Chris Fleming > Chris's Quotes

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a strong sense of being permeable, porous, of my body being open to the unpredictable forces of outside matter – of seeing myself and my actions in terms of what I’ve swallowed or been immersed in, what I’ve touched or been touched by, what I’ve injected, ingested or inhaled.”
― Chris Fleming, On Drugs

“The structure soon became clear: cocaine was for people who’d succeeded, whose principal tool of drug delivery was the rolled bill; pot was for Gen X slackers who wanted to ‘chill’ or musos who wanted to be ‘creative’; and speed was for losers, for junkies who couldn’t get heroin, or else for miscellaneous ex-crims with facial tattoos who now did long-haul trucking.”
― Chris Fleming, On Drugs

“Addiction is reliable; dealers rarely are.”
― Chris Fleming, On Drugs

“For most long-term users, a substantial part of the high usually precedes the intake and uptake of drugs. Setting up the deal or, better, having the drugs in one’s possession, produces a high sometimes more substantial than that produced by the substances themselves. Watching junkies set up a score is to witness a shift in behaviour and temperament much more obviously euphoric than what appears to come over them after they inject.”
― Chris Fleming, On Drugs

“Reverie allows us to imagine other possibilities than those which lie immediately before us, other worlds than those we inhabit.”
― Chris Fleming, On Drugs

“It is highly culturally diagnostic that the debate about climate change has been, from all quarters, heavily shaped by claims of conspiracy.”
― Chris Fleming, Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid

“despite professing a deep distrust of traditional institutions of authority such as governments – conspiracy theories actually reveal an extraordinary faith in the organizational aptitude and institutional discipline of such bodies. Consider the scheming, forward planning, and perpetual fidelity to an agenda that would be required for governments and/or military operations to prosecute an effective conspiracy. Surely the effort involved in a four-and- a-half-decade intergovernmental ruse required to fake the Apollo 11 moon landing would dwarf the cost and organization of a moon landing itself. The conspiracy would be, in many ways, a grander accomplishment than the space exploration it purportedly fabricates. (Then again, perhaps the conspiracist counter is that the substantial sums once diverted to NASA are now being allocated to government programs designed to fake all levels of space exploration...)”
― Chris Fleming, Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid

“Proven conspiracies very often involve a banality and institutional disorganization that is conspicuously missing from the average conspiracy theory, in which countless numbers of conspirators from multiple organizations are able to march in evil lockstep ad infinitum.”
― Chris Fleming, Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid