton’s character from Fight Club and transpose it onto my situation. Replace a boring insurance job with the mundane details of a research project. Take out the influence of loveless fathers, replace with indifferent teachers, and use mountaineering instead of bare knuckle boxing.

Instead of physically challenging myself with destructive acts like bare knuckle boxing I climb mountains and balance on rock ridges.

All the elements are there to form a transition from the mundane to confident researcher, morphed into weekend mountaineering warrior. For some reason, things just click.

Does this mean you should take all the elements from your favorite movie and mold your life around them? Ah, no…that’s like stalking the person you think you’re connected to, the one who doesn’t love you back. That’s like falling for Mary, she only makes you feel good about yourself, but it’s not love that you feel, it’s just an unhealthy obsession.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Find those elements of inspiration that work and extract what you need to make your journey through life easier to bear and figure out.

Then the mountains and the work and the broken flowers don’t seem so fatal and maybe the vastness of your life becomes digestible.

Much spunk is made about decisions. To survive you have to get involved and make choices in life. Maybe you stay up at night wondering if you should make one or not, because, of course, you have to make one or two eventually. After all, they make the world go wrong. You make one and then wonder if it was right or not.

All those factors, those variables to consider, what if the camera cost too much? This bike doesn’t have shocks, but it does have the disc brakes. Should I run the fatigue test with a median strain of 0.10% or 0.20%? And maybe I’ll buy a mountain bike later, which would make the shock variable moot. Hey, let’s go find Osama, no wait, ok…invade Iraq.

There’s right and wrong – good and evil in the world. We’re taught this from birth, and it’s the basis for many beliefs and books. But when are choices really black and white? How do you know if it was the right decision? You think you know, but do you really?

If something goes wrong it generally just means you did something that your boss didn’t agree with. You know for sure it was the wrong course of action because your ears are physically being assaulted by his voice. Or maybe it’s more subtle, the wife throws something in your direction or the guy walks off in a huff.

But what does it mean if something is right? Well, no one yells at you or says that you screwed up. They’re silent because there’s nothing to complain about. You still get a paycheck and everything goes on, da doom, da doom doom doom.

In most situations you can’t understand and anticipate all of the factors that will eventually establish the criteria for that lonely little decision being the Right choice. But if things start to go wrong, just change the game, rewrite the future history – and make some new decisions.

Break the original decision up into manageable pieces. The path from black to white has a maximum of 256 shades of Grey (if you’re looking at a computer screen) and you can lean very far in either direction without being totally black or blown-out bleached white. If things start to wrong, just make some new decisions and swing back to the correct course.

Above all, don’t be afraid to fail. When you get the fear of failure inside you start to hesitate and second guess yourself. With the exception of those universal moral truths, the only real failure is letting fear cripple your ability to choose between Pepsi and Coke.

But the only thing on my mind at the moment – the decision, the question to be answered, you know the conflict: should I try to solo the Fusshorn (and possibly the Aletschhorn as well) over the weekend or safely stay home in Zurich?

If there’s no post by next Friday, we’ll be able to convincingly say – in hindsight, that it was a poor course of action to follow.