The Dull Inevitability of Getting a Bag In

Nervous now, aren’t you. You’re deep into your third can and it’s been less than an hour since you left the shop – closed now, the shop, long closed – but it doesn’t quite feel like it’s over, does it? It’s only 1AM, and just before you’re about to say it someone points to you and goes “gram?” and you say “gram” and they look down at their phone Notes and go “OK so that’s… three… grams” and you want to say no I thought you meant like go halves on a gram, like let’s all share a gram, not “let’s get a gram each”, that seems like a simply huge number of grams and addendum it with, like, I only have £20, I don’t really want to be going all-in on a gram right now, it’s two weeks until payday but the call is already being made and hey, you reason, hey, you have that birthday coming up next week; whatever you don’t do now you can take with you to that, and anyway that one dealer’s number you had saved in your phone messaged you to say “bro stop texting me” after he offered you a fist bump and you accidentally clasped your entire hand around his fist and the whole car went quiet – so fine, actually, fine, this is actually a good thing, getting a gram in, it saves you a whole headache later on, and yes obviously there is the usual nervy 45-minute wait where every small noise outside the door makes you say “check your phone” to the person who made the call, but other than that it’s quite calm isn’t it, and you just quietly work your way through two more cans and then it arrives, O lord it arrives, and you deck it out onto a vinyl of Be Here Now and do one extremely large line that makes your nose feel alight and then boom, it’s four hours later and your pupils are like saucers and the sun is peeking weakly below the curtain and you’re explaining very quickly to someone you’ve got pinned in a corner that right, no right, because listen, if everyone just I just want everyone I know to meet their full potential you know, and you go to the bathroom for a piss but nothing’s really happening, so you just sort of sit there and look at your genitals for a bit and you look in the mirror and yes OK yes there’s an amount of forehead sweat that’s sort of mixing into a miasma with your fringe and it’s Not The Look, but don’t you feel exhilarated don’t you feel good don’t look at the time don’t look at the time, like you should do this more often, you and all the people here, like you don’t really talk enough in this way, don’t look at the time don’t look at the time, and anyway you’ve got exactly one big line left out of that gram you did earlier, so let’s just do that and clonk into our boots and go out into the searing light of the early day and just get an Uber home and sleep sleep sleep, and then maybe when you wake up at like 3PM in a sort of contorted mess of duvet and blankets with your feet all caught way down the bottom of the bed and your nose dry and your mouth dry and it takes you 45 minutes to get up and go to the bathroom for a glass of water, so pounding your headache is, ANYWAY, maybe then we can treat ourselves to a large-sized Domino’s and a whole season of Peep Show—

YOU HAVE WON FRIDAY NIGHT