I came quite late to drugs. I came quite late to drink, too – I was near sanctimonious about it as a teenager, and I suppose if you’re a nerd-teen who primly purses his lips at the idea of a swig of beer then nobody is exactly going to offer you drugs, are they now – and never really dabbled in weed, The Teenager’s Drug Of Choice^™, because both my parents smoked when I was a kid and I couldn’t stand the smell of burning tobacco. They tell you, in assemblies at school, how weed is a ‘gateway drug’, and it’s always painted as some sort of mach-speed descent into the abyss – ‘One toke of weed’, drug counsellors with pocket protectors tell you, through orange-fade glasses lenses, ‘and a week later you’ll be high out of your mind on smack, then dead’ – whereas in fact all weed really does is open you up to the idea that stimulants can temporarily alter your brain chemistry in a pleasant and/or unpleasant way, and how fun that can be. It’s very tiresome, living in your own mind, all of the time. Weed tells you that you don’t have to do that quite so rigidly as every previous year of your teen existence before. Anyway I skipped that lesson because I was a fucking square.

The point is: I am cool now and have had drugs.

Recently a friend of mine came to town for what we termed ‘The Final Sesh’, a pour-one-out-for-your-comrade weekend of excess, the type of which he will never have again, due to his partner being pregnant with a baby. Jay is an old friend, a pink-faced Scouser who walks like he’s smuggling gear into a Kasabian concert, and over the years we have seen each other in various states of distress: fat, drunk, dumped, vomiting, and now expecting. When that baby comes – tiny, pink, Scouse – his life as we have known it will end permanently, and a new and more responsible one forged in its place, and one, we imagine, that does not involve staying up until 4 a.m. getting really quite high on a sofa, and putting hour-long techno mixes on YouTube and turning it to such a level where you can hear it – really, really hear it – but also hear each other as you turn and sink room-warm lager and tell each other how important the notes you are listening to actually are. Exact transcript, from the weekend in question: ‘These notes, man. These— god, these fucking notes.’ Sounds become very important when you are high.

Because we are 30, now, and that is a difficult thing to be. Internally, I fundamentally still feel like I am a lost child still slightly bewildered to have pubic hair. Externally, the world expects me to work a job and pay bills and know what politics is. And somewhere in between those spaces, there is a dissonance: I want to be out partying and drinking and shooting my mind out of its skull to some distant, unknowing place, far along the galactic realm – but also my face really, really does look 30 years old under the thudding UV lights of a club, where young people are, gazing upon me like a spectre of death. More and more over the past year I have felt my age, not because my knees hurt or my back has gone or because I started a savings account or any shit like that, but just simply because when I’m in a bar I’m no longer part of the vital, sexy élite at the centre of it: I am the weird guy, on the edges, wearing a formal pair of shoes because he came straight from work and didn’t really expect to be coming out tonight, drinking a Diet Coke because he’s learned through years of hard lessons that pacing two beers with a soft drink really does help mellow the hangover the next day without softening the buzz the night revolves around. My clubbing days are dwindling down, now, not through any great lack of motivation on my part, but just by the sheer embarrassment of how I look when I’m there.

So for the last time ever and in honour of the new life barrelling towards us (him), Jay and I decided to go to a day rave, which is a rave, but it is during the day.

Raves have never been my thing because even at my deepest drunk or highest high I have still been lucid enough to recognise when (and be deeply annoyed by) people chatting absolute shit to me, which people on ecstasy at raves very much like to do, at me, also while listening to dance music, which is the worst type of music there is. This rave was no different: ‘Are you alright, mate?’ people asked. ‘Are you having a good night?’ This is pointless conversation, doubly so when I’m at a urinal pissing. A girl in a glitter top noticed that I was ‘very tall’. Truly, I want to be ever so high that I can unlock the simple part of the brain that allows me to think this is significant or useful conversation, but I can’t, even when chemically baffled, and that makes talking to people who are very difficult to me. In the toilets, a man in a Hawaiian shirt – unbuttoned, so you could see his entire waxed chest – noticed that I, too, was holding my hands under the hand-dryer for an unnecessarily long period of time, and nodded, ‘Nice, isn’t it?’ before his sunglasses fell back onto his face and he turned to leave. ‘Good to meet you, mate,’ he said, extending a warm hand, and he genuinely meant it.

I mean yes I should probably mention I was flying on ecstasy at this point. I’d only ever done half a pill before, years earlier, and it made me derangedly horny – it flipped me from a meek man who has never approached a woman in a bar ever in his life into some sort of frothing-mouthed Tom-Jones-spliced-with-another-,-somehow-hornier-version-of-Tom-Jones fuck-a-geddon, where I went around to every woman in the bar in turn and chatted them up, striking out methodically with each of them, and after I woke up harrowingly alone at 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon I vowed never to take that one again – but Jay had somehow palmed two pills from some dealer in the crowd of the main room and despite my horniness reservations, hey, it was The Final Sesh, so yes I banged one and washed it down with cider.

The hand-dryer incident was the first I’d noticed any great side effect. Ecstasy seems to go one of two ways – horny (derangedly so), or a kind of simple child-like wonder with the world around you, but so far I was feeling neither. Coming up had just made me overwhelmingly anxious – in my head I was quite scared I’d altered my brain chemistry, permanently, forever, and was making small vows to myself that if I was still feeling this way in half an hour, I would simply leave; still feeling like this the next day, I figured, I’d quit my job and tell them I could never again come back to work; if I still felt like this a week later then I’d simply have to kill myself – but after a half-tin of cider and a couple of visits to the urinal I started to feel the requisite warm and glowy. Then I went and sat down and— oh my god, guys. Oh. Oh my god.

I feel like I invented sitting down, that day. Listen: I know a lot of people have sat, before. There were people sitting down before me and there will be people sitting after me. The first Neanderthal man probably sat on something. Animals can sit down. You are probably sitting down right now, a skill you almost certainly learned as a child. But listen to me: I invented sitting down. Until I took slightly too much ecstasy at a day rave as a 30-year-old trying desperately to relate one final time to an old friend, we were just sitting on things.

Jay was not so into this as I was. He kept saying things like: ‘Please, I want to dance.’ He found a flyer with the DJ set times and explained that his favourite DJ in the world was playing at 10.30 p.m. ‘We’ll go there,’ he explained, in the soft tones he had now accepted he had to talk to me in, The Sitting Down Boy, to get me to do anything. ‘We’ll go there, and have a little dance.’ And I would say to him: ‘But after that, we can sit down?’ And he would say: yes. And I would say: ‘Is it alright if I just sit down for, like, 45 more minutes first?’ And he would look at his watch and sigh: yes. And then I would sit there, sitting down, and explain to him very quickly how astounding sitting down feels. Direct transcript, J. R. Golby, February 10th 2018, 8 p.m., Extremely High, re: sitting down: ‘Why don’t we do this all the time?’

I suppose it was a fitting end to The Final Sesh, really: that, after years of partying together, through university and first jobs and moves to big cities and birthdays and just-because-we-feel-like-its, that time I had to go to a house and pick his shoes up because he had bafflingly left them there, that time we ended up in Soho in the deep dark pink hours of it, the time we ended up folded into the crowd of football supporters flooding into town from a packed Wembley, all those pints and all those shots, all those pisses against chain-link fences near tube stations, all those arguments with taxi drivers: that The Final Sesh would be me, desperately sitting down and unmoving, rigidly refusing to go and dance to a DJ we’d paid upwards of £30 to see. In a way, as the last dry skin of youth shedded off our friendship and we became, snakelike, incrementally more adult together, something important happened: we came to know each other, not as kids anymore, but as men. Seated men.