i don’t mind at all.

the reasons are varied and somewhat complicated.

as you may or may not know, for ten solid years of my life i was part of the straight edge community and dedicated to a lifestyle of abstaining from substances. over those years, my mindset and experiences changed quite wildly, from a violent, militant and entirely intolerant viewpoint regarding substances, to a laid back and extremely indifferent personal choice.

suffice it to say i’ve grown a lot over the past ten years. met many people, sober people, addicts, abusers, and casual drug users. 

for the past 3-4 years, i’ve become increasingly fervent in my nihilism, to the point where it has almost entirely consumed the essence of my philosophy. i still like to think of myself as an ethical egoist, although when it comes to ethics, i subscribe with passion to the concept of subjective morality. 

i may seem to be being quite long winded at the moment but i promise this is all relevant to my decision.

over the years, my feelings for the straight edge community, the hardcore community as a whole even, have dwindled. who i am as a human being, what i think and feel, how i express myself, even in this community where these things are supposed to be widely accepted, a haven for ‘outcasts’ as it were, i still felt like a complete stranger. i began to grow a deep resentment towards this, to think that this genre of music, this lifestyle, these people, that i had given my faith to and extended my emotions to, to beg for solace and acceptance, were just another thinly veiled group of abusive, predictable and typical human beings, no different at all from almost anyone else in any other obscure social group. 

i began to withdraw completely from music, from being social, from putting my stock in causes. i was consumed by this black, monstrous nihilism and sense of ultimate futility that threatened to drag me towards death itself. it was this very sense of futility that i eventually tempered to help me understand that even the negative did not matter towards that same end, and that a ‘fuck it anyway’ mentality could be attained at my leisure and used as a therapeutic defense mechanism. 

all of this in mind, i basically began a new life in completely withdrawing myself from everything and choosing who, what, and where i put my emotional stock, simply on a personal preference, in accordance with my wildly changing and always ultra judgmental standards. 

needless to say, for the past few years i started to feel disconnected from people who view sobriety as some sort of spiritual or social cause. when one human being tries to dominate the actions or choices or opinions of another human being it aggravates me on an extreme level, and i truly believe that if you spend most of your time worrying about what other people do and your personality consists entirely of judging what people do and don’t do, that you are a hollow, uninteresting, and severely flawed person who needs major guidance and mental actualization. there is more to life than the human race, you exist as a silent entity and you can make your way through whatever this existence is with some form of self-gratifying hedonism and even then your self-gratifying ‘morality’ will begin to take shape in the context of your own choices and your own decisions, rather than someone else’s.

it was around the end of summer this year, that i had a brief stint in portland with an ex close friend of mine. i won’t go into great detail about this because i could bitch about this human being forever, but that would go against everything i just said. she was a heroin addict, a delusional schizophrenic, and a very aggressively lonely and desperate person. somehow, in the maelstrom of my short lived relationship with her, it dawned on me that i did not blame the heroin for who she was as a human being. (don’t get me wrong, i don’t do heroin, i never will, it’s gross, dangerous and shitty, to me anyway.) which also sparked long nights thinking about the past, my perspectives of people who drank, people who used substances, and it began to reveal deep opinions that i held regarding addiction, and that i truly believe that substances are inconsequential, and that people themselves need to be blamed for what they do. 

i can no longer blame drinking or drugs for the shitty personalities or horrible decisions of other people. i feel that this goes right along with blaming guns for murder. 

with my newfound perception of things, i began doing heavy research into drugs and everything else that i vehemently denied myself, after some time i realized that i’m an adult, i’m not beholden to anyone, most especially not to a group of people who i feel as though i don’t know whatsoever, people i don’t belong with, people i barely even respect the opinions or general intellect of. i realized that i’m intelligent enough to be responsible about what i choose to do, and at the end of this life, the bacteria consuming my corpse will not care about my abstinence, just as the ones consuming yours will never care about yours, or your opinion about mine.

i’ve become something in my mind completely isolated and i feel that i don’t owe anyone anything, and the very last thing on this earth that i care about is living up to the standards of another human being, another future corpse, another nameless photograph in someone’s dusty album a hundred years from now. 

so i guess that’s that, i now do whatever i like to do, and i respect people who enjoy sobriety, and enjoy their company, i treat every human being quite simply by the actions of their character and not a single detail of their lifestyle, diet, hair style, etc. is relevant to me. and i’d appreciate if anyone without that exact mindset was not a part of my life. 

i’m sorry for the egregiously explanatory response, i mostly did it because i have a few close friends who were curious as well, and i’ve never bothered to explain myself to them.