2.
My mom was an elementary school teacher for a long time, working at schools around a big city in the southeastern US. She worked with a lot of low-socioeconomic-status black kids who came from shitty neighborhoods where you might expect to find drugs—if not directly in their homes, then not far away, probably in their friends' and neighbors' homes.
Sometime around 2014-ish, when she was teaching 3rd or 4th grade (ages 8-10), she told me about the latest retarded trend that she and the other teachers were having to deal with:
The students had somehow gotten access to a bunch of Pixy Stix. For anyone who's not familiar, they're these paper straws of really-finely-ground flavored sugar, basically a powder. You're supposed to tear them open and pour it into your mouth. They're really shitty candy.
I don't remember why the students had so many (leftovers from a party, maybe?), but they had a steady supply of Pixy Stix for a while—long enough for kids to start coming up with new ideas about what to do with them.
By the time that it became a problem that my mom had to deal with, the kids were referring to the Pixy Stix as "happy crack." They would pour out little lines of the candy powder and snort them. Even after the teachers and school staff intervened and tried to make them stop, kids would keep hiding the tubes everywhere—pockets, desks, bookbags, inside of sleeves, shoes—just so that they could
keep doing this dumb shit.
I don't know
why they were doing this. It's just sugar! It doesn't get you high. And it can't feel good—especially to an unpracticed kid who doesn't know what he's doing and probably fucks it up the first half-dozen times.
But they had apparently seen something in their homes or their communities or their media that made them want to imitate it. They knew some of the elements. They knew a name. And although they didn't really know what they were doing, or why, they knew
enough to know that they
wanted to do this.
But you don't have to be some poor black kid from the projects to fall into this dumb behavior.
It could just as easily happen to some lily-white kid from Minnesota who always hears from daddy that she's his favorite, so she has this connection with him, and then she watches him do something that now
she wants to do, too.
And what happens when you're a kid and you
think you're pretending, you
think you're just going through the motions and imitating your parents... but you've got the actual stuff in your house, and you don't understand what the actual stuff really is?
What do you
think happens then, Nick? You dumb, vile motherfucker, still reading your own thread like we know you are.
