Chew Gum Related Quotes

When, shortly afterward, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn’t know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat, or sleep. But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don’t know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it’s not necessary, the world is the world, it’s all we have. So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible. A lean old man hobbling along in a shabby suit carrying a bag bulging with bottles in one hand: what a sight. The world extended its hand, and I took it.

Outlawing drugs in order to solve drug problems is much like outlawing sex in order to win the war against AIDS. We recognize that people will continue to have sex for nonreproductive reasons despite the laws and mores. Therefore, we try to make sexual practices as safe as possible in order to minimize the spread of the AIDS viruses. In a similar way, we continually try to make our drinking water, foods, and even our pharmaceutical medicines safer. The ubiquity of chemical intoxicants in our lives is undeniable evidence of the continuing universal need for safer medicines with such applications. While use may not always be for an approved medical purpose, or prudent, or even legal, it is fulfilling the relentless drive we all have to change the way we feel, to alter our behavior and consciousness, and, yes, to intoxicate ourselves. We must recognize that intoxicants are medicines, treatments for the human condition. Then we must make them as safe and risk free and as healthy as possible. Dream with me for a moment. What would be wrong if we had perfectly safe intoxicants? I mean drugs that delivered the same effects as our most popular ones but never caused dependency, disease, dysfunction, or death. Imagine an alcohol-type substance that never caused addiction, liver disease, hangovers, impaired driving, or workplace problems. Would you care to inhale a perfumed mist that is as enjoyable as marijuana or tobacco but as harmless as clean air? How would you like a pain-killer as effective as morphine but safer than aspirin, a mood enhancer that dissolves on your tongue and is more appealing than cocaine and less harmful than caffeine, a tranquilizer less addicting than Valium and more relaxing than a martini, or a safe sleeping pill that allows you to choose to dream or not? Perhaps you would like to munch on a user friendly hallucinogen that is as brief and benign as a good movie? This is not science fiction. As described in the following pages, there are such intoxicants available right now that are far safer than the ones we currently use. If smokers can switch from tobacco cigarettes to nicotine gum, why can’t crack users chew a cocaine gum that has already been tested on animals and found to be relatively safe? Even safer substances may be just around the corner. But we must begin by recognizing that there is a legitimate place in our society for intoxication. Then we must join together in building new, perfectly safe intoxicants for a world that will be ready to discard the old ones like the junk they really are. This book is your guide to that future. It is a field guide to that silent spring of intoxicants and all the animals and peoples who have sipped its waters. We can no more stop the flow than we can prevent ourselves from drinking. But, by cleaning up the waters we can leave the morass that has been the endless war on drugs and step onto the shores of a healthy tomorrow. Use this book to find the way.

This is the start of a toxic mismatch between the child’s capabilities and the unrealistic expectations of an education system that is all too often underresourced, developmentally uninformed, and trauma-ignorant. Even if the child “progresses” to the next grade, they are still behind, and this sets them up to fail. Year after year, they fall further and further behind. Their delays in developing skills, together with their trauma-related symptoms, begin to attract mental health labels (see Figure 6). The hypervigilance from their sensitized stress response is labeled ADHD; their predictable efforts to self-regulate—by rocking, chewing gum, doodling, daydreaming, listening to music, tapping their pencil, etc.—are prohibited. They will be labeled, medicated, excluded, punished, perhaps expelled, and then, all too often, arrested. When they try to avoid the constant humiliation of school, they’re charged with truancy; when they try to flee and the school staff tries to stop them, a restraint incident results in charges of assault—against the child. This is the school-to-prison pipeline.

It didn’t take us long to see how it all worked out. Any man who tried to play straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure, he hated to smoke a nickel’s worth of tobacco or chew a stick of gum, worrying whether somebody had more need for that nickel. He felt ashamed of every mouthful of food he swallowed, wondering whose weary night of overtime had paid for it, knowing that his food was not his by right, miserably wishing to be cheated rather than to cheat, to be a sucker, but not a blood-sucker. He wouldn’t marry, he wouldn’t help his folks back home, he wouldn’t put an extra burden on ‘the family.’ Besides, if he still had some sort of sense of responsibility, he couldn’t marry or bring children into the world, when he could plan nothing, promise nothing, count on nothing. But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance, ’ they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes—what the hell, ‘the family’ was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in ‘need’ than the rest of us could ever imagine—they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

Please,” I finally managed to say, “please call them off. Don’t do this. They’re your family, Blake! I’ll do anything, I swear.” Turning in his arms to face him, I pleaded with my eyes. “I’ve already proved that!” Gripping my chin roughly in his fingers, he leaned over until his face was directly in front of mine. “You’re right. You will do anything. But you’ve already ruined a lot, Rachel. We need to rectify that . . . first.” “First? I don’t—what?” “Yes, first. Before we move on to the next . . . step.” His blue eyes took on some weird form of heat that I couldn’t name. “Well, didn’t I do that by telling Logan I’d lied about you? By having him watch us leave together and telling Candice I was spending the weekend with you?” “You’re oddly eager to get to that next step, sweetheart.” He smiled, and the arm around my waist tightened. “If it’ll get you to leave all of them alone, then I’ll do whatever it takes to get to that step!” “I’m counting on that,” he whispered, and crushed his lips to mine, pushing his tongue into my mouth and growling when he didn’t get the reaction he was looking for. “We’ll work on that. Until you’re convincing enough to fool me, this”—he pointed at the various screens—“is how it’ll be.” Blake started to unwrap his arms, so I grabbed the back of his neck and brought our mouths back together. I tried to picture Kash as our lips moved against each other and I sucked on his bottom lip. But this wasn’t Kash. Even if there had been a lip ring, or if Blake had been chewing the cinnamon gum that Kash always did, I wouldn’t have been able to make myself believe this was the man I was in love with. A sob ripped from me and my arms fell limply to my sides. Blake moved his lips to my neck and made a trail to my ear. “While I appreciated that, like I said, we’ll work on it. Now, go get ready for bed, I’ll be back in a minute.” My body went rigid and he laughed soft and low. “I won’t touch you tonight. Now that I have you where I want you, I need you to realize you’re in love with me. Scaring you wouldn’t help with that right now.” “You are scaring me!” My hand shot out toward the screens. “This—this is terrifying! Everyone I care about is in danger. You blew up George’s car, for shit’s sake! Does it not bother you at all that you’re related to them?” “For the last damn time, sweetheart,” he sneered, “nothing will happen to them if you do what I say. And the faster you realize you’re mine and you acknowledge and embrace your true feelings for me, the faster my men leave them alone.” “You can’t just force someone to fall in love with you, Blake.” He huffed. “I’m not. You are in love with me. You’re just being difficult. Get ready for bed.