Expiration Date

Everyone who tries meth thinks they can handle it. They think they’ll be the first to notice if meth turns into a problem. It is the first lie – the Original Sin – with which meth deceives the user. Expiration Date, is a darkly humored novel about milkmen and methamphetamine in Colorado. Although it's fiction it's based on many of the author’s all-too-true experiences, doing meth, dealing with tweakers and working 16 hours a day six days a week delivering milk on the Eastern Plains of Colorado. At age 39, Bobby Thomshaft yearns to live the lusty life he never got to live when he was younger, and starts experimenting with methamphetamine. After becoming estranged from his wife, he takes a young drug-addicted girlfriend, Allegra. As Thomshaft’s meth use increases, his positive nature warps into a delusional mix of Pollyanna optimism and meth-fueled hubris. He starts believing the rosy illusions of what he wishes to be true, and creates a blind spot of elaborate self-deception to keep him from acknowledging the slew of meth complications piling up. Meanwhile, Thomshaft’s helper and friend, Rudy Tvorsky, tries to wake Thomshaft from his illusions, but he doesn’t realize how far he’s fallen until it’s too late. Expiration Date features adult themes including sex, drugs, lies, violence, bender drunks, some sodomy, greed, jealousy, paranoia, and severe social maladjustment. Written from a decidedly male, blue-collar viewpoint, some who’ve critiqued it, have called it “prick-lit” the opposite of “chick-lit.” The Meth Mindset Physiologically, it’s incredible ingesting a drug created with chemicals such as ether, muriatic acid, iodine, lye, red phosphorus, antihistamines, and anhydrous ammonia doesn’t drop you dead on the spot. Sometimes it does. More often though, meth destroys slow, psychological, and behavioral, tweaking the user, measure by measure, ever more out of sorts with the world they perceive and the world as it really is around them. A lie lies at the heart of meth. Even its dispassionate chemistry is a trick. Meth acts in a way that subverts the body’s self-survival mechanism. Everybody has fundamental needs for sleep, food, drink, companionship and sex. When one of those needs is fulfilled by eating, sleeping, drinking, spending time with friends, or getting laid, a message is sent to the part of the brain controlling the particular need. Satisfied, that part of the brain sends neurotransmitters (sort of chemical thank you notes) called dopamine to the brain’s pleasure center. Arrival of dopamine in the brain is met with much rejoicing, and the pleasure center sends a message to the body that all is well. The whole reaction takes place instantaneously. This is why normal people feel good during and after eating, quenching thirst, sleeping, making love, or spending time with friends. Methamphetamine bypasses this system of achievement and reward. Meth stimulates the sending of dopamine in massive quantities to the brain’s pleasure center, which in turn tells the body, “All is well.” Meanwhile, basic needs go unfulfilled. The brain is a creature of habit and soon becomes conditioned to this new routine. The brain notices that meth provides more pleasure than any satisfied need ever did. The brain stores that knowledge – that first incredible high – in its memory banks and forever schemes to get back to that original high, white moment. The brain learns to pay the most attention to the need that supplies the most pleasure. Noticing that dopamine is being produced without having basic needs met, the brain stops producing its own dopamine when basic needs are met. After long enough, a meth addict cannot enjoy eating, sleeping, sex, or being with friends as much as they once had, if at all. Pleasures satisfied by taking care of basic needs now are superseded by one need – meth. All energies channel toward fulfilling that supreme need, all the rest are secondary. Sure, meth addicts still occasionally sleep, eat and fuck, but the brain no longer associates these actions with pleasure. They are perfunctory functions. Biology with only biology as reward.