The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. There's this new drug called mephedrone. It's supposed to be like cocaine, but it's completely legal because the government hasn't banned it yet. Anyone with a bank card can simply go online and have it ordered to their address.

People like me, for instance. Last week I went online, googled "buy mephedrone", and clicked on the first result that came up. It was a website selling "plant food", although it was clear from reviews like "All of the plant food you have sold to me have got my daisies dancing and my lilies laughing" that "plant food" was actually a euphemism for mephedrone. So I clicked the little "BUY NOW" button and paid £20 for 1 gram.

And today, the postman pushed an envelope through my letter box. I tore the envelope open. I looked inside. There was a little plastic bag of white powder.

I pulled the bag of white powder out. I was holding drugs. I was holding DRUGS.

I sat on my bed with the packet of drugs in my hand. It was a little resealable bag like the kind used by every drug dealer ever. A little ziplock bag. The bag was transparent, and inside was a fine, white powder with a yellowish tinge. It looked like icing powder. The powder at the top of the bag had stuck together in tiny lumps while the powder that had fallen to the bottom of the bag was finer.

I listened for any sounds coming from the rest of the house. Nothing; silence. This meant, hopefully, that my two housemates were out. They were probably at work. Not me as I had the day off.

First I went to the bathroom and filled a glass with water from the tap. But not because I was thirsty — because I was going to use it to take drugs. As the tap filled the glass, I looked at myself in the mirror. The bags under my eyes were dark. And my hair was a mess. I'd planned to get a haircut today, but now the drugs were the priority: I needed to take the drugs ASAP so they would change my personality and make me into someone cool instead of a loser. I'd been a loser for years now. But that wuld change, starting now.

Then I went back to my bedroom with the glass in my hand and shut the bedroom door. I set the glass down next to my bed. I tipped the bag of drugs onto the top of my chest of drawers, next to my Xbox 360 and yesterday's underpants. I carefully divided out some the powder. Then I pushed a small amount of powder into the glass of water. The powder became an expanding white cloud in the water as it started to dissolve.

Outside the window, the sky was grey with clouds. A bird in a tree somewhere was whistling a happy tune.

I held the glass in my hand and looked down into the white, cloudy water. Did I really want to drink this?

Without thinking twice, I drank it. The taste was awful, like drinking bleach or washing powder, but I forced myself to down the whole thing.

Then I sat there patiently waiting for the drug to kick in. And what happened next was impossible to describe. Literally impossible - because nothing happened. The drug didn't work.

I was disappointed, but really it knew it had been too good to be true; you can't just buy drugs on the internet. It had all been a scam.

I carried on with my day. On my agenda was to get a haircut. So I got in my car and drove to the barbers. It was a barbershop on the other side of town that I'd never been to before.

I walked in. The bell above the door jingled. There was the smell of cologne and shampoo. The snip snip sound of scissors. I mumbled "Hi" to the two hairdressers and sat down on a chair in the waiting area.

And it was there, as I sat in the barbers' waiting area, that the mephedrone finally kicked in.

There was no doubt about it. This was HAPPENING.

One of the barbers finished with his customer. Then he waved me over in a friendly way. I stood up, strode over to his big black leather chair, and plonked myself down.

I stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were wide. My pupils were so dilated there were virtually no irises left. Also, I was now grinding my teeth.

The barber draped a black sheet around me and asked, "So how are we today?"

"Really good thanks," I said. My teeth were clenched tight and I was gripping the arm of the chair.

Somehow he didn't notice. He just smiled and nodded as he tied the sheet around my neck and asked, "And what are we doing today?"

I'd planned to just get a normal haircut: short on the sides and longer on the top. It's the haircut all men get.

But suddenly, I had an idea.

"Can you shave my head?" I blurted out.

"What— just shave it?" he said.

"Yeah," I said. "Shaved heads look cool and I want to look cool!"

He laughed. So he got out his electric shaver and began shaving my head. Whrrrrrrrrrr went the shaver. My hair started falling to the floor.

I felt warm and at peace with the world. The touch of his fingers on my head felt wonderful. I sat back and relaxed. This was AMAZING. I never wanted the haircut to end.

I looked at myself in the mirror again. Not only were my eyes now somehow even wider, but I was also grinding my teeth. Gnash gnash gnash gnash. Fuck, how long had I been grinding my teeth for?

I forced myself to stop. But then, a moment later, I was grinding my teeth again.

Next to me, another hairdresser was cutting the hair of a guy in his thirties. "So I've been working for this new company for three months," said the guy, "and it's a complete utter arsewank of a job. I work 60-hour weeks, I never see my kids, and the manager's a total arsehole. I have to find a new job!"

"If you hate your job, then you should try being a postman," I said spontaneously.

There was a moment of silence. And then— everyone laughed.

It was weird. No one had ever laughed at my jokes before.

"So you're a postman then?" said the guy.

"Unfortunately," I said. And everyone laughed again! It was crazy! Even the barber shaving my head was smiling in good humour.

I couldn't believe it. I was being SOCIAL!

This drug was AMAZING!

But unfortunately, the haircut ended. "There, how's that?" said the barber. He held up a mirror so I could see the back of my head.

"Looks good," I said, nodding enthusiastically. But I'd wanted the haircut to last longer. I didn't want to leave. I felt so warm and nice sitting there in his chair, so I said, "Could you shave it... shorter?"

All conversations stopped. It was like that moment in Western movies when a stranger enters a tavern and everyone falls silent, including the piano player.

"Shorter?" the barber asked, frowning. He exchanged a troubled look with his colleague.

"Shorter," I said.

So he picked up his electric shaver and started shaving my hair even shorter.

An awkward silence pervaded the room. The only sounds were the high-pitched whrrrrrrrrrr of the electric shaver, the snip snipof scissors and the gnash gnash of my teeth grinding together.

The barber looked nervous as he manoeuvred the hair trimmer around my increasingly bald head. Finally, he finished. He nervously held up the mirror to my head again.

"Looks good!" I said.

I paid and left. When I stepped outside onto the street, my head felt cold. I touched my head, and instead of feeling hair, my fingers met only bald skin. I had no hair left. I was literally bald. I'd gone into the barbershop with a full head of hair and had come out as bald as a newborn baby.

I was still as high as Everest at this point. My brain was running faster than what should be possible, like an overclocked computer. Everything was REAL and NOW. No wonder people take drugs, I thought. Drugs are AMAZING!

My social anxiety had been lifted. Now I wanted to talk to people! Interact with them!

Where to go next? Now I had this temporary gift of sociability, what should I do with it?

Then I saw it: a library! What better place to go than a library when you're high on drugs?

So I ran across the busy A-road and went inside.

Ten minutes later, I came back out of the library. In those ten minutes, I had used the library's computer to check my Facebook notifications and a librarian had helped me reserve a book called Ender's Shadow on an interlibrary loan.

Facebook notifications? Interlibrary loans? This was no good. I was on drugs! I should be doing cool things — not reserving library books!

I needed somewhere fun and alive — but unfortunately, there was nowhere nearby that matched that was fun or alive, so instead, I ran across the busy A-road again to the next-best place, a local shopping centre.

At least there were people there. Happy, normal people carrying bags from H&M and TopShop, chatting between themselves. I noticed that women weren't noticing me, even though I must have looked irresistible with my newly-shaved head. What I needed, I decided, was to be even cooler.

And what do cool people wear? Sunglasses and leather jackets.

Next, I stole a pair of sunglasses from River Island. Yes, I stole them. It was easy: I simply walked in the shop, picked up a pair of sunglasses, tore off the security tag and walked back out of the shop with the sunglasses in my hand. No one stopped me. No alarnms went off. (This wasn't my first time shoplifting; not by a long shot. I'd already had a lot of practice.) Then, outside, I put the sunglasses on, despite the sky being grey and overcast. Now I was super cool. Now women would have to notice me.

But wait: next up, to complete the look, was a leather jacket. Shaved head, sunglasses, leather jacket: the ultimate combination! No woman would be able to resist me!

So I went into Gap and asked if they had any leather jackets. They didn't, but the shop assistant let me look through a catalogue. Her colleague came up and whispered to her, "Is everything alright?" She nodded to her colleague, in the same way a negotiator nods to the police to say, "Don't intervene; I have the situation under control for now."

Anyway, my only option of getting a leather jacket was to order one and wait five working days for it to arrive in the store. I didn't have time for that - everything had to be NOW - so I said thanks and left.

I spent a couple more hours walking around the shopping centre while high on mephedrone. Things I did: sat and had a cup of tea in the cafe at Sainsbury's while staring at other patrons; recommended the Angling Times, "the UK's largest angling newspaper", to a bemused man in WH Smiths, even though I'd never read it and only just seen it on the shelf a second earlier; walk into GAME and walked back out in disgust after discovering there were no playable demos.

I was well and truly off my rails. You couldn't make up such a mad-capped adventure. Getting my hair cut; having a cup of tea in a cafe; reserving a library book; looking through a brochure of clothes: all the crazy actions of a drug-fuelled young man.

But I began to wonder if maybe a shopping centre really was the best place to spend a mephedrone trip. Maybe there were better places?

So I went to the car park and got in my car. But when I began to pull out of the parking space, I heard a horrible loud SCREEEECH. I slammed on the brake, turned off the engine and got out to see what had happened.

I had driven too close to an enormous concrete pillar and scratched the side of my car against it. My car now had a large ugly scratch where the paint had come off.

A man and a woman were staring at me. They were still watching me as I reversed my car back and then pulled out of the parking space, successfully this time. I imagine they were a little disappointed that I didn't scratch my car again.

By now, the drug was wearing off. I was feeling exhausted, like how you feel when you're coming down with the flu.

What people don't tell you about stimulants is that they cause a comedown a few hours later. It's the equivalent of a hangover, but worse. Kelechukwu Okereke, the lead singer of Bloc Party, described comedowns as, "A flatness so bleak, I've been bitten by a vampire. A flatness bleaker than the one it replaced".

I didn't want the drug to wear off. I didn't want a flatness so bleak that I'd been bitten by a vampire. I enjoyed being extroverted. For once in my pitiful life, let me be sociable and extroverted!

So I came up with a plan: to be on mephedrone forever. And I mean that seriously. That was my real, actual, genuine plan: to take mephedrone every day, in the same way people take medication for their blood pressure or an underactive thyroid. Somehow it seemed like a good plan at the time.

So I drove around infamously seedy parts of Bournemouth looking for drug dealers. But I couldn't see any. Please god, don't make me go back to the way I was, I thought.

Anyway, the drug wore off, and I went back to the way I was: a weird, antisocial loser.