Storytime with Jason00S2000
 

How I quit hard drugs, 8+ years clean from cocaine:

Back in 2014, culture had been changing ridiculously fast.

With the proliferation of the smartphone, how people lived was being rapidly switched from living in the moment in the real world, to everyone living through their digital selves. Instead of people watching a concert, or vibing at a party, people had their phones out to record, completely filtering their lives through the device first. How many people ever go back and watch a fireworks show from 10 years ago on their phone?

Us old farts, we grew up using 286 computers on green screen monitors, our games run on floppy disks and we were jealous as fuck of the first kid with a 486 and a hard drive to install the Wing Commander voice-acted addon to. The first time we played DOOM on a 386 with a colour monitor, it was fucking mind-blowing. The tech explosion was altering our lives on a nearly daily basis growing up, and all of the old social mores we learned as kids from the boomers were abandoned for this human-engineered apple picked off the shiniest, newest trees. I’d often find myself torn between awe and a deep, aching nostalgia for those raw, unedited moments of connection. An analog soul feeling lost in a new, digital world.

Being a gregarious, douchey socialite who spent his time running with tons of different groups and a wide variety of people, I had seen how incredibly different social situations had become with the release of apps like Tinder. Online dating on your PC was a complete turn of events for sure, but being able to swipe on profiles while sitting on the toilet, or at a bar, or... anywhere? I knew this was a pivotal moment in culture and society. It was like watching human connection reduced to a series of desperate swipes- gritty, fleeting, and brutally modern. We went from free-range humans to being in our own little algorithmic cages. Our entire view of the world, and people around us, seen through a lens not crafted by our senses, but by a system that reduces us to binary code and filtered through what the masters of this new tech wanted us to see, feel, believe.

I accurately predicted the complete twisting of dating with my book in 2013, my own attempt at making sense of why it had become so easy to get laid by a new woman, yet so difficult to actually find one to be with. The way we had been conditioned to behave influencing us in ways that it took grey hair, and maybe a divorce for some of you to figure out. Dating since the 00's, unknowingly built the foundations for the "situationship," which wasn't even a word back then—had completely taken hold of many of our lives. Remember, incels were basically not even a thing back then, and if you recall growing up in the 90's and 00's, even ugly, short dudes could get girlfriends. Before the Taylor Swiftification of the female mind, and the Tate-takeover of the redpill, the soul of romance hadn't yet been bartered away for casual encounters connected through a digital dance.

It was around this time that women I met within a 10-year age range of myself were attracted to me like crazy, probably because of my ridiculous abandonment of the social rules. Our society in the 00's and early 10's was still in such a flux that nobody could really manifest or envision what they wanted out of life, myself included, because there was an abundance of everything. So at this point, I ended up dating a Jewish woman nearly 15 years older than me, because she had such a unique take on life. She was crazy as fuck and I loved it, but being 35-36, I started to get the feeling that something was missing in life. Inside my soul, a nagging feeling, like a rock in your shoe on a long hike. The longer I would wait to address it, the worse my limp would become.

If you remember the early 2010's, the Vancouver Olympics, it was the best time of Vancouver's history... next to the time when the first Fast and Furious movie was released. My glasses are the most rose-coloured for when life was a simple time of 5.0s VS fart-tipped Civics. Food was practically free, rent was cheap, people were sooooooo non-politicized, and NOTHING WAS WOKE! Holy shit, you could socialize with every crowd and crew, and if you went to a party of 50 people, you could have 50 different personalities to mingle with. Life was truly a serendipitous adventure every step of the way. But by a 1/3rd of the way through the 2010's, there was a feeling in the air, a great disturbance brewing. It may have been my age, it could have been the quick death of hipsterism, or maybe the rapid rise of the woke, but I knew the Jason00S2000 of the 00's and 10's was being squeezed from all directions, steadily crushing my soul in a world obsessed with control.

My lizard brain took over, and I was no longer interested in the older girlfriend and simply, easy comfort. I dumped her dusty ass- and during that end-of-summer vibe, I searched like a terminator for the most beautiful, younger woman I could find. Eventually, I met a gorgeous late-20something woman from a rich, upper-class family. It was mating season, and barely a few weeks after I met her, she made a phone call to me on a Monday afternoon.

"Jason, I'm pregnant."

Let me tell you, if you don't have kids, those words hit like a fucking mack truck doing 500 MPH in a BeamNG drive video, shattering the carefree aura I’d cultivated after the nightmare storm of my painful youth.

It was that day, after that phone call with my sweaty hands, that I made the decision to permanently quit coke. I had been a bit of an addict after being around circles like the BC TV and Film industry where EVERYONE did coke, or the mortgage brokers, or IT professionals, or, God save us all, the North Van firefighters who were sniffing more Bolivian marching powder than Bieber trying to forget being diddled by Diddy. Previously, I had dated an actress who basically just came to my place to do coke and bang all the time, which was certainly fun, but I knew I was in a place where the good times were coming to an end. The culture was shifting so rapidly, and, I felt it intangibly in my soul, that the coming years were not going to be changing for the better. That phone call was a brutal wake-up, a titan-sized hand reaching through my cellular device delivering a cosmic-scale bitchslap that forced me to reckon with the reality I’d been dodging for years.

That very next Saturday, on my Facebook, I got word that my dealer, East Van Mike, or Dagger Mike, as he was known at Funky Winker Beans, overdosed off his own supply and died. Nobody at the time knew this new drug called fentanyl that seemed to be floating around and getting mixed into other drugs. You can imagine the look on my face when I realized I would've normally picked up drugs on a Friday night and partied with my friends all weekend, as was normal for many people in the 00's and early 2010's; the shock and survivor's guilt gutted me like a stock D-series engine running 40 PSI on 87 octane.

Over the next coke-free 9 months until my child was born, I watched as nearly 10 of my friends and acquaintances dropped dead from poisoned drugs. Fentanyl was in EVERYTHING at this point, the overdose death chart rocketed up like a hockey stick, and the hipster community dropped faster than Elias Pettersson's goal output. Each loss was a raw, open wound, watching so many unique souls get swallowed up by Satan’s snort. PJSalt

With my newborn’s innocent eyes on me, I understood that the age of unbridled chaos was done, and that true growth in my own life meant honoring those losses by choosing a path of hard-won redemption.

But that's another story...

I was on the 5.0 side of things back then. :)

Also, many of us remember that "political correctness" was absolutely was a thing in the 90's/2000s. You just didn't have such an effective rage machine aimed at you back then to get you all bent out of shape about it. Only people like Rush Limbaugh (rot in hell) or Doug Collins from the NS news.

All sorts of words can be used to describe someone who doesn't fit into society, austistic, aspergers, bipolar, schizo, retarded, there are so many terms for people who are different. Recently watched a bunch of videos of Indian cannibals living on the Ganges river and they didn't seem that strange, you know, other than the whole decorated skulls and eating people thing. I'd probably have more in common with them than a normie Canadian boomer in 2025.

I experienced first hand how quick people will label others at the start of COVID and during BLM when I expressed my skepticism... even doubts that were based 100% on legit, sourced information.


Here's the thing about being "politically correct", do you remember life from like the 90's until about 2013? We were free to talk about basically anything and as long as you weren't hateful and trying to cause violence, you could talk freely. Yes, there have always been rabble-rousers for money and attention, but nothing like the explosion of that like we saw with the rise of wokeness. Do you remember what the front page of YouTube was like for the first few years? A golden age of self-expression.

My art / writing career has been kneecapped so hard by the current paradigm, for example, in 2017 I had been dropping bombs on Twitter about how society was progressing in a more authoritarian and less-free direction, and I had about 3000 legitimate followers.

On International Women's Day of 2017, I just tweeted:

"Women don't have a penis"

And my account was completely nuked. Not a 24 hour ban, not a 7 day ban, but completely nuked! How is that statement hateful, I did not even tweet it at anyone.

So do you like coke or do you just like coke laced with speed...

Somehow I don't think you were a patron at Funky Winker Beans, you might be the 1st RS-crackhead in that case :lol

More of a question, what spurred your sudden return, and more so, this flow of written consciousness?

I'm curious here.

Give it some time, this is like a slow-brewing coffee, pull up a cup and wait for it to percolate.

2010's was a hulluva time. care free and lettting the good times roll.

I still can't believe there has never been a TV show or anything made about ClubVibes.com, the energy that Vancouver had in the 90's and 00's was fucking incredible.

Last year I was able to spend some time in Vancouver wandering around and visiting some old spots. The vibe is so much worse. Young people today pay so much more to have so much less than we did.

We lived through the BEST of times, it actually makes sense that nobody makes TV and film about our era, because kids today would either not believe it, or riot in the streets if they knew what they missed out on.

ahh clubvibes. havent heard that in ages lol.

shit was so much purer,cleaner and cheaper back in the day. too much cut sketchy shit these days.

being a dad changes your whole prospective on life. cant party anymore like back in the day.

also wondering what brought you back to RS?

Do you want the short version, or the long version?

Hol' up, I have to walk to the nearby middle-of-nowhere gas station for a 11.9% beer, and I'll give you the short version. :toot:

The sweet period was from the 2000's to 2015ish. after that everything went to the shitter.

Hobbies to the parties to the basic necessities to the lg's( can't forget them). the best was had. scared what kids today will face in their teen years. maybe similar to fashion, everything will come back?

Get to this motherfuckin story already

Is it true that heavy coke use will dissolve your sinus/mess up your nose?

You have to be a celebrity or rich football player to have that level of cocaine use, or close to it, because to do that is extremely expensive.

If you're spending $200-$300 a month partying with the Devil's dust, your nose will be fine. Going from a coke using womanizer to a father of an infant in the space of 1 year was much, much more difficult than actually quitting coke. Quitting was the easy part.

The tough part is trying to figure out how you're going to be the type of person to instill good values in your kid, when your values were simply aligned with feeding your dick hot pussy, your stomach cold booze, and your nose that Beelzebub's bump.

In some professions, you basically can't get away from it, it will always be around. Kitchens, TV and Film, IT professionals...

Welcome back.

Lol I used to go to funkys for karaoke. One night I spent the night drinking with ChiPig from SNFU and we each sang like 10 songs. It was fucking awesome.
That's another guy lost to addiction on the DTES.

ChiPig used to walk around the DTES in a shiny gold suit when he wasn't too fucked up, in the early days of 2009-2010(might have been a year or two later, I forget) I hung out with him at Pub 340 because they had really good and really cheap prime rib and other food deals and I'd run into him there. He was pretty coherent at the time and told hilarious stories about being a musician. He was completely fucking out of it right around when hipsterism dropped off a cliff in like 2015-2016ish. The last time I saw him, probably the winter of 2015, he was completely nonsensical and just lying in a doorway in the rain.