The smallest people in the world are barely identifiable by the eye. Think of the smallest, baby ants you can find crawling up and down your hands. This is what these little people look like because they often dress in all black. So in a way, they kind of look like little ants without the crawling abilities and sticky feet. These little people live in the mountains. They have to survive in a rough environment that send rocks and weather down at any minute, annihilating clans of the mini population.
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As people break up into smaller and smaller niche clicks, many of us never have to spend much time with people who aren’t like us. Our social groups become more and more homogeneous, leading to greater and greater them-against-us feelings.
Of course, there are lots of ways we can be the same and yet different. Conservative pro-gun Republicans and liberal pro-gay marriage Democrats aren’t all the same height, weight, shoe size, nor do they all share the same birthplace, number of siblings or favorite color. One place where you are still forced to spend time with others who may not share your core values is rehab. The one thing you all share is that you want to get off of whatever drug or substance to which you are addicted, but that might be it. Maybe recovery would be easier and less unpleasant if you all shared some other passion, some other interest. We need themed rehab centers. The best inpatient drug rehab centers already offer luxury accommodations and cater to the needs and wishes of top executives. And many rehab centers focus on one type of addiction, such as heroin. This just takes that concept a step further. Look at the recent comic book and related media conventions. Look at the regular convocations of fans of one TV show or another, or a film franchise, or tween book series. We like to dress up in costumes and/or put on makeup, forms or attend panels on minutiae related to our favorite book/show/film, and spend copious amounts of money on related merchandise: posters, figurines, temporary tattoo kits. There are already long-established theme parks devoted to Disney characters and films, and themed areas at Universal Parks & Resorts theme parks devoted to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Maybe a heroin detox center catering to fans of J.K. Rowling’s Boy Who Lived could be added. There are as many possibilities as there are fans. Not every tween lit hit will have the staying power to justify a theme rehab center, but maybe Alice and Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. For sports fans, there could be themed rehab for football or a specific team. Cult TV shows seem a natural for the theme park treatment: Arrested Development, Sex & the City, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The X-Files, even Breaking Bad. Anime and manga are popular enough that they could have a themed rehab or two, too. And there must be dozens of rock band possibilities. Naturally, they would still have to offer heroin addiction help, with licensed and trained medical professionals, proper facilities, treatment options and after care. But many treatment programs already teach that finding a passion to replace an addiction or redirect the time and energy realized after an addiction is in recovery is healthy and a good deterrent for relapse. Maybe this wouldn’t be the most effective long-term heroin abuse treatment, but it seems worth a try. People are very devoted to pop culture, conventions and festivals, and too many people relapse after recovery. If we can co-opt that devotion, maybe we can make recovery last a lifetime. One of the stranger films about drug addiction, and one of the strangest literary adaptations ever, is David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. It is not so much based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name as it based on Burroughs work in general and his life while writing the prose that would become the novel.
William S. Burroughs (1914 – 1997) was a writer and heroin addict, among other substances, and the latter seemed to be a strong influence on the former for most of his career. He was a friend and colleague of Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and later musicians including Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson. In real life, Burroughs several times sought heroin addiction rehab treatment help, but always relapsed and was allegedly still addicted and using at the time of his death. As a book Naked Lunch wasn’t so much a narrative as a series of vignettes. To turn those episodes into a film, Cronenberg used Burroughs life as a frame. He appears, thinly veiled, as William Lee, which is both the name of the protagonist in the novel as well as an early pen name that Burroughs used. Lee works as an exterminator, but discovers his wife, Joan, has been taking his bug powder and shooting it up like heroin. Lee becomes addicted as well, and begins to have hallucinations or visions of his typewriter coming to life, telling him he is a secret agent, and to adopt the cover of being a homosexual, because homosexuality is the greatest all-around cover an agent can have. He also gets a new drug from a mysterious Dr. Benway. Shortly thereafter, Lee kills his wife, seemingly accidentally, while attempting to shoot a glass off her head – he describes it as their William Tell routine – then goes on the run. The setting now shifts to Interzone, Burroughs’ surreal version of Morocco, and another assignment, involving an expatriate American couple named Tom and Joan Frost (based on Paul and Jane Bowles, expatriate American writers living in Morocco). Joan Frost looks like (and is portrayed by the same actor as) his late wife Joan. Lee discovers creatures called Mugwumps with penis-like protrusions from their heads that produce another addictive drug. Eventually he meets up with his friends Hank and Martin. He leaves Interzone with Joan, whom he kills at the border crossing in order to prove he is a writer. The film and the novel have little in common. The novel is a rambling road trip, with Lee pursued by police and looking for drugs, with digressions and stories, and Mugwumps who produce the addictive fluid from their actual penises – but the parallels to Burroughs’ life and early writings are everywhere. Burroughs did work as an exterminator. He was married – common-law married, anyway – to a woman named Joan, who was an addict (Benzedrine, not bug powder), and whom he killed almost exactly as depicted in the film. Burroughs later said he wouldn’t have become a writer if she hadn’t died. Burroughs also was an addict (heroin and cocaine) and a homosexual. Early works include Junkie (later Junky), originally published as by William Lee, Queer and the stories collected as Exterminator! Burroughs wrote the vignettes that became Naked Lunch in Morocco. Heroin isn’t mentioned in the film, but there are at least three different fictional drugs or substances used like heroin, and the film can be seen as the heroin-induced hallucinations of William Lee/William Burroughs as he writes Naked Lunch. While not specifically depicting heroin use, it shows the deleterious affects of destructive, addictive drugs on the addicts' life and psyche. |
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