"Are we having fun yet?"
October 21, 2009 11:42 AM   Subscribe

The Last Crack Hipster "The media got it a bit wrong, he said. It’s not quite the bogeyman that they make it out to be. People who snuffled mountains of coke for years, the instant someone mentions crack, they freak out, panic, run the other way."
posted by mylaudanumhabit (93 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Granted, it’s highly addictive, and granted, it destroys people’s lives. Lots of times, a person will hit it and not feel anything much and be like, What’s the big deal? You hit again and again and again for a night. But the next day you don’t necessarily want crack again.

So go ahead and hit it one more time. Chase that dragon. Chase it, I say!
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:51 AM on October 21, 2009


The media got it a bit wrong, he said. It’s not quite the bogeyman that they make it out to be.


No, crack is not quite a bogeyman.

But it is an awfully good way to attract some page views, especially when you combine it with the buzzword "hipster".
posted by jason's_planet at 11:52 AM on October 21, 2009 [7 favorites]


Do they smoke it in pipes fashioned from PBR cans?
posted by tommasz at 11:56 AM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


Ohh, it sounds so romantic and artistic, a crack connoisseur in a hovel in NYC. Cool. So incredibly cool.

Pussy.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 11:56 AM on October 21, 2009 [3 favorites]


Say what you will, but this is pretty decent writing, and I found it interesting.
posted by Damn That Television at 11:56 AM on October 21, 2009


Damn That Television: " this is pretty decent writing, and I found it interesting."

Disagree on both counts.
posted by Joe Beese at 11:58 AM on October 21, 2009 [11 favorites]


Chase that dragon. Chase it, I say!

Not to be pedantic, but chasing the dragon is smoking heroin off tin foil. Not smoking crack.
posted by dortmunder at 11:58 AM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


Thank you for teaching me how to smoke crack! Yay!
posted by Evangeline at 11:59 AM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


My wife bought me a crack pipe once.

Well, she didn't mean to. She needed to catch the bus one morning, and had only a 20 dollar bill, so went in the little corner store next to the bus stop to get change. Of course, they made her buy something, and she saw those little glass vials with tiny roses in them, and thought it'd be a cute present for me. The cashier looked at her funny, but sold it to her (though he didn't include the steel wool). She carried it around in her purse at work all day, and gave it to me that evening. Then I told her what it really was.

Good times.
posted by MrMoonPie at 12:00 PM on October 21, 2009 [36 favorites]


In regards to
My usage of the drug...
It modified my personality
To the extent that I was
Highly irritable.
I was like a crack Hitler hipster.
posted by scatter gather at 12:05 PM on October 21, 2009 [10 favorites]


Prospective Shoe Court Shoe Store employee (Bob): It was great. It's crack. It gets ya real high.
posted by gagglezoomer at 12:06 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


Chase that dragon. Chase it, I say!

Not to be pedantic, but chasing the dragon is smoking heroin off tin foil. Not smoking crack.


And taking crystal meth while wearing a vibrating heat-bead suit is riding the snake (transcript).
posted by filthy light thief at 12:07 PM on October 21, 2009 [7 favorites]


Haha riding the snake -- what an awesome reference
posted by mylaudanumhabit at 12:11 PM on October 21, 2009


This 30-year-old college dropout graffiti artist who takes money from his parents and smokes crack is fly, yo!
posted by brain_drain at 12:13 PM on October 21, 2009 [5 favorites]


Also, I thought this passage was particularly insightful -- I mean wow:

These kids are coming up and technology is going to drive them hard. Insane. Everything that you do is just going to be out there. Look at Twitter: “I’m eating dessert.”
posted by brain_drain at 12:15 PM on October 21, 2009


Wikipedia would have us believe that both uses of chasing the dragon in this thread were proper.
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist at 12:16 PM on October 21, 2009


I believe that was the single most irritating piece of writing I've encountered this year, and that's putting the content wholly aside. To address the content: drug addicts found in all walks of life.
posted by nanojath at 12:17 PM on October 21, 2009 [4 favorites]


When I was at college I remember one of the professors was an expert in drug addiction. He talked about the absolute horse shit that was the received wisdom (aka hysterical tabloid press in the UK) at the time which suggested it was 'one hit of crack and you are hooked for life' so I understand that some people, supposedly, can take it or leave it. So I take that might be a fair point.

However, the writing is terrible. It's the kind of sub-Vice shite that appears in free papers in every hipster dive bar in every city in the Western world.
posted by ClanvidHorse at 12:18 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


I've always known 'chasing the dragon' as a general reference to attempting to capture the high you got off substance x over a binge period. By the end of a binge a 'hit' of x has little of the intensity of hit one. Nevertheless, chasing the dragon, one keeps going harder and faster trying to recapture the hit one feeling.
posted by Babblesort at 12:19 PM on October 21, 2009


This has always been a class issue with a sprinkling of racism thrown in for good measure. Notice how Whitney Houston vehemently denied smoking crack. I knew a girl who started everyday with a nice little mimosa and somehow thought she was doing something fundamentally different than the blue collar guys who would religiously lineup in the morning to grab a 32 oz Coors Light poured into a Styrofoam cup at the friendly corner store.

And the proper way to spell New York? A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork.
posted by geoff. at 12:20 PM on October 21, 2009 [4 favorites]


I know a hipster who refuses to speak to his mother because when he was addicted to cocaine she casually referred to his crack addiction. "It was so declasse. I couldn't forgive her."
posted by jefficator at 12:21 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


I read this while eating a tri-tip sammich, so I don't feel like I've lost any real time. However, what was the premise of the article again?
posted by jsavimbi at 12:21 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


I can't decide whether to say whether "The Last Crack Hipster" sounds like a quirky knockoff of "The Last Unicorn" or if "Crack Hipster" sounds like a forgotten B-52's song.
posted by hellojed at 12:22 PM on October 21, 2009 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: Granted, it’s highly addictive, and granted, it destroys people’s lives.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:24 PM on October 21, 2009 [3 favorites]


i don't think there was a single paragraph in the article that didn't make me think to myself; "what the fuck is he talking about?" am i the only one who didn't catch hardly any of his references?
posted by rainperimeter at 12:26 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


So while we're at it can we get an Instructables for autoerotic asphixiation too?
posted by scalefree at 12:29 PM on October 21, 2009


am i the only one who didn't catch hardly any of his references?

There were a lot of references to Dash Snow and that whole subculture. There was a backgrounder on him and that whole scene previously covered on MeFi when he died.
posted by deanc at 12:30 PM on October 21, 2009


Written by The Last Unabashed Hunter S. Thompson Imitator, I see.

Or wish, rather.
posted by Shepherd at 12:33 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


Ugh, I hate cocaine and its cousins. Its rapid-acting asshole fuel.
posted by The Whelk at 12:38 PM on October 21, 2009 [20 favorites]


Written by The Last Unabashed Hunter S. Thompson Imitator, I see.

My thoughts exactly.

On top of that, I have a distaste for anyone trying to romanticize drug usage but I guess it's OK because its New York and the characters use colorful language and have colorful names.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 12:38 PM on October 21, 2009


I've always known 'chasing the dragon' as a general reference to attempting to capture the high you got off substance x over a binge period.

It originally referred to the method of smoking heroin on tinfoil that came out of Hong Kong. The idea being that you gently heat the heroin so as to vapourise (rather than burn) it. As you melt the powder into liquid, to maximize the delivery of the drug, you have to tilt the foil and let the bead of dope run down the tinfoil, following the bead with your smoking tube. Hence 'chasing'. The 'dragon' part comes from the idea that the plume of smoke resembles a dragon's breath. It takes a fair amount of practice and hand/eye/mouth coordination to master, if you aren't going to waste expensive drugs.

Here in the UK at least, smoking crack in the same fashion -- on the foil with a smoking tube also made of foil -- also gets called 'chasing the dragon', but smoking it in some kind of makeshift pipe us just called 'smoking crack' and is never referred to as 'chasing'.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 12:43 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


We should encourage more of the idle rich to kill themselves and if piss-poor pseudo-journalism such as this is what it takes, so be it.
posted by Abiezer at 12:47 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


Wikipedia would have us believe that both uses of chasing the dragon in this thread were proper.

Yeah!

take that, you pedantic, humorless fuckers
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 12:47 PM on October 21, 2009


The Last Crack Hipster likes to point to the 1990s. The year that Nevermind dropped, in September 1991. A week or two later, the world went gaga for Michael Jackson’s album Dangerous, with the hit single, “Black or White.” But by January, Nirvana was ruling the charts.

I intend no hyperbole when I say that George W. Bush could write better than this.
posted by Joe Beese at 12:48 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


Most of the heroin on the west coast of the US is tar herion which you really can't chop and snort so with a lot of users being averse to needles foil smoking is a lot more prevalent out there than it is on the east coast where snorting is more typical among non-IV users.
posted by The Straightener at 12:49 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]




Written by The Last Unabashed Hunter S. Thompson Imitator, I see.

Nah, this thing's way more Faux Tom Wolfe. Notice the author sort of taking on the voice of the subject, the broad ironic distance masquerading as novelistic third-person intimacy? That's Faux Wolfe. Actually not bad Faux Wolfe, to my mind, but Wolfe nevertheless.

Now had this guy actually bought himself the biggest rock the Chef had in stock and then spent a weekend in a stupor in some Williamsburg sublet, shouting profanities at hipster passersby in the street below through a megaphone between extended Socratic dialogues with the ghost of Dash Snow? That'd be Faux Thompson.
posted by gompa at 12:56 PM on October 21, 2009 [15 favorites]


Can you help me out here a minute please mac,
asked Stevie Nicks as she revealed her back
Then I realized the flaw
Of illicit drugs in a straw:
Her cocaine tasted exactly like crack
posted by Astro Zombie at 12:56 PM on October 21, 2009


I can't quite figure out what bugs me about this article. I went into it expecting to be bothered by it, and I am, but it's not for any of the reasons I expected.

Any fool knows that smoking your drugs always leads to you wasting some. Hipsters always say they care about not being wasteful, but they never man up and just inject. F'ing hipsters and their ways.

No, that's not it.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 1:07 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


Damn That Television: Say what you will, but this is pretty decent writing, and I found it interesting.

Joe Beese: Disagree on both counts.

I can see your point on the first charge, but you are going to have to make a pretty strong argument to convince me that I didn't find it interesting.
posted by Damn That Television at 1:07 PM on October 21, 2009 [6 favorites]


Written by The Last Unabashed Hunter S. Thompson Imitator, I see.

I'm actually starting to dislike Thompson because of all the horrible writing he spawned. Seriously, a large selection of Thompson books on one's bookshelf is a real red flag, especially if he is someone claims him as their favorite author. Everyone influenced by him seems to never catch on to his great aspects - that he was first and foremost a very keen journalist and a clear writer - and focus on his raucousness and gonzo.
posted by fuq at 1:08 PM on October 21, 2009 [7 favorites]


Thts' what has happened with Celtic punk as well. They allw ant to be Shane McGowan, so they start every song with "Paddy has been drinking" and end them all with a fight, but neglect that McGowan grew up steeped in Irish folk music and literature, and that his songs often focus on the history of the Irish diaspora, and tales of war, and other tales drawn from the almost newslike reportage of historic events that you sometimes find in Irish songwriting. They want to be Shane the drunk, not Shane the poet or Shane the ethnomusicologist or Shane the historian.

Am I off topic? I've been smoking crack.
posted by Astro Zombie at 1:13 PM on October 21, 2009 [12 favorites]


Written by The Last Unabashed Hunter S. Thompson Imitator, I see.

Ahem.

Don't be dissing Dr. Thompson like that. This guy is a hack. Hack is whack.

*thwacks at invisible bats with a giant bowie knife, writes twenty paragraph exposition about the Platonic lizard-nature of the people in line at Starbucks then stabs his MP3 recorder to death for suddenly hissing at him for the fourth time in an hour*
posted by loquacious at 1:23 PM on October 21, 2009


Damn That Television: " you are going to have to make a pretty strong argument to convince me that I didn't find it interesting."

Maybe you were high on crack.
posted by Joe Beese at 1:25 PM on October 21, 2009


No, but that's the point. Hunter S. was good, but it wasn't because he wrote about drugs or because he could put on a warped writing style when it suited him. It was because he was smart. Imitating the drug thing and the oddball style thing without living up to the smarts? Yeah, that's precisely hack work.
posted by nebulawindphone at 1:26 PM on October 21, 2009


Seriously, a large selection of Thompson books on one's bookshelf is a real red flag, especially if he is someone claims him as their favorite author.

I have the same misgivings about Bukowski-philes (although my Thompson-tolerance is considerably higher).
posted by stinker at 1:37 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


Ugh, I hate cocaine and its cousins. Its rapid-acting asshole fuel.

A missing apostrophe turns that sentiment from interesting to awesome.
posted by Shepherd at 1:52 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


I thought this article was going to be about some hipster talking about the band Last Crack, who were actually pretty decent -- at least their early stuff, I haven't listened to their later works.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:52 PM on October 21, 2009


I've always known 'chasing the dragon' as a general reference to attempting to capture the high you got off substance x over a binge period.

I've always known 'chasing the dragon' as a general reference to how much 20th Level Paladin got his +5 Holy Avenger.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 1:54 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


Chasing dragons is some fucked up shit. Why you want to get them all nervous?
posted by everichon at 2:03 PM on October 21, 2009 [7 favorites]


This article doesn't make crack sound fun at all. Tacking up sheets over my windows because I'm afraid of The Man awaiting outside my apartment door with AK's.... no thanks. I prefer my drugs to make me careless and worry-free.
posted by Bageena at 2:04 PM on October 21, 2009


Chasing the dragon: prescriptive or descriptive use?
posted by fixedgear at 2:10 PM on October 21, 2009


Strange memories on this nervous afternoon in Los Angeles. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never actually exists — a dull gray roar, spikes on the noise floor. Los Angeles or San Francisco in the middle ninties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation shatters like a thin glass stem or bulb, for reasons that everybody understands before their time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty months — or very nearly years — when I left the desert half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed my BART pass under the Bay at eighty miles an hour wearing dumpstered jeans and a filthy black jacket studded with hard drive magnets . . . back beats booming in my ears in counterpoint to the clack of the track through the Transbay Tube at the self-transforming lights behind my closed eyelids, not quite sure which stop to take when I got to the other end (never stalling at the escalator, too tense to wait while I charged the stairs three at a time) . . . but being absolutely certain that only if I carefully chose which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was only madness in hard to find, dense, discrete pockets that may last only an hour or a day. If not across the Bay, then out in the deserts or in the dingy warehouses of Bayshore, or much further south to Vernon or Inglewood - or hiding in plain sight online at hundreds of different co-locations scattered around the globe tied together with the thin, fragile web-work of the DNS root servers, anywhere with an uncensored access point and a feed. . . . You couldn't go striking sparks just anywhere without bringing out the fire department inspectors or riot cops. There was a fantastic paranoid sense that whatever we were doing was dangerous, that we were playing with real fire for the first time with our hearts and minds. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of being sold a false bill of goods about the concepts of Old and Evil or even Victory. Rejecting any sense of false dichotomy; we didn’t need that. We learned from our elders. Our thirst for knowledge and truth would prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs — there were no sides. There is no fighting but that which is inside each of us. We had all the momentum and direction of a Rat King; we were riding the aimless crests of a million ripples in an increasingly dry pond, each pebble an individual splash, trying to keep the novelty going. . . .

So now, more than fifteen years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Los Angeles and look South, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the ripples still constructively interfering and echoing like holographic wavefronts — that place where they may become the endless marching crests that may finally break over everything that came before.

This time there was no high water mark, but an ongoing Biblical flood — a flood of trickles, a million small sparks in a tinder-dry forest all at once. This time the waves keep building from one generation to the next. No false ultimate peaks or arbitrary distinctions, no needless self importance or purpose — no boundaries.

No Manifest Destiny but ripples on the dance floor.
posted by loquacious at 2:23 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


Now I know why everyone hates journalists. sigh.
posted by Maias at 2:30 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


this is just to say
I have smoked
the crack
that was in
your stash

and will kill you
if you do not
get me more
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:30 PM on October 21, 2009 [15 favorites]


No Manifest Destiny but ripples on the dance floor.


A name is earned, a prodigal returns, that Six Under Episode with the crack subplot crashed and burned.
posted by The Whelk at 2:35 PM on October 21, 2009


Reading that makes me wish crack were lethal.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:37 PM on October 21, 2009


I can't quite figure out what bugs me about this article.

I'm annoyed because I'm going to hear some hipster vomit up some of this shitty prose to show off his street knowledge.
posted by electroboy at 2:47 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


I don't think I'm hip enough for drugs. I used to think I was, but no.
posted by heyho at 3:09 PM on October 21, 2009


I think that the author was trying to write as if he, himself, were hitting the pipe. Which is about as interesting as someone writing about stoners while taking bong hits.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:17 PM on October 21, 2009


Now I know why everyone hates journalists.

You say that like writing about your friends' drug use for the Style section was something novel and transgressive and hasn't been core business for the last forty years or so...
posted by PeterMcDermott at 3:39 PM on October 21, 2009


So what makes the subject of this article a "hipster"? I suppose the title is catchier than, "Some Dude I Met Who Also Happens To Be an Addict."
posted by xingcat at 3:53 PM on October 21, 2009


Didja ever wake up
Your face stuck to the pillow?
Did your mama every call you
An ugly gorilla?
You're a Crackhead!
posted by squalor at 3:58 PM on October 21, 2009


So what makes the subject of this article a "hipster"? I suppose the title is catchier than, "Some Dude I Met Who Also Happens To Be an Addict."

If I ever get the chance to write about someone I despise, I'll make sure to call him a hipster in the title. That way, the reader will already be full of loathing for the guy, before they've even reached the body text.
posted by kersplunk at 4:05 PM on October 21, 2009


I believe this article was written by taking good writing and cooking it up in a pan with baking soda until it was hard.

That said, there aren't a lot of stories about drug use that are interesting to anyone except users of those drugs, so this author started out behind.
posted by thedaniel at 4:14 PM on October 21, 2009


Man, that was so fucking cool. HAMBURGERTOWN.
posted by molecicco at 4:20 PM on October 21, 2009


See, with drugs there is always a line, and one's drug use can always go over it.

Everyone's line is different, and the problem is that you don't know that you've gone over it until you're well past it.

So, yeah, you can probably do crack for a night and never do it again. But if you do it one night with no negative repercussions and you just have a good time, why not do it next friday night? And the friday after that?

And so on.

The one-hit and you're hooked bs IS a problem, because it doesn't match up with peoples real experiences with drugs.

The reality of drugs (except opiates) is that they're an incredible amount of fun, they actually can greatly improve your quality of life (at least for a time), and that most of the time, most people can use them and not suffer any negative consequences.

You'll never know for sure if you're one of those lucky people, but you will eventually know for sure if you aren't.
posted by empath at 5:01 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


The reality of drugs (except opiates)

Opiates are as much fun as the others.

So, is crack really no more dangerous than cocaine? How do we know who to believe?
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:13 PM on October 21, 2009


So, is crack really no more dangerous than cocaine? How do we know who to believe?

Smoking is a more severe route of drug administration than snorting, as absorption by inhalation is more efficient and faster than through the mucous membranes. I think crack is also more likely to contain impurities than powder cocaine and can be considered more dangerous in that sense. Otherwise, I'm not sure. Maybe because using it exposes you to poor black people.
posted by granted at 5:49 PM on October 21, 2009


Remove 60% of the words, add eleven racial and/or ethnic slurs, ten F bombs and two brutal killings and you have the first three chapters of a James Ellroy novel.
posted by MikeMc at 6:27 PM on October 21, 2009


Oh, and at least one reference to Sal Mineo and J. Edgar Hoover dressing in stockings and garters and whipping each other, then you have some Ellroy.
posted by MikeMc at 6:30 PM on October 21, 2009


So, is crack really no more dangerous than cocaine? How do we know who to believe?

How about the research? Crack is no more dangerous than powder cocaine because what everyone forgets about powder cocaine is that you can shoot it, which is every bit as dangerous and addictive as smoking it. This is why the stupid mandatory minimums were bogus and known to be bogus the moment they were proposed because even if you can make the case that smoking is more addictive than snorting, you can't make the case that it's worse than injecting, which was being done with powder long before crack was intro'd to the market. The other ridiculousness is, of course, that with baking soda, you can turn powder into crack anyway.

Now I know why everyone hates journalists.

You say that like writing about your friends' drug use for the Style section was something novel and transgressive and hasn't been core business for the last forty years or so..


In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd argues that we should legalize sports betting but only allow newspapers to benefit from it to save journalism. I was tempted to write a letter saying why not just legalize marijuana , too? After all, journalism has been indirectly benefiting from selling drug panics for the last 100 years at least: if the Times was the authorized pot dealer, at least they'd be making that money honestly, rather than lying about drugs to sell papers.
posted by Maias at 6:41 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


is crack really no more dangerous than cocaine

Is bleach really no more dangerous than lye?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:42 PM on October 21, 2009


loquacious: "Ahem.
Don't be dissing Dr. Thompson like that. This guy is a hack. Hack is whack.
"

Hehe..
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 7:25 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


Smoking is a more severe route of drug administration than snorting, as absorption by inhalation is more efficient and faster than through the mucous membranes.

True. Bioavailability of snorted cocaine HCl can be anywhere from 20% to 60%, peaking in 10-15 minutes. For smoked freebase it's 57% with peak onset around a minute. Curiously enough oral bioavailability is a bit higher than snorted but onset is slower with a lower peak. By definition IV injection is 100% bioavailable.
posted by scalefree at 7:45 PM on October 21, 2009


Man, that article really sucked the last bit of fun out of smoking crack.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 8:11 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


The article may have come about because he's still smarting from – When Party Reporters Turn 30: The Miraculous Transformation of Spencer Morgan. I'm not so sure it will regain his reputation for him.
posted by tellurian at 8:49 PM on October 21, 2009


mr hipster, the 80s just called and would like their drugs, their rose pipes and their chore boy back

really - i knew all that shit 20 years ago and i wish to god i hadn't - it never agreed with me, thank god, but others ...

drugs can be a real bitch
posted by pyramid termite at 8:51 PM on October 21, 2009


I am EXHAUSTED with the "Hipster" bashing and the way the word gets tossed around. I lived in Brooklyn for 2 years. I was probably a hipster and I had a lot of hipster friends. YES! There are doofuses abound. But there is also a large number of incredibly talented, hard working, wonderful people scraping their pennies together to try and make it.

Are there trust fund babies? Yes. Did we drink PBR? Yes, PBR and whatever else was cheap. But we worked hard, we went to church, we went broke etc etc.

'Hipster' is a hugely broad category and I hate seeing that word just get blanketed over good, reasonable people. One guy smokes crack, that's his choice. What makes him a hipster again?
posted by GilloD at 8:55 PM on October 21, 2009 [1 favorite]


I went to high school with crack hipsters. I went to college with crack hipsters.

This guy isn't the last one, because hipsters are obsessed with fulfilling their made-up ideas about how "real" black men are.

Racist losers.
posted by bardic at 8:57 PM on October 21, 2009


I was thinking what I wanted to say about bleh this article is but bardic, man, you hit it on the head: "racist losers."

I'm so glad I don't live in New York.
posted by sleepytako at 9:06 PM on October 21, 2009


I just read this guy's article from last year about how people in NYC like to take baths and there was this gem in there

"...after returning from a tour of the legendary bathhouses that dot the peaks of Mount Fuji in Japan"


WHAT! Peaks? in the plural form? Mt. Fuji could not be more of a uniformly singular mountain in the world. That's a singular situation. The bathhouses (銭湯) dot the cities. ARRGH!
posted by sleepytako at 9:15 PM on October 21, 2009


According to my cousin, her dad -- presently dying in a hospice from Alzheimer's -- was apparently smoking crack. In his 70s.

After his wife died, he began spending all his retirement money on hoochie mamas (my cousin's phrase), mostly black-Hispanic, and had one that lived in his house and drove his car, except she also moved in her mother and her bastard kid. It probably started there. He eventually sold the house to extricate himself from this situation, but then had no place to live.

When he lived with us (and his dementia became apparent), he cracked up his car, and the cops found several bottles of hard liquor both full and empty within. He had always been a drinker, but functional. Eventually he moved in with my cousin, the only one of his children who -- okay, the one of his children who hated him less.

But when they started dismantling his life and opening his boxes, they had already put out several on the front lawn as "free" when they found a crack pipe and other interesting paraphernalia (sex toys, porn, etc.) in one marked "garage". They immediately made a new rule: no boxes on the front lawn until we check them thoroughly.
posted by dhartung at 9:33 PM on October 21, 2009


Okay, as one of the only people here who's ever actually smoked crack, I feel like I may as well share my experiences.

Crack is not that great. In fact, I would say that it's a waste of some perfectly good cocaine.

Years and years and years ago, I lived in a terrible neighborhood in a terrible midwestern city. And by terrible, I mean terrible -- according to the US census, nearly 70% of the people in my neighborhood were below the poverty line. Youch.

So there was this guy who we all called Crackavelli. Not a bad guy, but a crackhead. Pretty sure he sold it, too. He'd come around every once in a while, and we'd hang out with him because he was kind of amusing. I mean, he'd talk forever and it would be total bullshit, but he wasn't a bad guy and we didn't have anything else to do. We never thought he would steal our shit -- he just wasn't that kind of guy. I think he really just wanted to hang out somewhere.

Anyway, a few times when he came around, we traded him some weed to in exchange for the crack-smoking experience. And really, it's just not the kind of thing you want to do. I mean, I had done coke, and knew what that was like, but crack is like 1000 times the high, and lasts about 1/20th as long. So basically, for a few minutes, you feel probably the most tremendous high of your life.... and then you want MORE. Like, you'll be begging for it. You lose your humanity a bit, but not to the point where you'll step over your grandmother or anything. But you want it. You want it bad. It's undignified. Really, I'm lucky that Crackavelli was actually kind of a nice guy and cut me off after a few hits.

After the third time I smoked it, I was done with the stuff. It's just really not that great. I've done cocaine since, although I almost never even see the stuff anymore -- I don't move in those circles, and generally have better things to do.

But I can say that I know what crack is like. And I can say that, to a degree, I know what drives the average crackhead. There but for the grace of god go I, and that sort of thing.

And I can say this, experiencing the crack high really only reaffirmed my commitment to atheism. Because no loving god would ever create something like crack. No human being should ever have to experience a high like that and then have to come down from it. It's a terrible, terrible thing.
posted by Sloop John B at 9:37 PM on October 21, 2009 [7 favorites]


My experience with cocaine -- and it's limited to knowing people who used a lot of it -- is that it comes from far more dangerous territory than dope. Pot dealers have always struck me as guys who use their pot connection as a social lubricant. They pick up some extra money, they smoke up with their customers, sometimes score with a stoner chick, and they love the social aspect. They often buy the stuff from dropouts with farms, or hippies with hydroponics. It's a big, mellow, flaky world, and there are some crazy fuckers with guns, but you don't see them that often.

With coke, you are, at best, two degrees of separation from the crazy fuckers with guns. You go to a party with a guy who likes coke, he gives you a lift home, and on the way, he stops to score. And his guy is some party burnout. And his guy, his source, is a paranoid psychopath with a stockpile of weapons, and sooner or later people who are too close to his orbit wind up seeing some really crazy, blood-curling shit.

With crack, based on my experiences living above a crack house, the sellers are crazy fuckers with guns, their sources are crazy fuckers with guns, and the buyers are sometimes crazy fuckers with guns.

So crack may not be chemically worse for you than cocaine, but it's socially more dangerous. I won't go near any cocaine, because it travels with a bad crowd.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:10 PM on October 21, 2009 [2 favorites]


Astozombie's post might be dramatic, but he gets it. Go look up some Rat/Coke studies on Science Direct and get back to us. After my last very recent relationship none of your jokes are funny and now I'm looking for a nice straight edge Episcopalian girl in church to meet next Sunday and also I really miss the really nice and genuine chubette I had as a "go see bands buddy" last year.
posted by celerystick at 10:22 PM on October 21, 2009


"Geffen bet right. Kurt Cobain didn’t want to go on Geffen’s label; Sonic Youth leader’s, Thurston Moore, talked him into it, so they could go on tour together. The kids ate it up. Everything had been getting too phony and theatrical. They wanted something real. The grunge scene was real. Heroin somehow went along for the ride, as a “real drug.” But how did crack snake its way into pop culture"

Fuck Cobain,Sonic Youth, Galaxy 500 and other White Irono-Snots.. they SUCK anyway. PAPS : Privileged Art Pussies. gping to listen to old Supremes. Sorry you guys touched a nerve.
posted by celerystick at 10:30 PM on October 21, 2009


With coke, you are, at best, two degrees of separation from the crazy fuckers with guns.

My experience with coke users is mostly that it's sleazy guys using it to pick up girls at clubs that are far too hot and/or young for them.
posted by empath at 10:41 PM on October 21, 2009


Go look up some Rat/Coke studies on Science Direct and get back to us.

Not to downplay the dangers of cocaine, but many of those studies were later refuted (at least partially) by the goings on at Rat Park.
posted by Afroblanco at 12:24 AM on October 22, 2009


Metafilter: There are doofuses abound.
posted by thegreatfleecircus at 10:07 AM on October 22, 2009


Cocaine turns everyone who takes it into the same person, and that person is an asshole. I'd rather deal with a heroin addict any day.

Also, this may be a byproduct of getting old, but articles like this make me crazy with anger. Dash Snow as a patron saint of experience. Fuck that shit. Seriously.
posted by jokeefe at 12:22 PM on October 22, 2009 [1 favorite]


Well, he did experience being fantastically wealthy, then doing a lot of gack. I guess that's a kind of experience.
posted by electroboy at 1:22 PM on October 22, 2009


I miss drugs, but not the people you were forced to hang around with while doing them.

I guess that's called getting old.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:13 PM on October 22, 2009 [1 favorite]


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