"What is that? Whatever, why not, I'll try some. Ooh."
Hey there, it’s been a while. Yes, I know, folks have been wondering where I’ve disappeared to, why my cheerful voice has barely been heard chirping here in quite a good while. We’ll get to that, but let me get it out of the way and share something personal first:
My name is MBNYC, and I am a drug addict.
I’d expect that particular statement to be as unexpected and startling for you to read as it was unimaginable, not all that long ago, for me to say, let alone write.
For those unfamiliar with this precise sequence of words, allow me: that’s how you introduce yourself at any meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as at those of the phalanx of related groups dedicated to fighting various other addictions.
There are hundreds of them – also available for non-believers like yours truly – everywhere from sea to shining sea, for everything from gambling to kleptomania or narcotics and including, I seem to recall, addiction to shopping, to sex and to (presumably unhappy) relationships. Pick your poison, whatever it is, there’s a twelve-step for it somewhere, a twelve step that may very well be on the bloody front lines of America’s failed war on drugs.
Define failed? Look around you.
Define bloody? Sure: Roughly one hundred and forty three Americans die of a drug overdose every day.
Yes, you read right: not year, not month or week, every damned day.
American carnage? You bet.
That’s over sixty thousand dead bodies annually, equal to the population of a small town or four to six U.S. Army infantry divisions, with growth year over year of, I seem to recall, nineteen percent. Drug and alcohol addiction carry an annual price tag for America’s economy conservatively estimated to be well north of half a trillion dollars. Roughly one in ten Americans is addicted to drugs, alcohol or both.
I am one of them. This is my story.
###
In this diary, I’m going to walk you through what drug addiction is, how and why it manifested in my specific case, discuss some aspects of the opioid overdose epidemic in terms of its genesis, its effects and possible policy approaches to it, as well as some remarks on treatment for addiction. That’s a lot of material that doesn’t naturally cohere, in consequence, this diary is correspondingly quite long and thematically somewhat haphazard. I would ask you to bear with me.
At least I can write, so you hopefully won’t be too bored. This subject is important and near to my heart, I’m pretty sure this piece is one of the first of its kind, and I’d like to give you a direct window into how these things work.
In this piece, I sugarcoat exactly nothing. Zero. Nada.
A personal note: I’m not the junkie of stereotype by any stretch of the imagination, rather, I’m successfully and regularly in treatment – outpatient rehab at New York City’s LGBT Center, thank you very much – and actually doing remarkably well. In fact, in this piece, I belabor ad nauseam the fact that I’ve been astonishingly lucky.
Lastly: if you feel that you or a loved one have a substance abuse problem, have hope.
Do not despair. There are resources for you everywhere – tons of links in the diary too – and I’m here to tell you one thing from personal experience: even the darkest night is only a vain and empty shadow, brief and powerless in the light of a new dawn.
###
Atypically for the population at large, my poison is crystal methamphetamine [pdf], colloquially ‘crystal’, ‘meth’, ‘tina’, ‘crank’ or ‘glass’.
I rarely do anything else, maybe GHB every once in a while. GHB is comparable to Molly or liquid ecstasy, is the prototypical club drug and often the culprit in date rape.
Let me give you some context to better understand what that means.
Among men of my demographic – gay, white, professional, educated and urban – crystal is mainly and widely used as a sex drug. You can snort it – especially if you’ve always wanted a deviated septum and those rat bastards over at Saks keep on selling out – smoke or inject it. GHB you just pour into a drink, not an alcoholic drink of course.
‘Because that’ll kill ya. Like, dead. I know a bakers dozen of guys who bought it on G and alcohol, stay away.
The effects of using crystal are near Instantaneous and can last forty-eight hours or more. They are varying degrees of euphoria, arousal, the disappearance of any and all inhibitions and, lastly, an absolutely confounding inability to sleep.
That, and crystal hammers into marble tablets the aphorism that men think with our dicks. So you’ll either write an opera or bang two dozen men.
You probably also won’t want to or, haha wrong, won’t be able to eat for the duration. Some clever folks call it the West Hollywood Tweaker Diet, which I’m sure sounds funny, innocuous and cute, except I’ve seen men lose ten pounds or more in a few days.
That’s the initial sales pitch right there: you’ll be happy, confident, chattier than a talkshow host, randier than a box of goats and – best of all! – keep your girlish figure.
Calgon, take me away.
You may have heard the story of Richard Quest, the CNN anchor who a few years ago somehow wound up naked in Central Park doing something apparently rather awkward. That’s what this stuff does.
Richard had an unrequited crush on me for the longest time, and we went to a cough club cough together quite often; he’s a good guy, incredibly smart and pleasant, just not my thing, so I mention him here principally as one prominent example of the altogether unfortunate things this drug can lead one to do. The club was run by the guy who did the voice-over in this ad. You’ll want to click on that at home.
Crystal meth is what cocaine wants to be when it grows up and has hair on its chest.
###
At my apex, nadir, call it what you will, I used crystal every few weeks or so, at most maybe once or twice a month – I may joke about it, but I’m not blasé in the slightest about how powerful this stuff is – and this almost universally in a scenario involving or centered on sex.
I can’t identify a pattern beyond the immediately situational and, more ominously, the fact that I now tend to binge. I don’t have cravings in the literal sense of the term and have never had them – I just quit smoking, let me tell you what withdrawal really is when I’m done chewing furniture – but that doesn’t matter all that much – when I start, I don’t usually stop for a few days and take as long or longer to recover.
That’s a problem with adult-y things like, I don’t know, say employment and marriage.
I used to be able to call it a night when it was a good idea to do so. I learned the hard way that this no longer holds true and is moreover unlikely to do so again going forward.
###
Volume, frequency or the inherent aesthetics of use are however not the defining metrics in applying the label addiction.
It’s descriptive if you require something to function at all on a very basic level, or can’t stop once you’ve started, even though your rational mind tartly observes that you behave, when intoxicated, in ways that are incomprehensible and unequivocally damaging viewed when you’re not. It doesn’t matter if the underlying intoxicant is criminalized like many drugs, stigmatized as is alcoholism or free of societal censure altogether.
That’s what distinguishes the recreational user from the person with a habit, assuming for the sake of argument that the distinction between the two designations is at all useful or descriptive.
And yeah, that one hit me like a ton of bricks too.
###
Now, you might wonder why exactly I might possibly feel compelled to share this overall rather unpleasant and arguably self-stigmatizing personal history here.
There are a few reasons to do so that in sum outweigh the obvious caveats.
One is that by writing and now publishing this diary, I’m drawing a line under a painful chapter of my own life and starting a new one. Any good Catholic can tell you about the therapeutic value of the confessional.
Yours truly in a playful moment with one of my husbands.
More gravely, I have come to believe, most urgently in the context of the national opioid epidemic, that this country needs to have a punishingly frank conversation about drugs, one that I’m convinced has to start with personal honesty of an at least equal degree.
And here we are now.
I believe strongly that the wider drug and overdose epidemics, when analytically considered as crises, are less medical in nature than they are social and political. I also believe that the progressive community has a role to play in any solution, possibly a definitive role.
There is at present no national strategy or action plan to address a scourge that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year, hundreds every day. I’d argue that this lack of direction and policy response is a direct, lethal consequence of one-party rule by the hard right.
Especially considering that the party in question is led by a narcissistic talking anus.
If a foreign invader did this kind of damage to the United States and our citizens, we’d have dispatched aircraft carriers a long time ago, and sent in Marines too for good measure.
Last but not by any means least, it’s also my hope to reach someone, anyone out there who’s going through what I went through.
The journey into and out of chemical dependency is scary and lonely. So if that’s you, babe, take heart and have faith: if a hot mess like me can get through in one piece, you can too, and you’ll emerge stronger and better than you went in. I did. You’re going to be okay, and I promise you too will step into the light of a new day. It will be hard work; anything worth having is, but be of good cheer, you can do this, and if you want it, you will do this. Maybe today was bad, could be, but you have it in you to make tomorrow better, to create the world anew. One day at a time.
And now back to the drugs. Might wanna pull up a chair, grab some refreshments, this is an opus and freakishly, agonizingly long.
###
Over thirty million Americans are addicts. Alcohol’s societal costs are about $250 billion annually. Americans spend one hundred billion dollars a year on illegal drugs and double that amount in related costs. Overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty.
Let that sink in. Not cancer, not guns, not car accidents, terrorism or AIDS.
Overdoses. They are the new and exciting American way to die and the proximate cause of recent drops in life expectancy for working class white men.
If you want to get granular, usually overdoses of opiates and their derivatives.
Downers generally carry a risk of overdose (defined as a shutdown of the body’s central nervous system, leading in turn to a cessation of breathing and cardiac activity); you can overdose on uppers like cocaine or crystal meth, but usually they prefer to kill you with a good old-fashioned heart attack.
Makes it easier on the family too I guess, given that they can just put heart attack in your obituary as cause of death; a little more acceptable down at the corner diner than “we found our child dead with a needle in her arm.”
Or you could just have a psychotic break like the roommate of a friend did last year; one day, we’re chirping over meth and coffee like happy and very very high little parakeets, a few days later his mind is gone. No warning signs, nothing. Just gone.
He’s about my age, good-looking guy too, maybe a year or two older, and did the same things I did down to the finer details. Absolutely fucking terrifying.
There but for the grace of God and all that.
###
It bears mention that the opioid epidemic currently garnering growing dismayed attention is not some foreign affliction visited on these shores by malice abroad. You’re thinking of that pig traitor in the White House, an understandable conflation; but unlike the sham presidency of tovarich talking anus, the opioid crisis is very much an American creation, born and bred on our shores.
It was our pharmaceutical industry that developed powerful synthetic opioids to treat pain. It was our pharmaceutical industry that noticed the immense profits to be made from illicit use. It was again our pharmaceutical industry that hired Federal regulators into cushy jobs, sweet payoffs to strike our government blind, or more accurately, to make it willfully complicit.
How much money does the industry spend, say on lobbying?
Compared to profits, pennies on the dollar, if even that much.
There are giant gobs of money being made with more and bigger gobs waiting in the wings. What could be more mom’s-apple-pie American than corporations making billions from human misery?
I don’t know, Elvis?
###
I consider addiction today to be easily analogous to the AIDS crisis of thirty years ago, in the level of stigmatization applied to it, as well as in its lethality and the lack of an organized, government-wide response. Addiction is also, much as was or rather is AIDS, something that happens to other people.
Say, to people like me.
Thing is though, I’ve been a Kossack since January 2006, UID 76701. There was a national emergency back then too, in that we were at war in the Middle East and had a shitty and illegitimate Republican president, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. I go to Meetups, to Netroots, give money, in normal times, log on pretty much daily.
Now there’s a habit for ya. Eh, fine, I’ll keep it.
So whatever else I may be – annoying, fabulous, an insufferable moran nuisance – I’m not *other* people.
You and I care about the same things, go to the same events, knock on the same doors, vote for and write checks to the same politicians. Fact is, if I can swing it after the ruinously expensive mess this diary chronicles – I’m out about thirty to forty grand – I’m heading to Netroots again this year.
This community – and more broadly the larger Progressive Movement – more than anything or anywhere else to me is home.
And I’m here to tell you that alcoholism, drug addiction or any of the myriad other members of this family of afflictions are not failures of willpower, the inevitable result of moral rot, not even simple sloppiness.
There is not really a moral component to any of this, not in the sense that it’s usually applied. I’m not myself a bad person, I think – though opinions on the subject sadly do vary – but man have I made some shitty choices. They add up, but they’re not probative in terms of personal virtue or worth.
In sum: Addiction is a disease, plain and simple, and addicts as sufferers therefrom deserve not your scorn but your active love, care and compassion.
We are your sons, your daughters, your brothers and sisters, your mothers and fathers, your flesh and blood.
Do not forsake us in this hour of our need.
###
So how did I get to this point? Like I said, that’s a long story. The short version tl;dr is heartbreak. Cheesy, you bet, but agonizingly true.
Over the last twelve months, my already faltering relationship finally fractured, and as a result, an outwardly satisfied life of comfort and security, long broken inside, finally crumbled into ruin and despair.
Drugs played an central role in all of it, drugs I took – and lied about taking – and which my partner (let’s just call him Joe, for simplicity’s sake) would no longer tolerate.
If that sounds heartless, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, it doesn’t matter: Joe is a recovering alcoholic. The cross on his shoulders is not unlike the one on mine and weighs at as heavily, if not more.
What you need to know about addicts, Joe, myself, any of us really – is that we are selfish. Believe me, I should know simply given how, as my accelerating downward spiral consumed me a year ago, I overlooked one crucial not-about-me fact: I had become a danger to his hard-earned sobriety.
That man went, for years, to one twelve step meeting after another, day after day after day to the last stale donut of recorded time, every day, all the while I was getting high with a series of interchangeable men, out of boredom, loneliness, lust or whatever other banal, flimsy excuses I told myself justified it all, made it worthwhile or somehow defensible.
In fairness to him, I’d run too.
###
In the space of those twelve months, I went to drug rehab and got kicked out of my home the day I came out. For a brief while, a few searing days, I was homeless on the streets of New York. I thought about suicide more than once. I was hungry, tired, lonely and afraid.
Then I overdosed on heroin. Yes, of course it was intense. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.
I was one of those people whose vacant eyes and hungry faces you do not see, equally invisible amid the splendor and the grime of the City.
New York is febrile in its energy, a leviathan that never truly sleeps; for those cast into its shadows, it is inhospitable, a cruel and unforgiving hellscape of deprivation, squalor and neglect you might suspect but seldom see, fitfully obscured just beneath the shining surface of Gotham the Great.
###
Two things were happening in what I now see was a self-reinforcing feedback loop: our (near) marriage was dying, and as a result, one of my greatest character flaws – a habit of deflecting pain by ignoring or anesthetizing it that long predated any drug use – ran rampant.
I binge on everything; love, beauty, people, coffee, food, books, places. When I first came to Paris, or later to New York, I spent days walking around just drinking in the sheer gorgeousness of them.
When I first saw Manhattan with my own eyes, shining in the sunset like a serrated ridge of burning gold, I bawled my eyes out.
I’ve done the same with men, with clothes, with music, art, food, the gym, anything at all that can be experienced. And I would argue that this is not ipso facto a bad thing; better to have an experience, take the risk of something new, than to grind away a life afraid of being able to feel.
As long as a painting, a building, a beautiful man or woman or something as simple as a bouquet of flowers can leave me gasping for breath, I’ll know I’m alive.
Eventually, I binged on drugs as well. Anything to mask or distract from a reality that got darker and colder with every waking moment.
###
Sadly, in my experience, blotting out a painful reality is of only limited utility in making that reality go away. You can plaster enough makeup on a pig to obscure the Rock of Gibraltar, and perhaps give that pig a passing moment of glamour; it will however remain a pig, obstinately oinking away while you fidget with the eyelash curler.
###
Take, for example, my most recent LSAT experience.
I’ve been engineering a shift from whatever it is that I do into law for a while, and I’ve actually already passed the LSAT, Law School Admissions Test. It’s a matter of paperwork and garden-fresh greenbacks at this point.
But Little Miss Overachiever here demands ninetieth national percentile or bust, so I decided to take it again. Spent months preparing, just the stuff you do; all shiny, spiff and ready. It was and still is a major project; this is my future.
And then the phone rings a few days before the big day. Hey, wanna hang out, blah party hot blah, sure I do. I’ll hang out with those cheekbones any day of the week. What’s one lazy afternoon in bed, please, hell yeah I’m on my way.
To condense the episode somewhat, I subsequently showed up for the LSAT high as a kite, smelling like a barnyard too most likely, completely unprepared, after having been up for several days and with one contact lens. Said lens ripped as I was signing in.
Not a winning presentation, a complete bloody shambles actually, so I abandoned the exercise as discreetly as I could, booked myself into a hotel for the weekend and called the man with the cheekbones.
He really is gorgeous – Native American if you must know, tall, muscled, inked – and this isn’t to blame him, quite the contrary. He got me through the worst days after the breakup in one piece, God bless him, and then there was that cinematic Thanksgiving with him and his cousin (!!!) that I’m so totally going to hell for – but in terms of actually productive behavior, “not so great” is an almost comically British understatement.
Sure we had a great time – and? A great time and four dollars buys you a cup of Starbucks’ finest. By the same token, Titanic had a not entirely satisfactory maiden voyage with some minor room for improvement.
Damn sure ain’t gonna happen for the bar exam.
In a nutshell, this particular experience is one major reason why I’m going sober. You don’t fuck with the basics of your livelihood. It’s just plain dumb if you do; no way to sugarcoat that, not convincingly. Believe me: I tried.
###
What also didn’t really help was that moment when I walked in the door back home after this particular crash and burn, where the reaction of my boyfriend to my self-evident failure was a bout of derisive laughter. I think he actually pointed a finger and laughed.
I don’t want to speak ill of him, he’s a good man and probably better than I deserve – even my dad agrees on that one – but that was a dick move, and sadly one not entirely out of character.
###
It’s remarkable how the years I endured of his teary threats to end his life — pro tip: if someone casually makes that threat, they ain’t doing it, they’re just manipulative assholes – the years of his intermittent drunken rages, of his scorn, disparagement in public and neglect in private, all that weighed in his scales as little as a feather, if even that much, next to my later transgressions.
Not that I think, in the perfect clarity of hindsight, that they should have; but as my bearings slowly came undone, empathy and altruism faded as well.
Over the years I learned, as he once volubly informed my friends – in my presence – that my main purpose in life is decorative, just as he learned that drunkenly kicking down a door in your best friend’s brand-new restaurant, the night of the opening no less, is generally ill-advised. People are touchy about stuff like that – who knew? Tends to be a real deal-breaker for any further relationship.
For the best friend that is, not for me. A few days later, on Pride Sunday of 2012, I took Joe to his first AA meeting. He stayed, I left and marched down Fifth Avenue in Army boots and a pair of Calvin Klein briefs. People went absolutely nuts; tanned muscled flesh will do that, and how dreadfully unfortunate that I no longer get photographed for a living, because that would have paid for a month in Aruba at least. Probably more than a month.
Decorative? Quite.
The Greeks call it hubris, the vain laughter of mortals who foolishly dare to vie with the gods. That day sowed seeds that ultimately bore bitter fruit in last year’s destruction.
###
Some people take from Alcoholics Anonymous what they need and leave the rest behind. Others are completely subsumed in it, live and breathe its customs, its rituals, embrace fully the tribalism and missionary zeal of an at its core religious endeavor.
Joe walked through door number two with a vengeance that did not cool over the years but became more pronounced, more immersed, more dogmatic. No believer is as zealous as the convert.
###
After yet another terrible fight – this was right after his sixtieth, notable chiefly for the fact that I was a shitfaced tweaky mess [Note: link NSFW] when he walked in the door – I suggested we separate.
I didn’t expect him to agree, but – spoiler – he did. I fell to pieces.
###
I fled from our increasingly alien – and increasingly shabby – home out into Gotham’s liquid nights, looking for affection and love but usually settling for drugs and sex; if you don’t look too closely and leave in time, or before the chemicals wear off, the illusion can hold for a while. The cold light of dawn is indifferent to truth and pain alike. But, as Joe once said of me, I’m in love with love, love being in love, and a hungry heart cannot be denied; it can however be deceived.
No flight is as doomed as the flight from yourself.
As time crawled on, I fled more and more and more often, further and deeper into those nights. Nights eventually bled into days, then nights and days and nights again, more and more and more, escapes fitfully masquerading as hedonism.
Hedonism however requires discretion, limits and control, of self, of others and of the general circumstances in which one finds oneself. I got sloppy and was losing control ever more, until that day I spent anchored to my desk, alone, unmoving, lonely and afraid of what my life had turned into; that was the breaking point. I couldn’t take it anymore.
I admitted myself into rehab a few days later. It was early summer of 2017.
###
I’d like to say it was a redemptive experience, and in some ways it was. For example, I found out – in a remarkable parallel to coming out of the closet – that I’m not some solitary fuckup laboring silently and alone in the dark, bereft of human companionship. Indeed, as noted, we are legion.
What I got out of rehab wasn’t just the knowledge that it’s actually quite widespread to lose control, it was also, and more importantly, an awareness of two related facts: one, what breeds addiction isn’t the relative availability of your intoxicant of choice.
It’s rather a cluster of habits and attributes that singly or in sum don’t predetermine addiction, but in combination make it significantly more likely. In my case, and again these vary for every individual, they are depression, anxiety, impulsivity, low self-esteem – yes, really, it’s true, don’t tell anyone – and a near-compulsive need for instant gratification.
Two, as with all else under heaven, you can improve on what nature gave you. There are tools that can counter these predispositions. Nothing you can buy at your local hardware store – that’s where you go to buy the rope you need to tie somebody up with, you silly person – just a set of habits usually reinforced by some form of structured therapy.
Which, and would somebody please just fuck me already, in a nutshell is what AA is all about, once you drill past the layers of saccharine Jesus claptrap about blowing your higher power and the heinous Shirley Temple rest of it.
Put less Lower East Side (and to close that circle), Joe wasn’t just wasting my time with his endless dismal speeches about the tools of recovery; the man, as much as it pains me to admit it, knew what he was on about, and if I were half as serious as I tell myself I am, or even slightly less petulant, superficial and willful, perhaps I’d have listened.
###
And if I can say that, maybe I can finally admit that losing him, throwing away a fifteen year relationship in a fit of bored, petty solipsism, was the most shattering and painful choice of my adult life, eclipsed only by the grief of knowing that our future together is gone, withered into a barren, choking dust untouched by the tears I’m still too hurt to shed.
All the sex and drugs in creation won’t make that anguish and sorrow go away or fill the aching void love leaves behind when it dies.
###
Now, most of my male gay friends are drug users. Gay women seem to go for beer and pot, go figure. That’s one cliché at least loosely based in observable fact.
By contrast, men – not all, but many – socialize around drugs, hook up with drugs in mind often even more than sex, in a universe of use – the alphabet soup of “party drugs” – distinctly different from that of our hetero brethren.
Crystal Meth, GHB, Ecstasy, Ketamine, they’re the raspberry cosmos of this day and age, and if someone asks you if you party, they’re not usually asking about a rave. Yes, fine, that one initially confused me too, back when I practically lived on the dance floor at Limelight, but anyway.
###
So it would stand to reason that, immediate family aside, I’d never really met even one heroin user before I married one, fittingly on September Eleventh of last year a few blocks from the World Trade Center.
Yeah, I know, laying it on way too heavy with the dramatic foreshadowing here – except every word of it is true.
We met in the building I moved to when Joe had finally had enough and kicked me out, that bright happy day I also got discharged from rehab with a spring in my step and a song in my heart.
I saw Rich down in the courtyard – the chill place to hang out – and there he was with his sad pretty eyes being all tall, dark and handsome. He had something about him, something wounded, something fragile, which to me is a big bowl of catnip with sugar on top. I saw him and still distinctly remember thinking “Yeah, you, me, gonna happen. Count on it, pretty boy”.
We met later that day, off and on again after that, nothing crazy. He’s a sweet guy, a little dopey and goofy, Italian by ancestry and Texan by birth. Can’t dress worth a damn, still: he’s sexy, silly, playful, a lot of good things.
Over the next few weeks, Rich and I became closer; it still floored me when, one warm summer evening, his tongue wound up in my throat and he proposed.
I said yes.
###
When I announced the happy news on Facebook – as one does, I gather – my entire circle of friends instantly and as one pronounced me stark raving mad for even entertaining the idea of getting married at all, to anyone, let alone to a handsome if troubled man a full twenty years younger than myself in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic divorce.
Which, you know, when you put it that way and all things considered, is good and eminently reasonable advice, so it again shouldn’t surprise anyone, not in the least, that he and I showed up in the City Clerk’s office a few days later to put pen to paper and sign a domestic partnership – gay marriage lite, all the fabulousness with half the calories. We moved in together a day later.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah I know, trick question. The answer is that quite a bit could go wrong and ultimately did go wrong, which I’d guess is what happens when you’re hurt, anxious over being alone and have no idea, rhetorical man-slut bravado aside, of how to actually be content just with yourself tout seul, let alone of how to navigate life without the emotional security blanket you patiently knitted over fifteen years but just set on fire.
It’s also, and this again in retrospect is far clearer than it was at the time, reassuring to have a new love interest when you previously thought your love life was over and you’d die a spinster, sad and forgotten with fifty seven cats as your sole company.
I’m allergic, ain’t gonna happen, but hey.
And yes, I’ll admit that the fact I was already in Europe, getting my degree and hitting clubs when this one was hatched did tickle my fancy. Just a tiny little bit okay fine not just a little. I don’t do the daddy thing, it’s nails-on-a-chalkboard tacky if you ask me, but he was cute and kind and sweet, so there was something there beyond the statistics and aesthetics.
More to the point and as I learned later, he told his mom on that first day that I was the most handsome man he’d ever laid eyes on, and that attitude, ladies and gentlemen, I can definitely work with.
###
At that time – roughly late July into early August of 2017 – I was still essentially a casual drug user (or so I thought) and, as noted, testing the waters of that odd new being single thing. Drugs weren’t top of mind and never really have been. I don’t generally think about drugs until some switch in my head flips and I throw myself into the fire.
Sure there had been a few unpleasant incidents, but who knows, maybe they only occurred because I was stressed and unhappy. Something. I’d first done this stuff a long time ago, most of my buddies as well, nothing to see here. I like totally and fersure know what I’m doing, so take that river in Egypt business and go play in it, naysayers! Harrumph.
If that sounds flippant, it absolutely is, so in fairness I’ll admit that I was already concerned about my drug use. I may be blond, but I’m not completely oblivious to the basic principle of cause and effect. I was certainly aware that drugs were a contributing or likely even the principal factor in the breakup I had just been through and in which I had put someone I love through hell.
###
Then one day, a friend – Syrian, the cutest thing in the world, a bit short maybe – gave me a healthy little package of nose candy (I don’t usually have to buy the stuff) and I thought, you know what, make a night of it. It wasn’t anything special or out of the ordinary in quality, amount, anything. I remember it quite well: nothing I hadn’t done many times before.
Rich wasn’t there and I had the day to myself, so put on some leather and saddle up, Betty, we’re gonna go paint this town in glitter and gay.
The night ended with me blacking out and in the emergency room for the second time that month. It was September of 2017.
Everything else hadn’t fully gotten my attention, this did. Once is an accident, shit happens, twice is a pattern.
The heroin overdose happened maybe a week or two later with Rich in some sad stuffy hotel room on the Upper West Side. What is that stuff you’re doing, ooh let me try it. Honey, please, I can handle it.
Famous last words, I guess. If once is an accident and twice is a pattern, three times is a big fucking siren going off and huge neon signs flashing Wake The Fuck Up.
That’s what happens when you wake up in an ER for the third time in a month.
That’s when I finally faced the fact that had been bloody obvious to everyone but me, that unless I stop doing these things, I will likely die, moreover likely die pretty soon.
I’ve been sober – completely drug-free to be exact – ever since.
Coincidentally, Rich is the one who kept me on life’s edge till the medics he had called arrived; whatever else may be true, that man saved my life and risked arrest doing so; there’s a warrant out for him. A lot of guys would not have done that. Again: freakishly lucky.
So tell me again how this is all fun and, like, totally worth it all.
###
When I say that I overdosed on heroin, you might wonder what that’s like. This was my first experience with that stuff, by the way, and I’m fairly confident it will also be my last. Tried it, it was awful, not happy, very much not a fan, not my thing. Case in point: I always thought the term ‘dope’ refers to pot.
That’s how naive I was. Turns out that – at least in this part of the country, I hear it’s different in the heartland – dope is heroin. Learn something new every day.
Here’s what it felt like: nothing at all.
One minute you’re there, then the thread rips and – if you’re lucky – you wake up without shoes in a hospital emergency room. There’s no glamour to it, no song and dance with grandma in a tunnel of light, no heroin chic, no hanging out with Kate Moss at the hot party in London, only numb helplessness, dismay and disoriented shock.
That’s if you’re lucky.
If you’re not lucky, and statistically you probably won’t be, that’s where the curtain falls and the story ends, with you dead and your loved ones left behind to pick up the pieces as best they can. We all know a family, perhaps several, that have been shattered by a death like this, cold, senseless and alone.
I’m narcissistic , impulsive and selfish to an astonishing degree, but this I will not put my friends and family through, not for a Mack truck made out of diamonds, gold and fairy dust.
###
Rich – not his real name, by the way – described himself as a recovering or former heroin addict, and that may very well be an accurate statement, or it may not be, I’m not sure. What he didn’t tell me is that he does enough Xanax on a given day to tranquilize a horse.
I have never had a problem with prescription medicines. Xanax in my book is something you take when you’ve done too much cocaine or crystal or, for that matter, when your evil mother-in-law is expected for Thanksgiving and you just know in your churning guts that your China pattern isn’t up to snuff.
But apparently Xanax is also something you do when your goal is to be asleep eighteen out of every twenty-four hours, the remainder of the day being devoted to ambling over to your methadone clinic and saying hello to whichever tragic drug dealer happens to be in attendance – maybe the nice woman with no teeth? She was nice.
Thing is, the methadone clinic is where you find a dealer to get more Xanax – which you need because the maximum amount that can be legally prescribed, to you or to anyone, only carries you halfway through the month. There’s like totally no reason to find that circumstance at least slightly troubling.
But at least it’s not heroin, I told myself. Hooray, he’s not shooting up, gold star for everyone!
###
The whole thing began to fray almost as soon as it was stitched, and finally combusted when I found Rich passed out in the bathroom one cold December morning. I’m no expert, but that didn’t strike me as successfully not doing heroin. That thing he had promised me and swore up and down was true; maybe not so much.
At that point, I’d already been clean for a few months, so there was a stark choice to make: stay and live with the drugs and with him all the while careening toward catastrophe, or leave and live without either.
I love him, I really do, but I couldn’t pay the price staying with him would inevitably exact.
I left New York a few days later to spend the holidays with friends in Boston. I was probably still traveling when our landlord in The Bronx tossed everything I’d left behind to be stored into the garbage; clothes, dress shoes, suits, ties, my gorgeous enormous computer, all gone. A fitting coda to the story if nothing else. Rich and I separated a few days later.
It was over.
###
As they – or we now, I guess – say in AA, life remains a work in progress, with the only constant being that the past is the past, the future unknowable, a matter of challenge, opportunity and hope, and the present, the here and now, the only certainty any of us have.
One day at a time.
That’s what recovery looks like, a daily choice not even to live healthy, it’s far more stark than that, it’s a daily choice to live.
And yes, I do wake up every day and remind myself that I’m lucky to be alive.
If that sounds perhaps a bit morose, corny, overwrought or overly dramatic, it’s not; that heroin overdose killed me. My heart stopped beating and I wasn’t breathing, that’s no disco nap; it’s reasonably definitive as death.
That I survived all this isn’t however evidence that I can get high again, perhaps sporadically, less often and with smaller doses; it doesn’t work like that. Survival on one occasion or even several isn’t dispositive of future outcomes.
It is however indicative of a new and dangerous phase in my consumption of narcotics, which is that negative outcomes after use are probably not the exception anymore, rather, they are quite likely to be the new rule.
As you can tell, I’ve played out scenarios in my mind five ways till Tuesday, and yeah, sure I wish I’d been able to reach a defensible conclusion to the contrary; I couldn’t.
I’ll be honest: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are or can be boatloads of fun.
I didn’t do any of this because it bored me rigid. If I wanted to be bored, I’d go find an Applebee’s or watch C-SPAN reruns.
With my not inconsiderable skills of argument and all the subtle sophistry I could muster, I couldn’t see a tenable scenario that would permit use of any kind to me, so this is and has to be it.
I’ve done this before; the 9/11 attacks threw me into a paroxysm of depression and ever-escalating drug use for about two years, maybe three. When it got bad, I quit cold turkey without a second thought, just willpower and a prescription for Xanax. Mommy’s little helper did the trick.
Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. Three ER visits in the space of a single month, all because of drug use, your life a bombed-out shambles, you hurt as much and as deeply as you hurt the people you love. How is that worth it? On what planet?
And how much longer would you be willing to roll the dice that the next time will be better?
###
I stayed in Boston till the end of January, including one night – my credit card had invidiously been cancelled, those swine – in the rough at South Street station. It’s true what they say, it never rains but it pours.
On the plus side, that experience was one of learning and empathy more than anything else, and – and! – Laura Clawson made me coffee the next day. Laura makes awesome coffee. She’s an amazing person and I hadn’t seen her in ages, so overall on balance a win, I’d say.
It’s true Tonto, silver linings, they are everywhere.
###
What’s next?
I believe that I can use my personal misery for good. I’ll be alright: I’m a white man with an advanced degree and excellent table manners, a great support system and a good family. I’ll bounce back. It’s already a big bounce to finish and now publish this piece. Money’s tight, always is, but I have a new apartment in a few weeks and will be fully back in normal life soon enough. Can’t really work yet, still a bit shaky (and outpatient rehab takes up a good amount of time as well) but I will.
One day at a time, believe me, things happen when they’re ready to happen and not before.
So let me take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
I repeat this ad nauseam because it’s God’s honest truth: others are not as fortunate as I was.
Two of my oldest friends who died from drug use, for example, or the sister of a friend who died much too young and much too soon, a nephew who almost died multiple times – three suicide attempts if memory serves – and drove his parents to despair, my cousin over in Europe who died last year, the tens of thousands of Americans who succumb to overdoses every year, the uncounted millions whose lives are stunted, nasty, brutish and short.
I’ve now had a front-row seat to the drug and opioid epidemic in all its squalor, its profound unyielding misery of wasted lives and missed chances.
it is a view that fills me with rage and should by right do the same to you.
The country faces many challenges, most of them self-inflicted, and I hesitate to assign them a hierarchy of urgency; however, the overdose epidemic is one of the worst, maybe because it ties together so many of the others, inequality and health care among them.
It is almost a metaphor of a fractured society, an unambiguously deadly metaphor.
Are we really going to sit back and allow tens of thousands of our fellow Americans to needlessly die every year? That’s what we’re doing right now, so there is precedent.
We have to break that precedent. Lives are at stake.
###
The medics brought me back from my overdose with a prescription medication called Narcan or Naloxone; It is an opioid antagonist, which in plain English means simply that it reverses opiate overdoses.
Narcan wasn’t even legal not all that long ago, today, small towns in New England are making it as widely available as possible, if need be in public kiosks. The puritan decorum of this part of the country went out the window when the corpses started piling up just a bit too high.
Our Federal government meanwhile, if this even needs to be pointed out, is absent on the matter, a sham cosmetic declaration of a public health emergency (that frees no funding) notwithstanding.
Kellyanne Conway is in charge, America’s most vapid talk show laughing stock this side of Tucker Carlson, if you need yet more evidence of government neglect.
I’m a partisan, but this not a partisan argument. Overdoses are a serious and deadly crisis. Naming Kellyanne Conway as being in charge of an effort to counter it isn’t just laughable on its face, it’s an insult to or, stronger, an active betrayal of millions of Americans, of the weakest among us.
Where is the rage?
Orange Hitler is obviously and manifestly inadequate to and unfit for the presidency, this appointment however is worse than that: it constitutes actively doing harm, a distracting and shameful waste of time when time is not on our side and the death toll rises every day.
More: 45 hasn’t nominated a director for DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency. Doesn’t exactly scream emergency; sorry, Trump voters in Appalachia, all you desperate people who believed his lies that he’d tackle the opioid epidemic, looks like you and your families got grabbed by the you-know-what. You’re as dispensable as any other poor person in America, and guess what? Heroin doesn’t care if you’re white, and neither do America’s oligarchs.
Yeah, you got fucked. Was it as good for you as it was for me?
###
I’ve taken to carrying a Narcan kit with me after that episode; I’ll get a few more when next I head over to the needle exchange on 181st and Saint Nicholas that I volunteer for, The Corner Project. It is the largest, oldest needle exchange in the United States.
As well as a truly amazing place, one that taught me more about compassion and the intrinsic good in every human soul than a posh night swilling cocktails with the great and the good, congratulating ourselves on just how gosh-darned progressive and enlightened we all are.
True enough, Corner Project is not really the kind of etablissement that sees a lot of pretty gay boys in flashy clothes. Most people like me would probably recoil from getting trained in administering Narcan to reverse an overdose, while handing out syringes or going to work the streets helping addicts is likely a matter of distaste to some; difference being that I’ve been on the streets, been one of the people who benefitted from acts of human and civic kindness such as these. The least anyone can do is pay it forward.
Does any of this put me out of my comfort zone?
Not anymore.
A drug user myself?
Not anymore.
###
What I have now that I didn’t twelve months ago is a new, sober understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses, of my value and worth as a human being, a value divorced and separate from all the outward trappings, the clothes, the nice apartment, the legions of friends and the flashy clothes.
I just stocked up my wardrobe at Goodwill, not Dolce & Gabbana.
All the things I was afraid of, that kept me awake at night, have happened; I lost my home, my lover of fifteen years, a good number of material things as well, my computer with over a decade’s worth of work on it and twenty thousand audio tracks, and yet I’m still here.
Imperfect as ever, another year older, maybe a little wiser – dubious proposition that, but ever one lives in hope – and I’m still here. Chastened, humbled – but I’m myself again. II’m picking up the pieces and putting my life back together. More accurately, starting over – and how many men in their forties get that chance?
All a fuck of a lot better than dead.
###
I repeat myself: tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, were not so lucky. Over sixty thousand Americans fatally overdosed in 2016; AIDS at its grim despairing height never killed as many Americans in a single year.
Millions more are in squalid prisons from coast to coast, even more are trapped in lives of petty crime, violence and of witnessing the slow death of hope – just as millions of Americans have been for decades. You might not have seen them, small wonder, nobody really has in our white, middle-class world: they tend to be poor or black or both.
Don’t usually get the Lindsay Lohan treatment, those folks.
What’s different now is simply that the face of the drug epidemic is your neighbor’s kid. Parents bury their children every day, ripped from life with the shocking suddenness of a bolt of lightning and as unexpected and arbitrary.
The cost of this American societal failure is staggering. How do you measure millions of lives ruined?
Which currency precisely is it that counts the cold coin of wrecked lives and crippled souls?
How do we measure the extent of our failure? Can we?
###
So allow me to make a modest proposal: why don’t we all wake the fuck up and stop pretending that we’re not, right now, here, today, losing a generation of Americans we have the tools, the resources and the power to save?
The war on drugs has failed. The systems we have in place to prevent or treat addiction have failed.
An illustration? Sure. Across the United States, most drug treatment doesn’t happen in hospitals or rehab clinics, it happens in prisons. What more shameful evidence does anyone need?
I submit that this approach is no longer ethically, financially, morally or medically sustainable, if indeed it ever was. What’s less clear is what the alternatives might be.
###
I can’t in good conscience argue for a wholesale decriminalization of drugs modeled on what we’re currently seeing with marijuana. There’s a certain libertarian elegance to the idea, but here’s the thing: I’ve done all those drugs, and so have most of my friends. Please, gay New Yorker here. I don’t buy it.
Crystal meth, cocaine, heroin, none of these substances satisfy a discernible public need of a scope sufficient to justify a reversal of health policy, on the contrary, I don’t know that any safe consumption of them is possible or compatible with healthy human life.
It is however worth noting that heroin by prescription is being considered in England and that legal shooting galleries – places to inject under medical supervision – are likewise opening in the United States, this not because our societies are dissolute and decaying into decadence, but because the scale and pervasiveness of the public health emergency demands new approaches that are more carrot than stick.
One of them is harm reduction; to simplify it somewhat, an approach that meets people where they are, as drug users, and endeavors to make their use as safe as possible. That’s the idea behind needle exchanges, methadone programs – essentially heroin substitution – and supervised injection sites, monitored spaces where addicts can legally shoot up in a clean, safe environment with medical support and social workers on site.
This by the way is what the Corner Project does. People shoot up with heroin there five days a week and have been for years, presumably other drugs as well, but they’ve never had a fatality, not one.
It may not be pretty and isn’t exactly low-cost, but it works. As to pretty, I submit that this a relative term when you’re considering sixty thousand dead every year.
###
However, if decriminalization is not tenable from the point of view of the broader public interest or even politically feasible, in practice criminalization is also of limited efficacy. It arguably merely pushes the pre-existing market for narcotics underground, where it can’t be regulated and the consumer is at the mercy of whichever the most predatory link in the supply chain happens to be.
Astonishingly enough, that link may very well be the one that is both legal and regulated: prescription drugs.
The key drivers of today’s opioid crisis aren’t heroin, morphine, cocaine or crystal meth, let alone pot; they are Oxycodone and Fentanyl, two synthetic opioids produced by American and foreign pharmaceutical companies. With a prescription, they and their analogues are perfectly legal to possess and consume; it’s also worth noting that they are incredibly effective treatments for severe pain. Like morphine, they have a bona fide if limited medical use, as indeed does crystal meth; a legacy medication for attention deficit disorder, Desoxyn, is chemically pure crystal.
Adderall, if you didn’t know that, is dextroamphetamine – speed.
Yes, correct, stuff we prescribe even to children is chemically the same thing as the drug of stereotype for the Hell’s Angels.
That’s a really great plan, how’s it working out for ya?
On the street, Oxycodone and Fentanyl are deadly. You might know Oxycodone as Oxycontin, Rush Limbaugh’s little helper, pernicious enough in its own right and the gateway into opiate addiction.
It’s the reason my Rich became an addict. He’s practically a textbook case.
Think of it this way: all those kids, once maybe star athletes – like Rich was – or scholars, that today are basically junkies? Oxycontin made that happen; the drug is manufactured and marketed by Purdue Pharma, a privately held American corporation.
Why they’re not picketed ever day I do not know.
We’re all one sports injury, root canal, car accident or routine operation away from getting hooked on something orders of magnitude more potent than heroin, all with the blessing of our family doctor and – bonus! – covered by insurance.
Free and legal drugs, now there’s a great deal for ya, America. And we wonder why kids are shooting up behind dumpsters – or in their childhood bedrooms – from sea to shining sea.
This is that American carnage Orange Hitler blathers about on the TeeVee.
###
But it gets better: Fentanyl is the real killer.
A lethal dose of heroin is about thirty milligrams; for Fentanyl, it’s three milligrams, a few grains. To give you an idea of the scale: a dollar bill weighs roughly one gram, a thousand milligrams. Accidentally stepping on a patch of Fentanyl, touching it without gloves, any kind of skin contact, can kill you. Now take a wild guess which substance drug dealers use to stretch their supply of marketable heroin?
Lethal doses by volume.
Bullseye, Fentanyl. It’s cheap, easy to get and strong. I’m pretty sure that’s what I overdosed on; assuming arguendo that what took me out wasn’t the interaction between the heroin and the Klonopin my doctor prescribed for anxiety.
###
These are obviously somewhat random, disorganized observations culled from a few traumatic months in one man’s life. I haven’t had to live with a drug-addicted spouse for years, only a few months, let alone with an addicted child, parent or other close relative. I did do fifteen years with an alcoholic, but that is overall incidental to all this; it’s not as if he and I drank every day. It would follow that my exposure to the subject and any resulting expertise are correspondingly limited.
On the other hand, I’m not sure all too many people with a decade plus of progressive activism under their belt have been down this devil’s road. I also believe, as noted above, that this public health crisis requires a political analysis and response as much or more as it requires a medical one.
###
We have an opioid crisis ultimately for the same reasons we have Donald Trump, government by lobbyist and entrenched poverty: a societal willingness to sacrifice the weakest and most powerless on the altar of the almighty greenback.
The same people, broadly speaking, brought you these afflictions, as well as other stains on our national fabric. A straight line leads from peddling drugs that are stronger than heroin through peddling wars to systemic racism, to disenfranchisement, to tens of thousands of gun deaths to the elevation of vacuous billionaires to racist lies sculpted into monuments, a line of sheer, unbridled contempt for the common good on the part of predatory elements in our governing class, a contempt unmitigated by public oversight and seemingly impervious to shame.
Love may not conquer all, greed does. America’s true obscenities happen in boardrooms, not bedrooms.
On the face of it, it is a self-evident moral evil to manufacture, sell or dispense drugs of this potency to anyone with a few dollars to spare.
It was equally a clear moral evil to surrender countless neighborhoods of color in every state of the union to the scourge of crack cocaine, which, between you, me and the internet, is alive, well and as cruelly devastating as ever. I’ve tried it: stay away, here be monsters.
How much does crack cost, you ask? In the Bronx, ten dollars a bag. The dealers are usually kids in school; they get treated as juveniles by law enforcement, a very clever setup.
And everyone has ten dollars in their pocket. Yeah, kids too; that’s the whole idea right there.
But we have so many more evils to choose from.
How many millions of lives have we taken over the last fifty, no, fuck fifty, the last three hundred years in places where they don’t even have indoor plumbing? How can we poison our fellow Americans with lead-tainted drinking water – yes, water, that stuff you use to give your child a bath?
How can we tolerate the poverty and addiction that characterize the typical Indian reservation as much or more as the most neglected inner cities and dying rural counties?
Why do we imprison more people per capita than any major country except that run by the butchers that murdered their own on Tien An Men Square? Why are tens of thousands of military veterans living on the streets?
Or, since we’re on the subject of incomprehensible moral wrongs that are still with us, explain to me how it is possible that our country let over half a million men, women and children, mainly gay men like myself, die miserable deaths in the AIDS crisis while the powerful laughed in disdain? Is that the background to crystal meth ravaging gay communities across the country, that we still don’t matter enough for anyone to care about?
Fuck that plan too.
Children will go to sleep hungry in America tonight, as they did yesterday and will tomorrow. Where is the rage? When you’ve met homeless children, and I have, when you reflect that children are murdered in their schools, an important part of you is dead forever.
Surely this at long last cries out to heaven for vengeance or failing that, for pity. Surely this at long last we will not bear.
But we do. To our everlasting shame, we do.
Thomas Jefferson as ever said it best: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
###
You might deduce from the above that I’m angry, and you’d be quite on point; not angry over the consequences of the battle fleet of bad choices I blundered into over the past year and am fully responsible for, no, angry over the broader context that made these choices possible and their consequences inevitable.
Angry that I’m okay and so many others are not. What makes me special? Nothing.
Angry that I can wake up tomorrow in hope and expectation of a better day than today while so many others will never wake again at all.
I would like to believe that I’m gloriously unique, God’s favorite child cast down from Heaven, singled out for dismay and hurt; it is not so, as noted, I’m one of millions.
I’m lucky. I got out in one piece and could take off a month and more to lick my wounds in New England. Some poor black or brown kid in South Central or The Bronx can’t do that. I am warm, clothed, housed and fed; again, not things to be taken for granted or available to everyone.
###
I am not entirely certain what to do with this experience; but writing it up is not the end of the story and shouldn’t be. This is the second time in a decade that I survived something that was clearly on track to kill me and almost got there, a sobering thought, no pun intended.
Being diagnosed with HIV back in 2009 led me into international AIDS activism; maybe this trail of tears will lead to a similarly productive place. One thing I’m certain of is that I’m not the man anymore I was a year ago. Deep trauma changes you, and while it would be easy and maybe even satisfying to shut down and discard empathy and solidarity in favor of self-pity and grudging resentment, I choose otherwise.
We are all only as good as the impact we have on the lives of others.
Like I said: I volunteer at a needle exchange and will for as long as they’ll have me. I’m also slowly getting active again for Progressive causes; we desperately need to take Congress in November. You can’t take time off when the issue is fascism in America. I’m already guilt-ridden that I’ve been absent for a full year.
My main goal this year or maybe next is to start law school; that’s still the dream and a lot of work I’m looking forward to doing. I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer, most people think I am one, time to find out if law is for me, YOLO and all that.
Unsurprisingly, I still haven’t figured out this being single business yet either, but you know what?There’s exactly zero urgency to do so. I played around in Boston – get real, of course I did – but I’ve now been celibate for a while. Too much damned work. Hehe.
I’m not going straight mind you, the trauma isn’t that existential, but I’m back home in the City, busy, solo and kinda liking it. One day at a time.
The drugs I’ve left behind; i suppose I’ll always be an addict, but I don’t have to be, will not and cannot be a user.
That’s in some ways a brave new world, but I’m okay with change and have done this before. It’s not anything to be afraid of and is in any event, as noted, a fuck of a lot better than dead.
Which, make no mistake, is my only other option. Sober or dead, you choose – it ain’t difficult.
I am also done stressing over things that might or might not happen or that are out of my control, because again: it got pretty damn hairy there for a while, and guess what, today I can chuckle, snort and write snarky self-deprecating diaries about it all.
Today I am ready to move on from the deep vats of self-pity I wallowed in just a few weeks ago and feel the suffering of others again with the empathy and concern they warrant.
I’ve now spent a year exploring the vagaries of my body and mind, I’m bored, it’s time to move on and give back. And yes, that other America that I’ve now seen, I need to engage with.
Homeless children, I’m sorry, that’s an affront to everything that is good and right.
I do want and need to heal further, but that’s a matter of when, not if. To paraphrase the late Nelson Mandela, have your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.
What that all will or should look like, I do not fully know yet, and that’s fine. One day at a time, babe, one day at a time.
That’s all any of us have. It’s finally enough for me.
FIN – THE END – ENDE
Brother can you spare a dime?
Lastly: it’s my understanding that diaries like this usually pitch for funds.
No problem: if someone wants to help out, my PayPal is here.
This adventure cost tens of thousands, I am not presently employed or lucky enough to have clients for my business, so some extra cash would come in handy, given how much damage this past year has done and the ridiculous amounts of money it all cost. I put about thirty or forty grand on my credit card alone, if you hear that noise, it’s a MasterCard softly crying in the background. If you listen closely.
No, seriously, it would help.
But if you really want to do good, want to help the truly destitute, please consider donating to the Corner Project.
