I've been trying to teach myself how to write. Yesterday I posted something I wrote, actually the first thing I've written all the way through from memory dump to coherent approximation of how it might work to polishing it. It made me nervous to post it, my original thought was that the drug conversation never goes anywhere and that maybe show and tell would be better. And who better to have read it, it would be hard to find a more intelligent audience. After I posted it I made three edits, what had looked pretty good one minute looked embarrassing when the heat was on. I made a few other changes this morning, there still were a few rough spots I finally solved to my satisfaction. I'll not bore you with that version, it's the same, it just reads better.
Anyway....After posting it I realized that show and tell was beyond my writing abilities at this point, oh well, back to work.
Anyway....What I'm posting below is not in any form whatsoever, it is just the dump part of it. I wrote it yesterday, I'll get back to it eventually and clean it up. I'm posting it specifically to Farmboy(? I think I remember that right). I appreciate what you did for a living, trying to herd a parade of the dead.
In the spirit of show and tell. I'll not continue doing this, either about this subject or others. I appreciate your consideration.
ARS
I got the feel for group therapy right away; I was a group therapy star. Everybody talked about their shit and so did I talk about their shit. Not in a mean or sappy way (I feel your pain, barf, oh do you really) or by telling anybody what they ought to do, how would I know. I’m a very empathetic guy and it’s been 10 years of rubbing shoulders with all manner of damaged people, some of them smart self-aware damaged people. I’m not meaning to imply that junkies sit around having philosophical bull sessions, let’s all let our hair down and cry, never happens. Still, a lot of barriers get dropped and people do talk about how they got there, often in commiseration with someone else going through something similar. I’m not sure I know how to say this, so I guess I’ll just say it.
All kinds of people become addicts I guess, I did run into people I wanted no part of and had no part of. All things considered, I didn’t meet that many of them. I can think of reasons for this, really bad apples are carted off one way or another (what are the chances armed robbery is steady work) and my own mental radar are two main ones but there are others. For whatever reasons, most of the heroin addicts I knew were smart, strong people. They had to be, it is a hard thing to do. Some of the nicest, smartest, most human people I ever met were heroin addicts. When we did get more personal, many knew the how and the why of it, they just hadn’t figured out how to fix it. The fix they had come up with-heroin-had become the problem but removing the fix didn’t solve the original problem and the sun comes up every morning. The fix simplified things, it was understandable, it was definable, not some random whack out of left field.
One thing a heroin addict cannot avoid acknowledging is that he is an addict. That avoids a lot of the mental ducking and dodging. “I’m not an alcoholic, I just like to drink” is plausible up to a point while “I’m not an addict, I just like to inject heroin into myself several times a day” is not, I’m still socialized enough to recognize that. The drug itself kills emotions and dampens the back noise, all of the jitter, all of the clutter in my head. It often is the solution someone turns to for an emotional problem they can’t see any other way of handling and it does that part well, although that was not my personal situation. This conveys a further benefit, I’m able to look at a lot of things that I normally avoid, not that I see them clearly or well in relation to each other. That’s the problem, I can’t get all these things weighted and counterbalance correctly.
youtube.com
Robert |
