ketamine olympics

on turning 24

It all begins—as all truly great ideas must—with the hivemind of three twinks on ketamine. 

Hiveminds; shared delusions; divine communion. These phenomena are commonplace in my life now. I pass my days away with the same people, a revolving cast of dolls and faggots and hags and junkies and degenerates who show up for the same scene every evening, with the same fervent devotion one might see to a cult. Rather than orbiting the commands of some dictatorial figure, we are really devotees of time—the time we spend with one another, the time we refuse to take for granted, the time we honour with our love and our desire for connection. I think we are scared of wasting time more than anything. Each day must be bled out for its potential, each second dissected and excavated for its worth. We are outpacing that terrible, lifeless fog of adulthood, and the only sanctuary we can find is a relentless eternity in each other’s company. 

I guess this is what it means to be in your 20s.

Time moves differently in this city. It moves like molasses, so thick and languid it suffocates, suspends us like flies in amber. You are a fly in amber looking out through the glass, and you can see the world moving beyond the edge, and you crave so desperately to be out in the noise and the bustle and with the People Who Are Doing Something, and all you are left with is your restlessness. I feel this subconscious urgency running through everybody I know, and perhaps that is what bonds us together. We want to make a monument of our lives in a city built to stifle that very desire. 

And so there are three twinks on ketamine in some random living room on a Saturday night, captive audience to a makeshift comedy birthday roast we came up with because what else is there to do? And they are laughing and high and feeling something and they crave the intensity of it, so they conspire together for more ways to touch that intensity. We all want to have so much fun it gets a little scary. It is how we remember that we haven’t yet been anaesthetised by the humdrum of the world. ‘What if we all sat around in a circle and did K until the last person K-holes?’ The idea plants. ‘When’s everybody free?’ And it germinates. 

When I elect to host the Ketamine Olympics for my 24th birthday, I am sure of two certainties: firstly, that I am friends with a group of amateur improv actors who will ‘yes, and?’ literally the stupidest idea presented to them; and secondly, that we are so diligent in our pursuit of fun that the logistics will be airtight. We set ground rules in place. A bump is taken every fifteen minutes, stretched out to longer intervals as the highs start kicking in. We have a set of designated sober friends who act as both caretakers and objective judges, grading everybody’s performance. There is no compulsion to participate, and you can opt out of any round you like. We test out various skillsets through competitive rounds: a cigarette race; a maths test; a human knot; charades. It is one thing to handle your ketamine—it is quite another to perform on it.

I ring in my 24th year with around 30 of the people I love most in the world competing in what is essentially an athletics day for aimless 20-somethings with functional drug problems. What a strange life, and yet, I could not imagine anything more appropriate. 

There is a point, around 4am, when many of the competitors have retired home and all that’s left are the veteran partiers who are committed to staying up until dawn, at which I feel like I am in purgatory. There are enough drugs in my system for me to feel disconnected from my body, watching myself watching everybody else and watching that watching, but not so much that I am indecipherable to my own insight. The lightbulb in this living room is yellow, and it casts everybody in some haunted twilight. The speaker isn’t working anymore. All you can hear are the exhausted rambling of each person desperately trying to make sense of itself. I cannot imagine there is anything that exists beyond this room right now.  

Your 20s can feel like a purgatory often. They at least feel like some liminal space between adolescence and true adulthood, resisting the gravity of either end but begrudgingly accepting the influence of both. I graduated this year, and I don’t know what I’m doing next. I am working but I don’t enjoy it; I need money but I don’t want to earn it; I want a place in the world but I can’t unearth it. These are the hopelessly normal anxieties of a hopelessly normal person, and the type of anxiety that can be so all-consuming in its paralysis. 

But some part of me has made a deep peace with limbo and finds comfort in my discomfort, wisdom in my unknowingness. I like to talk about the artfulness of being an aimless 20-something. The person that I am when I finish work and amble out to a sunny afternoon at the park with a bottle of wine in hand, the person I am when I am rocking back and forth on shitloads of ketamine on a living room floor, the person that I am when all I care about is making something beautiful of my little life, this is the person I am becoming and that I ache to become. I am 24 and I have not done very much with my life. But I have felt so many things, felt something close to infinity, and that is what I am alive for. The physical trappings of my life beyond that are illusory. I want to die having made sad, pretty, weird bitches laugh about something incredibly stupid, and I want to die having felt everything. These are the grains with which I measure my life. 

As a friend was leaving the Ketamine Olympics, he pulled me aside to commend me on the event. He told me he was most impressed by the almost athletic commitment with which every competitor took to the challenge. I laughed, thinking: well, yeah, these faggots love to get high. In actuality, his praise struck at the core of why I love these people so dearly—they’re insane and they love to have fun and they refuse to settle for a life half-lived. They are preconditioned to exhume some joy and meaning out of mundanity, and I am drawn to them because I am too, and our intensity is equal parts beautiful and terrifying. This is what I want my life to look like. This is the love with which I measure my life. 

Angels drugfucked in a living room. The nymphs and the satyrs in the cult of Dionysus. I wonder if this is what I thought 24 would look like when I was a teenager. I don’t think my vision was so specific, but I know I wanted to create art out of experience, love life so deeply it frightened me a little, make something beautiful. I think I am.