So. Kids have once again found another back door to getting “high” because they can’t stand being under their parents ever vigilant, controlling thumbs in an attempt to make them more perfect than those snotty Joneses kids—that and the fact that most kids can’t stand each other (or pretty much anything that doesn’t involve themselves).
It’s called ‘i-dosing.” Thank you Steve Jobs for inspiring our society to come with yet another “witty” name based around a verb in gerund form starting with the vowel “i.” Sesame Street can rest easy now, knowing that they can focus on the other 25 characters in the English alphabet because in the future everything will begin with an ‘i’ (even words that already start with that letter), thus confusing non-English speakers even more, and making Issac Asimov spin in his grave when Apple’s i-Robot is finally revealed, and done so with a tribute to i-Issac himself.
For those of you who don’t know what i-dosing is, it’s apparently a new way for people to get “high” from listening to a monotonous sound for an extended period of time. I can relate, as the monotone voices of many professors and teachers used to give me strange hallucinations of euphoria, until they’d slam the ruler on the desk and wake me up from my in-class nap.
So without further ado, let me be the first to say: “Quick everyone! Let’s overreact!“
Now I’ll be the first to admit here that music is a wonderful and wondrous thing, whose crescendos can send goosebumps across the skin, and whose moods can reflect or alter your own moods. It’s the latter reason why dentist offices will play Enya over NIN. You need to be relaxed so they can easily get into your purse, and not wound up to the point that you’re strangling the secretary while screaming “YOU DID THIS TO ME.” As far as I’m aware though, that would be as close to any high off of a song alone as you will get.
Leave it to general mass hysteria to claim that this is a gateway to real drugs, the same way they claimed that rock-n-roll, comic books, dungeons and dragons, and video games would be gateways to other illicit criminal behavior. Some schools are even overreacting to a point where they are forbidding cell phones and music players; not because the kids don’t really need them in a learning environment, but because they don’t want kids to get high off of Miley Cyrus (who should just be banned account of stupidity. I mean, really now: “Movin’ my hips like yeah” passes as a good lyric?? Way to use your adjectives and metaphors! I love doing things like–yeah!).
God forbid some of them should walk outside and see a rainbow…
Anyone with any kind of sound (pun!) reasoning and a solid head on their shoulders could easily tell you that what kids are doing is nothing more than a form sensory deprivation . Headphones on, lying still, and sometimes even blindfolded to cut out the light and other visual distractions.
And guess what! Being in an monochromatic environment can lead to the same thing! Hear that concerned parents?! Leaving your baby in a dark room for 15 minutes or more could get your babies “high!” You are essentially drugging your babies with darkness in the amount of time it’d take you to switch to Geico! Quick, call the social workers! Won’t somebody think of the children!?!
Yves Klein, pusher of highs through "art."
Perhaps the real question isn’t whether i-dosing is a gateway drug, but rather why have people resorted to using it. Maybe if people weren’t so mentally derelict and overreacting to kids boring themselves with white noise, we wouldn’t feel the need to shut others out, find new barriers to drown out the noise, and escape. Perhaps if reality weren’t such a bitch of an existence with Satre’s “Hell is other people” being played out live and in person, we wouldn’t need to find ways to get away.
As it is, perhaps the real problem isn’t these escape devices being used, but rather our inability to cope and therefore overusing them. Who wants some alcoholism? No? WoW addiction perhaps? No, not that either? Oh, how about hours of searching Youtube for cat videos! My point is, we all have our escapes, the only real problem is when we become captive to these devices and are unable to function in society (well, less so than some people are already unable to do).
Also, kids pretending to get high either to prove how cool they are, or to piss off their parents, is nothing new. Cum granis salis bitches!
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Stephen Elkham appeared in the Defenestration office one day when Amber forgot to shut a window after closing up. In a bizarre twist of irony, Stephen actually joined Defenestration through infenestration…and a ladder. Genevieve, Andrew, Eileen, and even Ben Franklin all tried to shoo him out with various methods (Ben tried logic and reason, Eileen tried magic wardings, Genevieve tried verbal lashings, and Andrew merely whacked at him with a rolled up newspaper) while Bigfoot stood back and laughed his ass off. However, Stephen barely acknowledged any of them while creepily staring at the wall and sipping coffee. Soon after, that room was converted into the “Creepy Staring Guy With Coffee” room, and was mostly used for storage. One day, while moving some old equipment back there, Haratron had serendipitously stored a typewriter in front of Stephen. It wasn’t until a few days later that Eileen noticed that the “CSGWC” room was suddenly alive with the ticking of typewriter activity, and suddenly full of papers (one of them was the complete version of Hamlet all in caps, another was hundreds of pages with nothing more than “All werk n no plai, mayks Jack a LOLboi kthx,” and yet another was a scathing review on Jane Austen and how the Bronte sisters should’ve ganged up and shanked her via a time machine). It was clear the creepy guy had some sapience… plus there was now a seemingly endless source of material that could be added to the website (Jersey Devil was charged with filtering though and scanning in all the documents). Stephen is still referred to as CSGWC though…