Mentalechoes

I've come to the realisation that it's not just drugs and alcohol that I'm addicted to, but pretty much everything that can be addictive. I've known for a while that I have an addictive - possibly… most likely obsessive - personality; at least since I was 16 when I recorded the techno background music to the Commodore 64 game Crystal Hammer onto a 90 minute cassette tape and played it on loop for 2 weeks straight. But I never believed that I was someone who was really an addict. The true realisation that I just might actually be an addictive personality didn't fully hit me until last week during very ordinary circumstances.

I'd come home after another useless day at the office, to my flat where the kitchen was still a mess from a poker game I'd hosted a night before. It was a scheduled gym workout day, so I began my routine of getting my gym gear together. The thing was I was feeling a bit hungry as well and I thought that I would chow down on a small energy snack to give me a bit of a boost for the weights effort ahead. When I went into the kitchen I saw the leftover packet of pringles sitting on the kitchen table. I think they were sour cream and onion, and I remember saying to myself, I'll just have a couple as I'll burn them off anyway and they're really tasty as they're my favourite ones. Well I popped the top, and then as the marketing advertisement warned me, I just couldn't stop. I turned into a pringles crack whore, and I ate the whole pack in one sitting in about 20 minutes. After the first couple I could feel the personality change come over me, but I felt powerless to stop it, and I just sat there, in front of the computer eating them until the last one was finished. I felt guilty because of all the calories I'd just consumed, but as I dusted pringles powder off my hands, I also felt satisfied in a dirty way. 

Wikipedia defines addiction as: An addiction is a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity. The term is often reserved for drug addictions but it is sometimes applied to other compulsions, such as problem gambling, pornography, compulsive overeating, and hyperreligiosity^.

I read that list of possible addictions and realised that of the four they mention, I had a penchant for two; online pornography and overeating, but mainly restricted to pringles. At 86 kilos for a 185 centimeter body frame, I'm not overweight, but they didn't say you had to be as a compulsive overeater, I guess you just had to eat a lot (of pringles). I spoke with a friend of mine about it and he said I was just a normal bloke, and that definition only applied to 12 year olds still living at home with their parents. What single late 30-something bloke doesn't overeat in front of the computer while looking at porn? Nobody! That's who! Not even the fit gay blokes I saw at gym, since I've heard from gay friends of mine that a lot of them are bulimic and throw up after a Ben and Jerry's pigout. Which they would probably do watching gay porn, instead of the regular german gang bang, and midget fucking stuff all the rest of us normal guys watch.

So in the end, I kind of come to terms with being addicted to everything, and swinging like a pendulum between my favourite addiction one week to something else the next. I figure that as long as I rotate my addictions then I should be okay; drugs and alcohol one week, exercise the next, chocolate and porn the week after that, online chatting the week after that, and so on and so forth through my personal list of guilty pleasures. Luckily living in Amsterdam makes this a lifestyle that doesn't make you a menace to society in the eyes of the mainstream. Rather I'm just some kind of aging new age bohemian, exploring a free existence. I hold down a steady job, so the city doesn't care. God bless the city calvanist founders for making us all equal in the eyes of the Lord, as long as we have money and can pay our way!

Padwanna!