The Non-stop Dancer

+ 7 Hours

The morning after the night before is something that happens to some people somewhere, every, single day. It is not a particularly contrived notion. Life is cyclic in nature. It always continues. The idiotic nature of man means that many, many people forget that.

Recreational drugs have an intentionally daft name. Rationally speaking, the opposite of recreational drugs must be work time drugs. Let's be honest, if there really was such a thing as work time drugs, there would be absolutely no unemployment in any country on earth. The danger of drugs is that boring people do not like them. The people that do try them encounter a significant disconnect from time. It is for this reason they are the primary form of escapism for millions of people.

Drugs have a habit of slowing down time itself. Two hours quickly become six.
An eight-hour sleep easily becomes a twelve-hour sleep. It is one of their most addictive qualities. On a primal level, most human beings are afraid of death, thus a narcotic that presents the illusion of an entirely different pace of life would indeed be popular as it nudges the individual's perception towards tasting the notion that they are indeed immortal.

When the fifty-seventh notification flashed upon the screen of the Stoner's mobile phone he briefly stirred. He had not even made it to his bedroom. When he returned home he had collapsed like fallen timber onto his sofa and fallen asleep. The living room was a battleground of lost evenings as the decaying corpses of half-eaten pizzas, discarded cigarette papers and empty beer bottles repurposed for ashtrays were scattered around, creating a striking reproduction of Picasso's Guernica. Had the Sleeping Beauty been woken from his sleep he would have seen the message that read 'Your video has been viewed twenty-five million times'. Such news, even containing such an extraordinary number, would have been completely irrelevant to the Stoner. Even on his soberest of days, he would have no way been able to comprehend that twenty-five million fingers had pushed a screen or clicked a mouse twenty-five million times. The vast majority of them would likely have belonged to different people and it, to a millennial, would mean absolutely bugger all.

Instead, the Sleeping Beauty slept on, completely oblivious to the fact that his video has travelled to seventy-three countries. It did not matter to the Stoner how people adjudged the video. He had never stopped to consider how it could impact anyone, not even himself. It did not matter whether the Non-stop Dancer had a wife, or children, or a job. It was merely the way the Stoner thought. It was simple, nobody had ever taught him that actions have consequences.