Opium Dens, Reviewed

My boss in on vacation. For three weeks. If there were someone else in the office to entertain/babysit me it wouldn't be so bad. But- I'm here. Alone. All day. If you think I haven't broken my self-imposed "no-facebooking-at-work" rule, go ahead and lock yourself in the loony bin. Despite this extremely lame personal set-back, I do manage to engage myself with reading material besides the bragadocious bullshit spewed by the status feed... such as the glorious, glamorous, gapingly left-leaning (besides the point) Vanity Fair.

A couple o' weeks ago, I stumbled upon the following article: Confessions of an Opium-Seeker by Nick Tosches, originally published in the September 2000 issue of VF (for which you need a solid 90 minutes to read). International illegality, drugs, and underaged prostitution aside, the article is the most stunningly penned piece of magazine literature I've ever read. Tosches chronicles his hushed, decadent quest to seek out the ever-so-elusive Opium Den of dyansties past with a prose that will leave you as high, as contemplative as the drug that he so thoroughly sought out via Hong Kong, Bangkok and the Golden Triangle, found, and inhaled-- inducing a raptuous profundity only the perfect drug could procure. I remain unconvinced as to if his high was maintained during the article's scribing as his writing style is as rich and tantalizing as, what I imagine, would be the ideal state of sedation/euphoria. But nonetheless, here's a sample of the art he constructs with language...

And now, wordlessly, we understand each other perfectly in the eloquence of a silence that not only contains all that has ever been and all that ever will be said, but also drosses the vast babel of it, leaving only the ethereal purity of that wordless poetry that only the greatest of poets have glimpsed in epiphany.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Fuck this world of $35 onions and those who eat them. Fuck this world of pseudo-sophisticated rubes who could not recognize the finer things in life—from a shot of that vinegar to the first wisp of fall through a tree—let alone appreciate them, these rubes who turned New York into a PG-rated mall and who oh so loved it thus.

//Thoughts?//