What makes a habit bad? Is it when it controls life and you can't live without it or is it when your dependency is prescribed and calculated? What about good addictions? They say it takes one thousand hours to be a master, so how do we measure habits that garner success. If all sins are deadly, why are drugs and alcohol shamed upon over fast food and social media? Isn't gluttony all the same when it comes to things that do not serve us?
The focus for this issue started right after watching Bryan Fogel's, thrilling documentary, Icarus. The film unveils solid proof behind the popularity and dependency of enhancement drugs in sports. I started to think about the pressure placed on the physical body to compete at such a high performance level. How the best athletes have to train for hours, eat perfectly, get enough rest and hope to recover in time to do it all again, and that is just practice. I started to think about the public fall from grace that tipped American athletes Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong. Superheroes of my youth were caught "using" something beyond their regulated nature to be the best. All in good sport.
There has always been a lustful hankering surrounding artistry and substance dependency. "Sex, drugs and rock and roll" has become the career slogan for our nations young and advantageous yet Prince and Michael Jackson died from opioid overdoses. Actually, most of our music legends went out from some type of malpractice. Whether Basquiat, Freud, Hendrix, Joplin, Houston, Ledger, Winehouse, Seymour-Hoffman, Belushi or Presley, their larger than life personas were never big enough to escape the grips of addiction. We obsess over the art while ignoring the madness of artistry. One of my favorite on-camera dope fiends, Chris Rock, just admitted in his special, Tamborine, that he had a porn addiction, which aided in the divorce from his wife of 16 years. Truth be told, I had a sex addiction. It cost me a life partner and a bunch of money trying to right my wrongs. I spent the first half of my twenties taking anything that came my way and the latter half with my legs closed and my hormones in a coma. The thrill of flirting to get dirty left with my juvenile ways. I started to appreciate intimacy over quickies and knew that romance was at the root of most needs yet I suppressed it. I neglected it for what was available. Bad habit.
Tracing patterns of life cycles can often unveil a map to the future. Creatures of habit, we create systems to provide comfort and ease. Be it life's trials, loves quarrels, family drama or just the need to be free, we all find escapism in some type of routine. This issue is an exploration into all the things that make us the same. The secrets of our truths, and how we use our time here to impact others. Each story serves as an example of humans being human. Fluorescents in a room of smoke and mirrors. Not everything you see is what it seems and this magazine is positioned to offer truth to those who seek it. Community driven, our goal is to be a panacea that unites us in our ways. We're all just trying to find the perfect footing between vice and life.
Nai Vasha, Co-Founder of UNDO-Ordinary
