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These Roses Are Crack Pipes
These roses are crack pipes. They’re sold at corner stores throughout the country, in neighborhoods where they’re needed. It’s illegal to sell drug paraphernalia, but it’s completely legal to sell these roses, and encase them in glass-tube packaging. They’re right by the register, otherwise they would be stolen constantly.
If you don’t smoke crack, you see a rose. Chances are, you don’t even see the rose. It looks just like more liquor store detritus, more useless impulse crap you don’t need. Or maybe it’s next to the items you lose easily, like cigarette lighters.
Look closely at the lighters. They often sell one behind the counter that works like a torch. Have you ever noticed that? If you smoke crack, you do. Also behind the counter is the tin foil and the steel wool. Again, if you smoke crack you know why.
This is the real world of parallel universes. There are multiple realities in the same physical space. You probably just see one of them, unless you’ve lived in more than one of them. You see the reality you need.
In San Francisco, beginning with the first dot com wave, people of different realities were forced upon each other’s spaces. The techies and the junkies lived in the same streets and buildings, used the same services, and ate from the same restaurants.
I was entering my peak alcohol and drug years while working at an animation company. I was drinking daily, doing drugs all weekend long, and producing short cartoons for the Internet using motion capture animation. My using was doing more damage than it was helping, and few people had the bandwidth for streaming video. I was doomed on both fronts.
My big plan was for the company to go public, get my big dot com windfall, and go to rehab. I had one picked out in Malibu, after I read about Ben Affleck and Robert Downey, Jr. going there. When I checked the price, it was 40 grand a month, close to what I made in a year. I would have to wait for the big score to get it together.
Peter Jackson swiped a bunch of my coworkers to go to New Zealand and work on Lord of the Rings. Part of me wanted to go. I was good in the motion capture suit, which made a lot of people queasy. But I was also afraid of being a blackout drinker in another country where my autopilot wouldn’t…
