Doing Drugs

A dream about drugs. I am helped along by someone who seems to be a friend, or he may be someone who I am hoping might become a friend. He is another brown hispanic, slender. He seems to be in his twenties, and I cannot reliably tell my age, whether it is my present self or a similarly younger me. I have some money in this dream. I don't know where I got it from, but I have it to spend, and my new buddy knows how to spend it. Drugs are the way to go to feel good, to have a good time. I guess this dream is realistic enough in that there is not a single thought given to the idea that girls can be rather fun. Maybe I do not have that much money to make that work for us. Marijuana is another matter. You can always call Mary Jane for a good time - she won't say no and she won't let you down. My buddy has a buddy who has the supply if you have the cash. I am not a little miss goody two-shoes in this dream. I am easily won over to the pursuit of getting high. So, maybe it is an older me in this dream, more desperate to shake things up and try to have some fun in my life while it is still at least a nominal possibility.

We are at his friend's place, and we get a little bag of goodies. However, it's not green and tobaccoey. It is blue and looks like a bag of blue rocks. I say it doesn't look right. My supposed friend says it is fine. It is good stuff. I pay for it, and then I wake up, without even getting to try my drugs. It is only later in the morning that it hits me like a bucket of cold water splashed in my face: my dream was doubtlessly influenced by my marathon-watching of "Breaking Bad" - crystal meth, the blue formula! I am impressed that my subconsciousness was able to hide the ball on me like that, so that I can be fooled in my own dream. I think my friend snookered me, told me that I was getting marijuana, or something relatively harmless, but got the hard stuff instead. Maybe I was a little bit of a goody-goody in this dream, after all, that I needed to be tricked out of my virginity.

But what is my dream trying to tell me? That maybe I should try drugs, seriously? I am not a complete stranger to Mary Jane, but we never really got along. Maybe this dream was just a random thing driven by good TV. Although my life is not all the thrill that I could wish it to be, my drug of choice remains good literature, and one needs a clear head to get the most out of that trip.

The Neighbors

I heard a commotion out front, and I went to the window to see what the neighbors might be up to, and I saw that big white dog loaded up on the back of their pick-up truck, leashed securely and sitting pretty. It is a little cold for an open-air ride, but I thought it was nice, that the dog should get to enjoy some new sights and scents.

But then I started to worry a little. Since it is Sunday, I do not think that they are going to a vet appointment, and they probably are not taking the dog to the park to play frisbee. I started to wonder if I will ever see that dog again. Of course, it would be better if they were taking the dog to a more pet-loving family, even if I do not get to see it again.

I need not have worried, though. They came back home with the dog in tow. Whatever they did, it will have to remain a mystery to me. I am glad the dog got to enjoy a little trip outside his back yard, though, now that I think more about it, the experience might have actually been a little traumatizing for the dog, not being used to the wider world. Indeed, even Bo tended to find such trips stressful, even when he was with us up front in the cab, and despite our walks to the duck pond when he was young, giving him some exposure to the world beyond our home. Hell, I am not comfortable myself when I am more than fifty yards away from my bathroom and my books.

Martin Amis

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INTERVIEWER

How important is the ego, self-confidence?

AMIS

Novelists have two ways of talking about themselves. One in which they do a very good job of pretending to be reasonably modest individuals with fairly realistic opinions of their own powers and not atrociously ungenerous in their assessments of their contemporaries. The second train of thought is that of the inner egomaniac; your immediate contemporaries are just blind worms in a ditch, slithering pointlessly around, getting nowhere. You bestride the whole generation with your formidability. The only thing your contemporaries are doing—even the most eminent of them—is devaluing literary eminence. Basically they’re just stinking up the place. You open the book pages and you can’t understand why it isn’t all about you. Or, indeed, why the whole paper isn’t all about you. I think without this kind of feeling you couldn’t operate at all. The ego has to be roughly this size. I’m not sure it’s true, but I was told by a poet friend that even William Golding can come into a literary party at six-thirty and do a good imitation of a self-effacing man of letters, but at nine o’clock the whole room may be brought to silence by his cry of I’m a genius! Just give him a bullhorn. They may have their little smiles and demurrals and seem twinkly and manageable characters but really . . . Is there anything you’d like to add? Yes. I’m a genius! End of interview.

There’s also the flip side, of course—terrific vulnerability, crying jags, the seeking of the fetal position after a bad review and all that kind of stuff. One of the perks of being a writer–son of a writer is that I don’t think I’ve had much of that myself—a huge self-love. Or maybe I see it clearly because writing has never seemed to me to be an unusual way of making a living or spending your time. Whereas, friends of mine, Julian Barnes, the son of schoolteachers, Ian McEwan, the son of a military man, they must be drunk with power when they sit down at their typewriters, and think; I earn a living because what I think has universal interest, or semiuniversal interest, anyway, enough interest to pay the rent. It must be gratifying in extraordinary ways. It would take a lot of getting over, it seems to me. I’ve never had that intoxicating pleasure, but perhaps I haven’t suffered either. It just seemed to me a very natural way of proceeding with my life, and I haven’t felt singled out at all. To me, it’s all about perceptions, perceptions about life or human nature or the way something looks or the way something sounds. Two or three of them on a page in a notebook, that’s what it’s really all about. Getting enough of them to enliven every page of a novel, like light. I mean, to call them felicities is wrong. You have to have a clumsier formulation, something like droplets of originality, things that are essentially your own, and are you.

-- Martin Amis at The Paris Review

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