Nikolas P. Robinson's Blog, page 51

Heresy Just In Time for Easter

A reasonably good friend of mine decided to claim that atheism is a copout on my part. This came about after I informed him that the reason we see instances of atheists apparently defending Islam is that they are trying to respond to anti-Muslim bigotry from Christians for the most part. This apparent defense of Islam is simply an example of pointing out to the Christians in question that there is a major case of the pot calling the kettle black as well as a great deal of misinformation and poor understanding where Islam is concerned. I go on to explain that the only reason we see more action against Christians here in America is because Muslims constitute a vastly smaller portion of the population than Christians, who make up the largest minority in the Western world. If Muslims were the majority here and were insisting on imposing their cultural choices on everyone else, we would see the inverse of what we see now.

My response is to ask how it is a copout to not believe in fairy tales? The individual in question doesn���t believe in 99.9999% of the Gods that people have believed in or still believe in���all of which had just as much veracity when claiming to be true and correct. There are ���holy books��� which support essentially every God that he doesn���t believe in with just as much historical accuracy and authenticity as the book that he does accept as being true. What makes the God that he believes in any more real than the Judaic God of the Old Testament or the God of Islam, the numerous manifestations of God in both Hinduism or Buddhism, or the multifaceted God of Baha���i���or even the Norse, Roman, Greek, Mayan, or Babylonian gods that he casually dismisses?

I think it is far more definitive as a copout to just accept something as true when there is literally no evidence to support it and ample evidence that goes against it. To shut off the brain and just accept something without critical thought is more of a copout than it ever will be to analyze something and apply scrutiny.

His response, of course, is to insist that I am guilty of another huge copout by claiming there is no evidence to support the Bible that he holds so dear.

He asks me about the Egyptian chariot wheels in the Red Sea exactly where the Bible said they should be. He touts the fact that they have found Sodom and Gomorrah exactly where the Bible indicated they would be, covered in the purest sulfur ever found. He argues that Noah���s ark was found in the 1970s, exactly where the Bible said it would be, though certain governments have been working to keep that a secret for some time. He goes on about how archeologists have used the Bible to find dig sites for a long time and that the Bible has managed to prove these archaeologists wrong from time to time where historical people and places are concerned.

I try to remind my friend that Sodom and Gomorrah having once been real cities is not evidence of Biblical accuracy. Those two cities, along with others that were not mentioned in the Bible, rested along a fault line located near the Dead Sea and could easily have been destroyed by seismic activity along the Jordan Rift Valley. Evidence of the partial (not complete) destruction of cities in that region has been potentially tied to activity along the fault line no different from earthquakes that plague California. I neglected to point out, because there would have been no point, that though there have been archaeological discoveries of settlements in the region, none of them has been verified as the basis of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. I also didn���t bother to point out that these stories were written at some point well after the devastation would have taken place, if in fact it did, and it���s nothing more than an example of taking an event from the past and applying a rationalization to what happened as a method of spinning it to fit the narrative of the writer. Similarly, someone centuries from now could write about some horrible, sinful event in Pripyat that led to God punishing them by unleashing a great poison upon the populace. From a point in the future, any past or present event could be suitably framed to reinforce any fictional narrative that we desire, especially when there is no written documentation of what actually did happen.

I tried to point out that he was dramatically overstating the claim that Noah���s ark had been found, considering that there have been dozens of finds in numerous locations that have been discovered to be hoaxes. There have been many searches in and around the Ararat mountain region, and nothing has yet been found. There have, however, been unsubstantiated claims by men who were trying to obtain fame and recognition, but there has been no evidence found of Noah���s ark aside from maybe a single plank of wood picked up a long time ago that the finder decided must be from the ark.

I pointed out that the claim that Egyptian chariot wheels were found in the Red Sea was a verifiably false story and that there were no Egyptian records that could be incontrovertibly tied to Moses, the plagues, or the exodus across the Red Sea.

I tried to explain to him that claiming the Bible could be used to determine actual historical and archaeological information is a no-brainer. Of course some of the places mentioned in the Bible existed in real life. A lot of places in Stephen King stories exist as well, though it hardly means that the narratives taking place in those locations are relevant or historically accurate. We have used myths from other cultures to dig up cities around the world. Would that fact make those myths as accurate and truthful as the Bible is?

I also felt that it would be prudent to suggest that he ignores the fact that Biblical scholars around the world concur on the fact that large segments of the Old Testament (from the creation myth to the flood and Noah) were adapted by the Jewish people from Sumerian/Babylonian myths that were not even monotheistic stories in the first place.

My friend suggests in response that I am guilty of casually dismissing what amounts to massive collections of evidence in his eyes, that the site of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah shows clear evidence of God���s footprint.

I had no choice but to ask him if he really thought that I hadn���t carefully paid attention to any of these major ���finds��� when they were reported? I have many areas of interest, and history is one of them���especially history of myth. I also felt it necessary to point out that what he calls God���s footprint is less dramatic of destruction than what happened in Pompeii, and that didn���t require God���s judgment.

Addendum

This conversation continued further after my posting the initial blog, I have added the following:

My friend replied to my last comment by telling me that what I claimed there is nothing close to what has actually been found. He suggested that I perform more in depth research and indicated that he would be able to share some things with me that I should watch or read.

I informed him that I have actually taken the time to do a lot of research on this subject, from childhood into adulthood, and that the things he insists are true are quite simply not supported by reality.

He went on to tell me that I don���t know anything about what was found in Ararat, that there is video of the chariot wheels in the Red Sea, and that there is an altar with Baal carvings and drawings on the opposite side of the Red Sea.

He mocked my claim, that I have done my homework, and stateed that I have not���while sharing a link to an article from December of 2013 from www.sunnyskyz.com regarding the claim from the 1950s that Noah���s ark had been discovered in eastern Turkey. He went on to say that he could continue on like this for days but believed that it would be more beneficial for me to do my own digging.

I replied that the ���find��� in Turkey that he is sharing happens to be one of the unsubstantiated finds that I was talking about previously. I explained that it had been disproven almost immediately, as soon as geologists were brought on site to examine it.

I assured him that I have already done my homework. I even took the time to explain to him that evidence to the contrary of the outlandish, albeit scientific sounding claims repeated in the Sunny Skyz article has been readily available from a number of independent sources for a long time now. I went through the trouble of laying out some of these refutations to the story he shared, letting him know that no pitch was actually found at the site (contrary to claims made by those who wanted to spread the story), the ���regular structure��� which was claimed to be found with metal detectors was nothing more than a random distribution just like one would find pretty much anywhere, that the shape (though it, like many other natural objects, may appear man-made upon cursory inspection) is nothing more than hardened mud and occasional boulders, and that only a couple of traces of petrified wood were found (substantially less than one would find here in the Black Hills).

I also assured him that the site where the story of chariot wheels in the Red Sea first appeared was a satire site, not a real news site, pointing out that they make a clear statement that the stories contained there are satire.

I expressed my sincere apology for poking holes in his beliefs, and stated that he is the one who needs to do homework and research on these topics. I suggested that he reads a story like this and accepts it as true without looking into it at all because it fits his worldview.

I know how strong his faith is and how much he wants to believe these things when he reads them���but he needs to take some time to actually study the sources a bit and look at what is being said and by whom.

I love him, and he is my friend, and I told him that he needs to stop doubting that I have done a lot of research on these things and others. I read almost as much non-fiction as fiction���and I read a lot. I watch a lot of documentaries along with the movies and television shows that I watch as well. I don���t have a life���so that is what I do for fun.

My friend replied by stating that there was no doubt that the find in Turkey was Noah���s ark. He accused me of not reading the whole story, that they found a lot more than a piece of wood. He further stated that my claim that geologists had studied it was false because it took the initial crew 15 years to gain access, that the government of Turkey had shut out anyone else who wanted to come in, and that after naming it Noah���s Ark State Park they almost immediately shut it down and guarded it at gunpoint.

As a brief aside, none of that is true, regarding the site being shut down and guarded at gunpoint. People have been able to investigate the site plenty of times.

He tells me that I still don���t know the whole story but claim to have done my homework. He talks about how they pulled aluminum rivets out of there as well as animal dung and proved it was a ship���s hull using ground penetrating radar.

All of which have either been proven to be total fabrications or have been explained without difficulty.

I told my friend that the story goes back a lot further than just that article posted in December of 2013, and that most of what he���s staking his belief on has been fabricated or exaggerated.

My friend went on to state that the initial person claiming to have found the Egyptian chariot wheels was Ron Wyatt, that he has actual footage from the late 80s of the find. He admits that they called him crazy, but claimed that they went back to the site in 2011 and found more than a few chariot wheels. According to my friend, they found human remains and animal remains, that this is a fact.

I assured my friend that I did indeed read the article he shared, telling him that it makes up all sorts of things considering that the initial investigation found no evidence of any kind pointing toward Noah or any sort of ark.

I felt it necessary to explain to my friend that Ron Wyatt was also involved in the surge of those pushing the belief that the Noah���s ark site was valid as well. It was necessary to point out that essentially everyone, including Biblical scholars, scientists, and archaeologists have dismissed Wyatt���s claims. I told my friend that Wyatt hasn���t ever been a credible source of information, that the guy was a crackpot and a fraud with no expertise of any kind.

I informed my friend that the story about going back to the site and finding remains and chariots was written as satire, that it didn���t happen, and that Wyatt���s original claims were bogus. I even went so far as to share the article from World News Daily Report (a satire site).

I went on to say that I clearly know more about Wyatt���s history as a well-known fraud���that his name is only popular or touted where pseudoarchaeology is concerned, within pseudoscience circles. This was a man who also claimed to have discovered Christ���s cross, his blood, the Tower of Babel, and who knows how many other things���a man with no geological, archaeological, or historical expertise wanders around and makes ludicrous claims, all of which were disproven, and my friend was using this man as a source of information.

My friend���s response was to say that I was wrong and that these were documented facts. He went on to say that this keeps me a clueless consumer, which is what they want.

I haven���t the foggiest notion who ���they��� are.

He hints at other archaeological facts that are out there in support of the Bible, but that none of which have been released or made into news stories. He suggested that I keep believing the lies and that I���m a great straightforward consumer, to, ���keep the blinders on for a little while longer,��� because they almost have me locked in.

My first question was to ask how he found out about these things if they haven���t been made into news stories. I admit that I openly mocked that the sites he uses for information aren���t somehow magically privy to information that the rest of the world lacks. I also pointed out that a lot of people knew who Wyatt was before he died, that he didn���t keep any of his ���findings��� secret and, in fact, spouted off his completely incorrect nonsense to every corner of the world.

What I wanted to ask was whether my friend is aware of what the term delusions of grandeur is indicative of���because, to believe that he somehow sees truth and facts that the rest of the world is somehow ignorant of kind of falls into that category, at least without him being an expert in one or another of the fields in question (which he is not).

Discussion Regarding Indiana

The following conversation took place between myself and a couple of my friends between April 2nd and 3rd of 2015, initially started because one of the friends in question (Friend #1 for the sake of anonymity) decided, not ironically, to share the statement, ���Funny how you never hear about leftists forcing a Muslim to bake a cake.���

I am not a fan of the law in Indiana or similar laws in other states. Bigotry masquerading behind religious freedom is a sham of the worst kind. Being the largest minority in the United States by a wide margin, Christians are not being oppressed or having their liberties infringed upon, no matter how much the most vocal jackasses within the ranks would like to have us all believe otherwise. These laws only serve to shelter them from the consequences of bigotry and ignorance so that they can behave towards homosexuals the same way that these same sorts of people used to behave towards African Americans until that civil rights movement actually made enough headway to put that sort of segregationist bullshit to an end, or something of an end, since institutional racism is still a pretty major problem all over America.

I���m sharing this conversation because I feel that it helps to show precisely how much of an uphill battle there is in reaching a point where homosexuals have the same rights and standing in society as heterosexuals do.

I have taken the liberty of correcting as many spelling and grammar errors as I can pick up on a cursory inspection, because it is not my goal to make anyone look stupid due to faults like that in the conversation. It���s not the purpose of this post to make anyone look stupid because of grammatical or spelling errors. The focus should be on the things that are being said and the thoughts that inform those words, not flaws in the communication itself. This is the conversation that transpired:

Friend #2: I would never buy a cake from a Muslim. They don’t believe in sugar. I won’t ever purchase anything in Indiana. Because I hate fake ass Christians.

Friend #1: The Indiana thing has little to do with Christians. It does however have everything to do with homosexuals shoving their agenda down you’re throat whether you like it or not.

Friend #2: Seems like the opposite.

Me: I’m with Friend #2 on this; this Indiana situation is definitely quite the opposite of homosexuals shoving an agenda down anyone’s throat.

Friend #1: Okay then I can have my opinion that my religious rites should be protected and I can think homosexuality is a sickness and in no way okay???

Me: You are free to think that all you like…but people being gay doesn’t infringe upon your freedom to believe whatever you want. Similarly, gays being able to get married doesn’t infringe upon your religious beliefs or practices.

But you sure as hell support infringing on their rights to be who they are…and not based on something they choose to believe or practice, but something they are. Literally no different than people using religious beliefs to hold African Americans back from the same rights that gay people are trying to receive now.

What you have expressed support for, multiple times, are quite literally the equivalent of Jim Crow laws, just applied to homosexuals rather than African Americans.

How does it feel to be in the same camp as George Wallace? I keep waiting for you to suggest that homosexuals are “separate but equal.”

Friend #2: Friend #1. I’ve known you since before I had pubes. I really find it hard to believe that you feel this way. DUDE. These people are the enemy. Now just as much as when you were with us. If you are trying to save your soul. You are doing the opposite. If you really feel this way I love and support your decision, but DUDE!!!!!!!

Friend #1: Quite the opposite Friend #2. Nik not once have I ever said a homosexual can���t be a homosexual. But they do not equate with a man and women in marriage. Adoption and insemination do not equal natural childbirth. There are two kinds of people on this planet men and women that���s it. It is a sickness. Yes they are telling me I cannot believe this. Yes they do have an agenda yes it is sick and warped beyond what you think. Yes you are not awake to it. Next you will be telling me I am a bigot because pedophilia is natural. No I am not as smart as you but I am smart enough to se through this BS. A man has a penis a woman has a vagina. End of story. Grow out of fantasyland already.

Friend #2: Whoa dude. Don’t even try to put that pedophilia shit in my mouth. I NEVER said that was cool. And I never will. WTF dude?!

Bullshit you aren’t as smart as me. ***** said you were smarter.

Me: Pedophilia is actually natural, in that it isn’t something anyone chooses for themselves. Decades of psychological study has very clearly shown that people who are pedophiles are not choosing to be attracted to exclusively or almost exclusively children. None of us, not even you or I, have control over what we desire and what we are attracted to. You seem to be mistaking natural for acceptable. Murder over territory and resources is natural too, animals of almost every variety do that…but for us to commit murder is not acceptable, regardless of how natural it actually is.

Another thing…regarding your perspective on adoption/insemination…does that same thought process apply where one or both parties in a heterosexual relationship are unable to conceive naturally? Is a child born of artificial means somehow less of a child in your eyes and the family somehow less of a family? If that holds true for homosexuals then it would just as validly apply to heterosexual relationships…being an unnatural means to bring about a child.

Friend #2: Whatever… Still not cool… Children aren’t done growing yet. That’s why they aren’t legally allowed to give consent. We don’t live in the middle ages. A 12 year old doesn’t need a husband to survive. In this time it is a disease.

Friend #1: Don���t try to shove a BS lie like homosexuality down my mouth either. And ***** never would say that. LOL!!! Love that lady!!!

Friend #2: No. You were supposed to be the trophy success story from that group. That program still turned into the RC academy system. I might have been a serial killer without her

Me: Hell yes it is a disease, pedophilia…not homosexuality. Pedophilia is wrong because it doesn’t involve two consenting, equal partners. For Nate to draw a correlation between homosexuality and pedophilia is a desperate attempt to create a false equivalency.

Friend #1: You have no control over what you’re attracted to????? What a sheepish copout. Dude really maybe I am smarter then you?

Me: What is this homosexual lie that you are talking about in the first place? The only gay agenda out there is for them to be treated like equal participants in our culture and society, to not have rights restricted based on religious bigotry that isn’t relevant in the first place. Marriage is not a religious institution unless you are a practitioner of a particular religion and get married within that religion. Marriage is a legal and social contract, that is the part that carries over from religion to religion or to the non-religious.

Friend #1: You can be attracted to sheep and just not fuck them. I am attracted to money yet I have never had any and I still haven’t robbed a liquor store.

Me: Yeah, because equating sheep with money and someone of the same sex is perfectly legitimate.

Friend #2: I played truth or dare once and had to French kiss a dude. If that is the way a gay dude feels when he tries to kiss a girl…………… #notachoice

Fucking gross. Never been so grossed out in my life. Still can’t get the whiskers out of my head

Eeeeeew gooosebumps. Fucking gross.

Friend #1: You’re mistaking humans for animals bro.

Me: I am not mistaking humans for animals…I am not the one who suggested that being attracted to a sheep is in any way similar to being attracted to a person of the same sex.

Friend #1: You suggested that murder us just as natural for humans as it is for animals. Even the Vikings eventually figured out they were human.

Me: What feels natural to a homosexual is to be with someone of the same sex just like it feels natural for you and I, and Friend #2 as well, being with a woman.

Friend #1, you and I, are just like anyone else…we don’t choose whom we are attracted to. There is no conscious process involved in attraction and desire. You look across a room and one person appeals to you where another does not, that isn’t because you picked that one…they are the one you desire.

Friend #1: You’re saying that you cannot control what you’re attracted to. Such BS

Me: I am saying that none of us choose who/what we find attractive…because it is true. No amount of trying to convince myself that I should find Kim Kardashian attractive has made her even remotely attractive to me, though I know that she is considered quite attractive to clearly most people. Just like how the three of us participating in this conversation could walk into a bar and be drawn to entirely different women, to the point where we wouldn’t understand why the other two were attracted to the other women instead of the one that we are. We don’t choose that. No one does. At no point in my life did I decide that this or that would attract me…at best, I began to recognize the trends so that I had a better understanding of what was in common between the women I find attractive.

We learn what we like and what we find most attractive in potential partners, but at no point in your life did you decide what those things would be. They just happened to be what you did find attractive. Some guys like blondes or redheads and just don’t find other hair colors attractive, some guys like tan girls or pale girls, some guys like large breasts and others like small…at no point did any of them make a conscious decision that those were the things they wanted.

Friend #2: IDK about all that. I am saying that I couldn’t be gay and enjoy it for all the money in the world.

Friend #1: Nik I love you just as much as I love my lost homosexual brothers and sisters man. Does not mean it���s okay.

Me: And I love you too, Friend #1…hell, there’s a reason we are still friends even when we clearly are never going to see eye to eye on some serious issues.

I wish you could wrap your head around the fact that being gay is no more of a choice than being a boy or a girl or being a certain skin tone or being a certain height. They aren’t lost. They are just not like you or I…that doesn’t make them bad or wrong or unnatural. The exact same type of arguments were used to dehumanize African Americans less than a century ago, that they were unnatural and somehow less than the whites…and interracial marriage was condemned for the same reasoning that you and others are expressing where gay marriage is concerned. It doesn’t impact you if they are allowed to marry; no one is being forced to perform gay marriage ceremonies if it is against their religious/moral code.

Friend #2: And if a gay dude gets as grossed out when he kisses a girl as I do when I kiss a dude then hell no it’s not a choice. I could never choose to be attracted to men.

But when you are playing truth or dare and there are only 2 dudes there…………… you do the fucking dare.

Friend #1: They don’t want to get married that���s a copout as well I am privy to there lies. They feel it is unnatural for one person to be with one person for life I know the lie well. Also I do not hate them or want any harm. But it is a sickness that���s no lie. Just like liberalism is.

Me: There are plenty of heterosexuals who feel it is unnatural to be with one person for life…in fact, I am almost willing to bet that the proportions are higher in heterosexuals than homosexuals where that is concerned.

You talk like there is some homosexual conspiracy, and there isn’t. They are human beings, just like the rest of us…and there will be those within the homosexual community who fall at different points in the spectrum regarding thoughts on marriage just like with heterosexuals.

But damn right the ones who don’t ever want to get married still want that right to not be infringed. I don’t ever want to be part of a gay marriage myself, but I think the right for them to be married should not be infringed.

Friend #2: I want to be with one person until I die……………….. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Am I going to hell because they always left? Have you even considered all the gray area?

Friend #1: There is no doubt there is a homosexual conspiracy. No doubt about it. Most people don’t know they are a part of it but yes there are certain organizations that have perpetrated it and set it into play over the years. To deny that is in fact the real conspiracy.

Me: I sincerely have no response to that.

Friend #1: Friend #2 what??? No man you’re going to hell because you don’t believe that���s the only reason you would go to hell. I am not saying you don’t believe, that���s between you and God. No one person can be the reason you would go to hell but only one person can save you from going to hell.

That���s fine it���s okay to think you’re above it but you’re not.

NAMBLA … Harvey Milk was in NAMBLA and he was a pedo. As well as many other such organizations.

I mean are you that inept to think that all movements are not started they just happen for no reason out of the blue. Really you cannot be that ignorant.

Third Participant In Conversation: Oh… It honestly took me a bit to get it (I haven’t kept up on the news much) No one should have to bake a cake for any one they don’t want to, ever!

Friend #1: Agreed

Friend #2: I agree with that statement. We are all free to do whatever we want. I have freedom of speech also. I’m not gonna come up to your family in public and call your grandmother a smelly old cunt though. I wouldn’t want to deal with the consequences. Just like if let’s say……… I owned a bakery………Long story short. You ARE free to do anything. As long as you are prepared for the consequences.

I think we should leave the North American Marlon Brando Look Alikes out of this. What have they ever done to hurt anyone?

Is NAMBLA really real though?! The chomos?

I’m just gonna leave this here………. Friend #1 if you think this is part of the homosexual agenda you have been mislead……… I know more than one homosexual and not one supports pedophilia.http://www.nambla.org/

Harvey Milk had a consensual relationship with a 16 year old. In SD I can do that right now. There is no mention of him being a NAMBLA member or of him supporting NAMBLA.

Friend #1: The boy was 11 and it was in NY. Not sure you’ll ever understand. That���s okay because when they walk that elephant out of the closest I’m sure you’ll go right with it. I will be considered more of a bigot. I am okay with that. It’s my choice I will live with the consequences. Problem is the as t I have to live with the consequences of the faggotry and the abortion and all you’re bad choices as well.

Friend #2: You could go be a Muslim. They kill homosexuals and abortion is illegal.

I can’t find anything about him being with an 11 old either. Not even on all the right wing hate monger sites.

Me: Yeah, I looked into that too. Even on the sites that are dedicated to drawing a correlation between Milk and NAMBLA the only “underage” relationship regarding Milk is with the 16 year old.

Also, something that Nate seems to be overlooking is that every gay and lesbian rights organization had cut even the loosest ties with NAMBLA more than 20 years ago…most of them had done as much more than 30 years ago.

And 16 is the legal age of consent in even South Dakota…and it wasn’t long ago that it was low as 14 in plenty of red states too.

Friend #1: The fact is that you have bought into the lie that gay rights and civil rights are one and the same. When they couldn’t be further apart.

Me: People quite literally said the same thing barely more than half a century ago, but with “negro” in place of “gay.” How is it that you don’t recognize that? Pull up some old interviews with George Wallace and others from the 1940s through 1960s…and you will see them using pretty much the same statements and arguments you do, just where African Americans were concerned instead of homosexuals.

The rights of any group of persons in America or elsewhere in the world is a civil rights issue…first and foremost. That is the definition of civil rights.

Friend #1: Here is what I have to say about that; not being able to marry and not being able to go to school, go to work, sit on the front of the bus, get hired for a job, enter a restaurant, or drink out of a drinking fountain is way different. You can’t deny it.

Me: If anyone here is buying into lies it would be the one who seems to be proposing some widespread, insidious conspiracy that involves groups of people that are absolutely not connected with each other, such as NAMBLA and any other gay rights organization. Besides, I don’t see you lumping all of us heterosexuals in with the men who take advantage of young girls (or the older women who take advantage of boys)…which, I feel I need to add, is far more common in the heterosexual community than in the homosexual one.

Yes, and the law that you were originally posting about is promoting a backward step towards exactly that sort of segregation relating to homosexuals. Gays can’t eat here, can’t shop here…and is it really such a stretch to feel that could extend to saying that they can’t attend this school or that, that they need a different mode of public transportation because this bus company or cab company does not serve homosexuals?

Take a moment, don’t just offer up a knee-jerk response…seriously take a second, maybe read a few articles that aren’t on some hate mongering anti-gay agenda site…and really think about what Friend #2 and I have been saying here. Don’t shut off your brain and spit out a preprogrammed response…actually listen to what is being said and compare it to what you are being fed full of. When has a single conspiracy theory ever been true? Men did land on the moon, numerous times…9/11 was not a controlled demolition…and there is no pederast-controlled conspiracy to do whatever the hell it is you seem to think the outcome of gay rights might be.

Part Thirty-Eight: Life After Meth

It was the final little span of time while the degenerate and his wife were in my life, after my roommate and I had opted for a life of relative sobriety and clarity in our lives and in our home, that I ended up being involved in what would be one of my strangest and categorically one of the worst relationships of my life…though a wonderful little girl did come out of it, so I can’t claim that it was all bad.

The girl that I ended up involved with was the daughter of the degenerate’s wife, someone I had dismissively met years before and not remembered. In my newly adopted sobriety she and I bonded over our mutual disdain for the junkies and tweakers still populating our respective lives. She and I had both recently sobered up and felt more than a little bit of contempt for those who hadn’t made the same choice.

When I say that she sobered up, I mean only that she had stopped using methamphetamine and cocaine, because she was still one hell of a drinker. There was one evening in particular during which she emptied a bottle of gin into a bowl along with a can of Dr. Pepper and thirstily continued to drink from said bowl like the classiest woman I’ve ever met. Being highly intoxicated by the time she was done, she was in no state to go anywhere so I invited her to just sleep in my bed with me that night. She ultimately stormed out of the house in the late night hours without even putting her shoes on because her attempt to seduce me failed for two reasons, the first one being that I wasn’t interested at all but also because there is one thing I have always insisted on; I will not sleep with a woman who is intoxicated unless we’ve had a sexual relationship already in place, I don’t know if it’s a moral code or what one might call it, but it would feel too much like taking advantage of someone.

Had I been in a better state of mind, without the after effects of months of heavy drug use and a thoroughly confusing non-relationship that I told you about already, this girl and I would not have become anything more than friends. I wasn’t particularly attracted to her, physically or otherwise, but we did click in some respects that surely could have made us friends at the time. I was not in a good place though, certainly not a healthy one yet, and she was very much interested in me.

Who was I to deny her interest; I wasn’t someone anyone else would want?

There was pressure from her mother for us to get together as well, because she had met my two oldest children and determined that I would be able to give her a beautiful grandchild or grandchildren, if only I could be persuaded to become intimate with her daughter.

The whole situation was fucked up, and only became more fucked up when both the mother and daughter approached me (together as well as separately) in order to propose that I knock the daughter up and then I could leave the picture altogether if I so desired.

I sometimes have those moments when I am forced to question whether I am mentally retarded in some small way or at least severely unbalanced, and my agreement to that plan was definitely one of those things that elicit that rumination.

It didn’t remain as clean and businesslike as all that, as she and I fell into a sort of relationship together…and she did indeed become pregnant after only a couple of months. I wish I could regret that, but the daughter we had together makes that impossible for me. Children have a way of doing that sort of thing to us, turning an otherwise regrettable experience into something we wind up treasuring even if there is nothing else worth holding on to from a whole period of our lives.

I will say that, if it had been possible, I would have preferred to have this daughter with a different partner though…a better alternative would not have been difficult to find.

During the pregnancy itself, things really weren’t so bad with her. She may have given up drugs prior to meeting me, but her alcoholism went on hiatus during the pregnancy and that served to make her a much more tolerable human being. She was so proud of herself for being completely sober for the first time in I don’t even know how long, and it was contagious enough that I was proud of her as well.

That didn’t last long.

It was only two weeks after our daughter was born when I received a phone call from her while I was at work because she needed me to pick her and our daughter up after I got off because she was drunk in an apartment downtown and there was no one sober who could get her and our newborn daughter home. After retrieving her she repaid my kindness by vomiting in my car, having managed to do little more than put the window down before evacuating the mostly liquid contents of her stomach.

This became a routine for us, not the puking in my car part of it (thankfully that was only the once), but the retrieving her drunken self from somewhere or another. Initially it was once every couple of weeks, for a month or two, and then it was once a week, and it kept getting worse until it was a couple of days pretty much every week that I was having to rescue our daughter from some place her mother had dragged her off to in order to be drunk, slobbering, stupid drunk.

The relationship didn’t survive her drunken escapades after we moved into a new house shared with my former roommate, the waiter, and his girlfriend. Having friends around helped me to build up the necessary self-respect to offer her an ultimatum, that she stop drinking so much or she needed to leave. Of course, I was the bad guy for putting my foot down like this.

This was not the first time, nor was it to be the last, that I was faced with a woman who treated me like I was an asshole for little more than standing my ground and displaying a modicum of self-respect and dignity, demanding a little bit of decency and consideration from my supposed partner. Clearly I am a fucking idiot because there have been more than just one or two women I’ve become involved with who considered it an intolerable affront for me to demand any such thing. Maybe it has to do with the sort of women I attract (looking, as I do, like a fleshy pin cushion), maybe it’s just something about me that makes me seem like I am suitable to be walked all over like a carpet and shouldn’t have the audacity to demand more from these women. Whatever it is, I damn well need to figure out how to change it one of these days. That sort of shit gets old really fucking quickly.

As you can probably guess, she opted to continue drinking her life away rather than concern herself with being a mother or my partner. She moved out with our little girl and continued living her life as she preferred. Thankfully that baby girl still ended up with me a lot of the time, during my days off and when her mother was at work I would keep her there with me since there was no other babysitter available.

The fact that my daughter was spending so much time with me even after her mother moved out was something that made me exceptionally angry about what came next in this particular story.

It was less than year after being out on her own that the mother was picked up drunk by the police, in a car full of other drunks, out on some errand or another. She became hysterical and insisted that the officers let her return home or take her there to her baby. The police checked out the house in question and found our daughter asleep in her crib in a house full of drunk and/or high individuals, not a sober person in sight.

Our daughter was taken into protective custody and Child Protection Services placed her in temporary foster care. I didn’t find out about any of this until a couple of days later when I called the mother to inquire as to why our little girl hadn’t been dropped off with me.

I was livid, to put it mildly.

My being angry was made no better when I was finally able to contact someone with Child Protection Services to demand that they let me know what was going on with my daughter and why I hadn’t been contacted. They rambled off some bullshit about how they had no contact information for me and that they were going to keep her in foster care because they didn’t feel that it would be a good idea to have her in unfamiliar or strange surroundings. Think about that for just a moment, they placed her with total strangers as foster care rather than send her to be with her own father, with whom she had spent probably as much time as she had with her mother, if not more. This was the sincere, totally straight-faced response that I received from these people. These are people who have to have achieved some manner of college education before they can work for that department, and yet the total lack of reasoning capability exhibited by the caseworker I spoke with was beyond astounding to me.

It offended my mother and grandmother as well, and they began petitioning the caseworker to pull her head out of her ass in what was probably a more civil tone than I was managing to muster after a couple of days time. I am not ashamed to admit that I was not composing myself in quite the gentlemanly fashion I probably should have been…under the circumstances I had every right to be angry.

It took a while to get through to these people and it was finally agreed that our daughter would be released back into the custody of her mother if she agreed to leave the home and roommates she had and was residing with me. So, she and our daughter began occasionally staying in the house with me, but mostly they would show up early in the morning on the days when the caseworker was going to perform an evaluation of the living conditions. I know that I was breaking the law by going along with this deception, but those jackasses were not going to release my daughter into my custody, and I sure as shit didn’t want her mother living with me again. We manipulated the situation to our mutual ends in order to get our daughter out of foster custody and I feel no guilt about doing so.

The mother was no more suitable to be caring for our daughter than she was before that whole debacle had taken place, but I was damned if that little girl was going to end up staying in foster care any longer than she already had…and it worked out, to some extent.

Sadly, the mother is no more suitable to be a mother today than she was then, less so in a number of ways. She has been in and out of treatment programs four or five times since then for drug and alcohol abuse, Child Protection Services has become involved in her life again at least one more time, and our daughter has been almost exclusively living in my custody for a number of years now, which is where she belongs. It’s just a damn shame that her mother seems to be unwilling or unable to provide a better example of what it means to be an adult and a woman.

I sure know how to pick ‘em, right? You can shut up though, I don’t need your judgment, and it’s not like I’m unaware of the fact that I have some pretty damn poor taste or judgment when it comes to the women I allow into my life. It’s not always a disaster though, just most of the time.

Part Thirty-Seven: For Your Amusement

Let’s take a break from the more serious fare and spend a little bit discussing some random things that are popping into my mind at the moment, an opportunity to lighten the mood a bit after my last few posts.

Thanks to one of my best friends I was inspired to entertain myself at the Central States Fair one August in a way that had nothing to do with any of the rides. I spent a while wandering aimlessly through the midway until it got dark enough for my purposes and I was prepared to have some fun…and my experiences with scouting at an earlier age had taught me quite a bit about being prepared.

I had a few Alka Seltzer tablets in my pocket and a fountain drink I had purchased from a concession stand along the way. I picked my victims for this prank entirely at random, approaching them slowly, popping a tablet of the Alka Seltzer into my mouth, filling my cheeks with soda, and allowing the foam to begin spilling from my mouth as I latched onto the stranger, rolling my eyes back into my head so that only the whites were showing and muttering in a rasping voice, “Someone in here wants to talk to you.”

I got away with startling people with that particularly amusing prank five or six times before I noticed the obvious security personnel following me wherever I went. I had gotten my enjoyment out of the night and figured it was time to cut my losses and get out of there before I got into some sort of trouble, also the front of my shirt was pretty well drenched from the foam that had been spilling out of my mouth. If I had been thinking I would have hidden away in the haunted house and tried out my prank on the people in there…would have added a legitimate scare to the attraction perhaps.

The next prank was planned, but never implemented. My fellow musician and I wanted to rent or outright purchase full wet suits which would leave no skin exposed and sneak into a port-a-potty at the fairgrounds, lowering ourselves into the respective basins of two separate units, from which point we would fling feces back up at unsuspecting victims when they used the toilets…maybe even just slapping a handful of the waste against their cheeks when they sat down, potentially scaring the shit out of them in a far more literal sense.

We figured that we could safely escape from security or police because no one was going to attempt to tackle us, coated in filth the way that we surely would be. We could race, awkwardly as would be the case wearing scuba gear, to the creek where we would dive in to the relative safety of the water where we could swim away to a safe distance and escape to laugh our sick asses off in safety somewhere.

In retrospect I have to think it might be best that we never did attempt that specific prank since I doubt it would have gone anywhere near as smoothly and seamlessly as we imagined it going. Wouldn’t it have been grand, though? If it had worked out as planned, it would have been absolutely fucking brilliant.

Or maybe I’m just crazy…but you can keep your opinion to yourself on that matter.

We had many genius plans, my fellow musician and I, so many hilarious pranks that we never got the chance to try out.

We wanted to purchase nice, white suits of some thin, breathable material, dress ourselves up as fancy as possible, and swallow almost toxic quantities of laxative. The plan was to board an elevator, push our way to the front of the cab, and let loose in front of everyone before accusingly looking at every other passenger when the smell permeated the compartment.

After we had gotten bored with the elevator the plan would have been to wander around in a public place, shit stains on display, without acknowledging the situation. Having no shame could be liberating sometimes, and it would have been terrific fun to try out that little prank as well, if not also a bit degrading.

There was also an entertaining idea of staying with someone who owned cats and insisting on using the litter box instead of the bathroom with a totally unbroken nonchalance, regardless of the privacy level…I still consider trying that one out as an adult someday, which should tell you just how adult I really am…or am not.

We may have had numerous plans that were never fulfilled, but there were plenty of things we did for entertainment without any planning involved. My fellow musician and I had a coworker who became a friend of ours and she happened to live in an apartment downtown near where we would aimlessly find ourselves wandering a great deal of the time during the midnight hours.

It just so happened that the alley entrance to her building never seemed to be locked, and we decided to walk right in on many occasions. At the end of the hall where the apartments were located was a large cabinet with wooden doors, which were similarly unlocked, and we couldn’t keep from peeking.

Out of that sheer juvenile curiosity (though we were both supposedly adults at the time) we discovered that these doors opened on the breakers for all of the apartments on that floor. It should be obvious what came next, as we immediately tripped all of the breakers before restoring the power again.

We came back and did the same thing quite a few times, when we were walking downtown and happened to pass by that particular alley entrance. Perhaps our actions cost some resident their job because an alarm didn’t go off in the morning, but we didn’t care. We were amusing ourselves and that was the only thing that mattered to us at the time. The victims of our amusement weren’t even afterthoughts.

That sort of dissociative mentality informed a lot of our decisions…and especially mine, as you will learn (if you haven’t already), but that’s all I wanted to share right now. That’s it…move along, there is nothing more to see here.

Part Thirty-Six: The Love of My Life

We’re going to jump forward a little bit here, or perhaps more than a little bit, because something specific is on my mind.

I met a woman a couple of years ago who changed everything for me. She knocked me off my feet in a way that I couldn’t have conceivably seen coming, in a way that I can confidently state that no other woman could.

It started innocently enough, with a night of fantastic conversation that neither of us wanted to walk away from. It was only a couple of days after the New Year, and I still can’t imagine a better way for that year to have started off. New Year’s Eve had been a disappointment for me, as the girl that I had been involved with was too busy drinking in the bars to even visit me long enough to wish me a happy new year with a kiss. I was in the final stage of a failing relationship which sorely lacked in connection and communication; so that night, losing track of the hours in captivating conversation was a blessing that I wouldn’t have dared hope for.

It began with something so simple, a friend request on Facebook from a woman I knew of but didn’t actually know. She had been involved with a friend of mine almost a year before and was previously married to an acquaintance of mine who I hadn’t really seen since before they had gotten married. In addition to those connections we had numerous mutual friends, so I had seen her pop up all over the place for quite some time online, though we had never been properly introduced and had never met in person.

I had always thought she was incredibly beautiful, and I do very much mean it when I use the word “incredibly” as a modifier there. I never had any occasion to contact her because there was no reason for me to suspect that she would even know that I existed…or to care, even if she did know. We know about my crippling self doubt and insecurity already, so there is no reason to explain why I felt that way with respect to her. It should come as no surprise.

It startled me to receive the friend request from her, if only because I had entertained the thought of trying to establish contact with her so many times before just to try and get to know her. That initial shock was nothing compared to how startled I was at how well we seemed to hit it off. We talked for hours, like I said, discovering that we had far more in common than either of us had with anyone else who had come into our lives, and I was beyond captivated with her.

It’s strange to imagine that, had she not taken that first step, I would never have had the nerve to try talking with her. As silly as it seems for a man in his 30s, I am (and have always been) intimidated by beautiful women, and she was certainly no exception, being so exceptionally beautiful to me that she took my breath away (and still does on occasion when I first catch a glimpse of her). It was astounding to me that, after talking with her for that whole time, that she could turn out to be such a perfect match for me.

My self doubt manifested itself when I began to suspect that our apparent connection and enjoyment of each other’s company was a one-sided thing when I didn’t hear from her again for a little more than a week after that first conversation, and I had made a couple of small attempts to touch base in that silence.

I started to think that I was right to assume that there was positively no way that she would take a real interest in me. I didn’t know how hectic her life was though, not at the time, and that her internet connection at home was far from reliable. She did indeed reestablish communication though, and we ended up talking for hours all over again quite a few times over the following days and weeks. I was enamored of her before I even knew it.

There were a couple of hurdles though, where my admiration of her was concerned. She seemed so unbelievably perfect for me, but I was still tacitly involved with another girl, which made it impossible for me to really delve into this amazing thing that was happening to me. The other hurdle came in the form of some mutual friends she and I shared who were feeding into my insecurity by reinforcing the fear in me that I could not possibly be what she would want in a man…they amplified my feelings of inadequacy. These were not insurmountable difficulties, but it was the issue with my insecurity that would prove to be the greater of the challenges.

There came a night, not too far down the road from her getting back in contact with me, when this spectacular woman invited me to her house. We had been talking quite a great deal and were already growing quite fond of one another. That first meeting was all it took for me to be entirely won over by her. We sat in her dimly lit bedroom talking for a couple of hours that night, about whatever came to mind, and joking with each other about things that polite company would find horrifying. I perused the books she had stacked upon her headboard and smiled to see so many of the same ones I had read for myself or intended to read. That would ultimately be one of the things that she cited as the sort of thing that made her so happy to have found me; that I was not only literate, but also intelligent and a writer myself.

There was something distracting though, about the fact that she was wearing nothing but a sarong when I arrived. There I was, sitting next to this enthralling and intoxicatingly lovely woman, with nothing but a thin piece of cloth covering her. If she had been trying to seduce me, she would have been hard-pressed to find a better starting point. It was undeniable that the chemistry we’d felt when we were simply talking with one another was even more profound in person. If you believe in love at first sight it could be argued that I fell in love with her right there that night…I certainly couldn’t frame a satisfactory argument to the contrary.

All that we shared that night, beyond the excellent company, was a kiss. I certainly wanted more than that and so did she…but I knew already that I wanted to be hers and that she felt the same way about me. I wanted to start things the right way between us, which meant that I needed to end things with the girlfriend I still sort of had. I didn’t drag my feet about it.

It didn’t take us long to be together and she was amazing in every way I could have dreamed as well as numerous ways I wouldn’t have thought to dream about. Everything about her served to draw me closer and closer to her. I won’t describe the intimacy here, but I would actually love to do so just to relive those experiences in my mind. We were insatiable for each other though, whenever or wherever the opportunity presented itself. We couldn’t keep our hands off of each other even during the breaks she had between classes when she would stop by my house to see me. I must admit that I miss those days, looking back…and I wish my memory was well-developed enough to allow me to close my eyes and relive almost every moment I spent with her up until today, the good and the bad.

And there were indeed bad times and fights. She wasn’t good at communicating her feelings about things and I had a tendency to push far too much when there was conflict, which triggered a fight or flight response ingrained in her since she had been involved in an abusive former relationship. I should have treaded more carefully in those cases, and I wish that I had, if only to know that I’d made things easier on her rather than more challenging when she was already in a negative state of mind. We could have avoided many of our fights if I had been more respectful of her problems concerning confrontation. That isn’t to say that there were a lot of fights, proportionately speaking. There were too many, for sure (but I would likely insist that one fight with her where I made her unhappy in any way would be too many), but I have been involved in plenty of relationships of my own and witnessed many others (both successful and not), and we actually fought less than what I would have to perceive as the average. If we had worked together to develop better habits for communication, a lot of those fights could have been easily avoided…maybe all of them could have been.

After starting my current job (less than half a year into our relationship) we developed a routine that I still reminisce about. I would spend the night at her house on Wednesday and Thursday nights while she and her children would stay with my own children and me on Fridays and Saturdays (and longer if there happened to be a day off from school for the kids on Monday). We would snuggle up in her bed on my nights out there and watch movies together until we fell asleep or until we couldn’t bear to keep our affection for one another held in check.

On Saturday afternoons, between my split shifts, I would drive to the bar where she worked and we would have lunch together. The routine was both comfortable and nice. I was happy. For the first time in my life I was happy without reservation…and she felt the same way.

During the summer months and Christmas break, she and her kids would crowd into the house here and we would have more time together. Our children bonded far better than either of us could have hoped for (something that we remarked upon plenty of times) and both of us were readily accepted by each other’s children as well. I won’t claim that life was perfect, but it was so much closer to perfection than I had any right to believe I would ever find.

You could easily guess that we started talking about marriage, and she was even the one to first bring up the topic in conversation, after I caught her looking at dresses and rings one day. Neither of us had the best opinions where marriage was concerned when we first got together, our previous experiences being less than stellar…but here we were, ignoring all of those predispositions and discussing our getting married in such a casual and optimistic way. It was all I could have hoped for, and she was everything I could have wanted. I knew that I would be spending my life with her, I had no doubt that she was the right one for me, and I didn’t even believe in that sort of thing.

There were ups and downs, like with every relationship…but for me the good always outweighed the bad. Maybe I will go into further detail on that aspect of our relationship later, when I come back to this topic. There will be more to write about where she is concerned. She is the love of my life, after all.

Part Thirty-Five: The Crystal Palace Falls

When the degenerate showed up in my life the final time, he was married and enjoying his own meth addiction (as was his wife, who happened to be a nurse)…the difference being that they were intravenous users, which is something I didn’t much care for. All of that aside, he did appear to be a little more stable than he’d been the last time I’d seen him when he’d attempted suicide on my living room floor…but I know how deceiving appearances could be, especially where the degenerate was concerned.

His own source being unreliable, the degenerate quickly latched onto my roommate’s best friend like the parasite that he was. Seeing those two spending more and more time together was depressing, to say the least, and it saddened both my roommate and I. The saddest part of that was how quickly the degenerate’s corrupting influence took hold, and intravenous use became the preferred method of administration by those my roommate and I had previously spent so much of our time with.

As a brief aside, intravenous use produces a quicker and more intense rush of a high that doesn’t last as long as it does when administered through either smoking or snorting…it also produces more pronounced psychological effects, and increases the health risks associated with drug use almost exponentially, no matter how careful the user in question happens to be (and the problem with drug users is that caution becomes less and less important with the passage of time). My roommate and I were well aware of these issues and considered them to be the line we weren’t interested in crossing.

The corrupting influence the degenerate exuded extended beyond the drug use itself, as he and my roommate’s best friend got a job together with a moving company where they began stealing small items like jewelry in order to sell it. This activity led to them being fired and made my point quite clearly for me, that there was more money to be made in actually sustaining employment than engaging in stupid and risky behavior for relatively small short-term payoffs. Neither of them was capable of taking the long-term into account though, not at that point…they were both too far-gone.

The increasing distaste that my roommate and I had for those in our circle of friends and acquaintances led us to begin treating them like subjects in an experiment we were performing, as we grew steadily more and more detached. We started trying to predict the behavior of different individuals, manipulating them in subtle (and sometimes far from subtle) ways in order to test their reactions and note them.

We called this Project Crystal Dreams, and we came up with shorthand nicknames for our participants within the experiment so that we could communicate about them openly regardless of who was present.

We actually got pretty good at it, calculating when one or another of our subjects would arrive at our apartment simply by determining where they were presently and what their previous movements had been. Our calling different places and asking questions about someone as far as where they were and when they’d left became another sort of manipulation, of those individuals from whom we were making our inquiries as well as those we were actively trying to monitor. We focused a great deal of our attention on the process of monitoring and exercising small amounts of control over their circumstances and the reactions they exhibited in response.

There was a perverse pleasure to be derived from those times when our extrapolations proved to be accurate, regardless of how negative the conditions might actually have been. I doubt that either of us really put much thought into it at the time, but I suspect that our interest in this little thought experiment was a method by which we could distance ourselves from the steady decline we were witnessing in our friends. We were doing what we could to separate ourselves from what was going on in order to avoid feeling connected to the events around us any more than we absolutely had to.

What the fuck do I know, though? We were spun out and suffering from severe sleep deprivation by this point, often going as long as a week without even laying down for more than an hour even though our bodies knew better than we did and forced unnoticeable little traces of unconsciousness upon us.

Sadly, as aware as I was of the state of everyone else in our lives, I was oblivious to just how much the long-term drug use and sleep deprivation was impacting my roommate. It was New Years Eve of 2003 when I looked around me, with my eyes wide open for the first time in a long while and determined that it was time to get out while I still had something of a life to return to.

I made the unilateral decision that there would be no further methamphetamine in our apartment and some self-aware aspect of my roommate was still clear headed enough to display a look of relief when I told him, in no uncertain terms, that we were done.

If I had known how close to the edge my roommate had been, I would have done what we had left all by myself, or (at the very least) split it a bit less evenly between us. We had a fairly large supply remaining that night, and his half of it must have been just a little too much.

That was the last time I did methamphetamine until a few months later when I had to test the quality of a batch that a friend of mine picked up when we took a trip to Denver for the purpose of a drug run. He didn’t use any of it himself, and he knew that I was familiar enough with the substance to be able to give him a fairly good idea of the quality he was paying for. That was the only time I broke with my sobriety, and not for the purpose of pleasure.

That’s beside the point though, back to what I was talking about.

I went to sleep for a couple of hours that night (I’m one of those individuals who could successfully nap when under the influence if so inclined) because I hadn’t been sleeping and I knew I needed it.

When I woke up a couple of hours later and walked down the hallway towards the bathroom my roommate abruptly opened his door a crack and peered out at me suspiciously. It was bizarre, but I was inured to bizarre behavior by that point since it was essentially a constant.

It wasn’t until after I’d used the bathroom and was on my way back to my bedroom when he opened the door wide enough for me to see what looked like a god damn disaster area and stood there with an expression that was almost challenging. My first thought, upon seeing the state of his bedroom, was to wonder how in the fuck I might have slept through what he’d done in there.

Everything was strewn about everywhere with no apparent order. Even his bed and dresser had been pulled apart and spread around the room, his blinds had been pulled from the window, and posters were removed from the wall.

I asked him what the fuck he was doing with his bedroom and he responded with something terse and paranoid about how I knew exactly what was going on that night.

I turned around and headed to the kitchen for a soda, shouting on my way down the hallway that I was surprised he hadn’t fashioned himself a tinfoil hat. He replied that he had done precisely that, which was the first indication that his sense of humor was still intact or that he had completely broken from reality, and I shouted back that it was curious that he could manage that without any tinfoil in the apartment.

I stood outside of his bedroom door like an angry parent and told him that he needed to clean that fucking mess up right then and there and to get his fucking blinds back in the window before our landlord happened to come by and see the state his room was in because his window faced directly onto our porch next to the front door.

It took a little while to discover what had been going through his head while I slept that night. According to him the rest of us (his best friend, my ex-girlfriend, and I) had been on the other side of the wall separating his bedroom from mine, watching him and laughing at him more and more as he broke down. We were apparently using lasers aimed at his window to monitor him and we were mocking him the whole time. There was something about a homosexual conspiracy as well, as he had been drawing something that turned out to be an accumulation of dicks, and he was being controlled by external forces in doing so.

He cleaned things up a little bit (though nowhere near enough to satisfy me) and then left for a couple of days to recover at a friend’s house where he could separate himself from what happened that night, this friend being entirely unconnected to the drug use and activities that had been taking place. He seemed much better when he returned, but recovery from a breakdown like that takes a while.

I like to think that I helped him to regain some semblance of centering, with a healthy dose of mockery and friendly derision thrown in for good measure, because I simply couldn’t help myself. We already discussed the fact that inappropriate humor is one of my ways of coping with things that make me uncomfortable.

Upon sobering ourselves up we made our apartment into the default safe haven for our friends to find some peace and temporary sobriety as well and it seemed to go pretty well.

For the most part, it was a good thing…but it could always be assumed that the degenerate would find a way to fuck it up. One day I was letting him wind down at the apartment after a particularly heavy binge. I was staying in the living room where he was because I didn’t trust him enough to leave him to his own devices in our apartment after all the times he’d proven that only an idiot would trust him.

I happened to fall asleep on the loveseat in the living room, keeping an eye on him, and he was gone when I woke up.

It was a day or so later when I began noticing that some of my DVDs were no longer in my collection (which was nowhere near as substantial as it is today) and I began asking around as to whether anyone had borrowed any of my movies.

I was able to narrow down when they had disappeared based upon the fact that I’d watched one of the movies in question the night before the degenerate ended up coming over and I confronted him about it. He threw a fit and became angry with me for accusing him of stealing from me.

I filed a police report and provided them with his name in connection with the theft and, sure enough, they located a handful of my missing movies in one of the local pawnshops with a ticket in his name. The prick had stolen from me and then had the gall to act like I was an asshole for accusing him of doing so.

It turned out that the police would recover my items but I couldn’t have them back until they had been retained as evidence if I wanted to press charges, otherwise I would have to go into the pawnshop and pay to recovery my own stolen items. I didn’t want to wait for what could be half a year or more before getting my movies back, so I opted to pay my own damn money to get my things back. Ultimately it didn’t get me back everything I had lost, because the degenerate had only pawned some of them himself

If I had thought to mention my roommate’s best friend as well, I would have been able to recover all of my missing movies, because the degenerate had given him another bunch of my movies to pawn in his name too.

From that point on, the degenerate was never welcome in my home again. It was the last straw for me; that he had stolen from me, lied about it, and led to me having to pay to retrieve what was rightfully mine in the first place. I decided that he was simply not worth having around and informed him of that fact. I haven’t seen him again since then, and I will be a happy man if I never do see him again.

Thus we have reached the end of my tale, at least the part pertaining to drugs and debauchery, as there have been no further drugs consumed by your humble narrator (aside from the occasional prescription medication, most of which has been prescribed to me legitimately).

Part Thirty-Four: The Hard Choices

Those who know me are well aware of the fact that I am of the pro-choice camp where politics are concerned, because I don’t feel that I (or any uninvolved party) have the right to impose a subjective moral choice in someone else’s life. Those who know me a little bit better are similarly aware that I lean towards a pro-life philosophical stance as far as my own life is concerned. Philosophy, however, has little relevance when real life comes into play a great deal of the time.

Once upon a time I met a spectacular woman and almost immediately knew that I wanted to pursue a relationship with her…strangely enough, she was similarly afflicted where I was concerned. It was less than a month into this relationship, and one of the first times that we had been intimate, when an accident happened with the birth control this woman was using and we just seemed to have the sort of awful timing that led to conception with that one slip up. It was a short while later before we discovered that she had gotten pregnant, having had no reason to suspect that it was even a remote possibility until she began displaying some of the symptoms associated with the early stages of pregnancy. Both of us already had children of our own and we were at points in our respective lives where neither of us was prepared to be bringing a new life into the world, financially or psychologically…so neither of us exactly relished this startling discovery.

My first question, not knowing precisely when the conception took place at first, was to ask if the baby was going to be mine. It may seem like a rude inquiry, but I didn’t know what her sexual activity had been like up until we had gotten together, and I hadn’t requested those specific details. It wasn’t that I was considering washing my hands of the situation no matter what he answer happened to be, that thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I really liked this woman and I wasn’t eager to jump overboard just because some other guy may have accidentally gotten her pregnant, it wasn’t like we both didn’t already have children from different partners, so the principle was essentially the same.

The timing worked out that the baby was mine though, as you might be able to predict.

We talked about the situation quite a bit, and she felt that abortion was the only viable solution since going through the pregnancy and having another child (at that time specifically) would essentially derail everything she was working towards in her life. She had a lot going for her, just on the horizon, and she was putting a great deal of effort into improving her life and the lives of her children; this was one of the things that attracted me to her, one of the things that I admired about her.

I tried to work out ways that we might be able to avoid going through with that particular decision, because I knew that she didn’t want to go through with any abortion any more than I did, but every attempt to figure out an alternate solution led to the same grim outcome…that she would be stuck losing a great deal of the progress that she’d made towards the better future she deserved. I had no choice but to concur with her assessment of our options, though I didn’t stop trying to brainstorm some other way up until it was no longer a possibility.

There was no question that she didn’t want to do it though, so don’t you dare judge her, the whole idea itself was painful to her and all I could really do was let her know that she had my support and that I was there beside her either way.

If she had chosen to keep the child we would have figured something out, as difficult as it might have been, I’m sure…as challenging as it surely would have been, we could have worked through it, because (at least for me) what we had was worth the strain. The choice was ultimately hers to make after all discussion had been completed and the options were weighed, and she made the difficult choice to terminate the pregnancy.

She scheduled the appointment with Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls (a few hours away) and I set aside money in order to assist her with the cost of the procedure. The scheduling wasn’t optimum and it conflicted with my work schedule, being an overnight trip…and it was like pulling teeth for me to get any time off work, which meant that I was going to be unable to accompany her. It turns out that, to this day, that it can be said that I do have two regrets (regardless of my bluster about not regretting anything); not working harder to find a way that I could be there with her during that trip to Sioux Falls is one of them, the other is that I didn’t find a better solution for us so that she wouldn’t have to go through with that.

Thankfully she had a close friend who was both willing and able to be there with her, and he took the trip with her in my place. I was grateful that she didn’t have to be there alone, because she shouldn’t have had to go through it by herself. It broke my heart not being there anyhow, especially when she told me about the counseling that took place before the procedure itself. I should have been beside her when she was forced to read about the development of her fetus and where it was at this point. I should have been there next to her when they asked her if she wanted to see the ultrasound video, which she couldn’t bring herself to watch (and I don’t blame her).

After it was all said and done, we never really sat down and talked about it. We never took the time to mourn together or really process what had happened. Maybe it would have made no difference if we had tried, as we each mourned our decision separately in our own ways, but it seems to me, looking back, that some good may have come of us doing so.

I didn’t make it easy for her to talk to me though, my coping mechanisms are off-putting at the best of times, but they can be devastating during times of extreme emotional fragility (which, thankfully doesn’t occur often). I wrap myself up in thoroughly inappropriate humor or flat affect detachment when working through difficult quandaries and the like; sometimes fluctuating between the two with seemingly no warning…and this was one of those occasions.

Maybe if she had been a part of my life longer than she had, she would have been accustomed to that trait enough to see it for what it was…but, as it stood, it simply pissed her off and made her feel like she was alone in coping with the loss we had sustained. If only I had developed better habits when dealing with unpleasant things, that whole situation could have turned out better.

There are people who bounce back just fine from something like an abortion, there are even people who can be casual and dismissive about it, but we were not two of those people…and scars still remain to this day.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that she told me that she blamed me for the whole thing. She knew, logically and rationally, that it wasn’t my fault…that, if anything, her error with birth control was the proximate cause of what happened. But what she knew and what she felt were two very different things. She knew that it made no sense to resent me like she did for what happened, both the unexpected pregnancy and the following termination…but that didn’t stop her from resenting me just the same. That undercurrent of animosity wasn’t made any better thanks to my inability to take the trip with her and be supportive in that respect as well.

There are a number of questions and possibilities that I have mulled over since then, little ways that I wonder if things might have been made at least somewhat better. Maybe if I had less jarring coping mechanisms or maybe if I had been able to be with her as a shoulder to lean on before and after the procedure…or even if we had communicated better with one another openly and honestly after the abortion, we could have mitigated some of that resentment and animosity. I never hated her for what happened, but she was the one who actively had to bear the burden of both the choice and going through the actual process involved, and I honestly can’t imagine what that had to be like for her. She tried to appear stoic and undisturbed, but I knew that it was a façade and I avoided probing at it because I thought that she needed that appearance of stability to keep from falling apart.

Even now I wish that there was something I could have done differently, because maybe things would have been better between us if that had been the case…but nothing can ever be done to repair the mistakes of the past, and we have to go on living with the repercussions no matter how painful they might be.

I may be pro-choice still, but I will never pretend that abortion is something that should be decided upon without very serious consideration. It takes a toll on the parties involved, at least it did for the two of us…and maybe that toll was just too much to bear on its own, even without the additional factors involved like my stupid, ill-advised reactions, it certainly seems like the price of that decision we approached together was much higher than either of us was properly equipped to pay.

Part Thirty-Three: In Love and Meth Continued…Hold the Love

Once more we venture into the period of my life as a methamphetamine use. This will not be a coherent, linear bit of storytelling, I don’t believe. That might be an impossible thing to manage, even if I desperately wanted to pull it off. Shit starts to run together and time blurs more than a little bit. This is more likely to be a series of snapshots randomly pieced together, rather than a movie.

I recall an instance when one of the anchors at the NBC station approached me in the break room, asking me in passing if I had been losing weight, to which I inquired, feigning insult, “Are you trying to say that I was fat?” It’s funny to me, knowing that the anchor in question probably had some idea what was going on regarding my apparent weight loss, because I was routinely carrying a small supply of the crystal in my wallet when I went to work, intermittently doing lines on the counter in the control room where I worked, frequently while there was other staff in the building. There were definite perks to working almost entirely autonomously.

Caution goes out the window with greater and greater ease the longer one is under the influence of methamphetamine. There were a couple of occasions when the former cop who was hosting our Mexican friend would offer me rides to work and we would casually end up smoking the substance from a glass pipe while driving down the streets in the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t just me who experienced that sort of disconnect from common sense, is what I’m trying to say, that drug has a definite impact on one’s sense of personal vulnerability…fundamentally erasing it.

There were literally whole days and nights that would run together seamlessly in the most surreal way while my roommate and I would spend the whole time in that former officer’s house, alternately doing lines and smoking from pipes almost constantly. I shudder to think of the quantities we were consuming that way in just one sitting (and not solely because of how entirely wasteful it was). We would lose track of time in conversation and monitoring the grainy feeds from the numerous security cameras that provided uninterrupted views of the whole area surrounding the house, because trafficking in massive quantities of crystal meth is the sort of thing that merits a bit of precaution. All said, it was actually damn enjoyable for us.

My roommate and I were almost always sent home with a decent quantity of our own to get us by in our everyday lives…and it most certainly did. There was often enough that we weren’t opposed to sharing with friends who occasionally came by and even the relatively new downstairs neighbors, when they were inclined to partake. One of those times, when our supply was low, they agreed to reciprocate when they had some of their own a few days later.

Sure enough, they did contact us (a few days later than expected) to let us know that they had what we were waiting for and my roommate went downstairs to retrieve it. I was already doing just fine at the time, so I wasn’t in the kitchen when he tapped into what he’d been given, only to almost immediately begin complaining that it was burning in a way it shouldn’t have been and that it tasted like shit, having an ammonia or piss smell to it. I started laughing and went into the kitchen to see what the problem was. I began laughing even harder when I tried a small taste of the yellowish rocks that he’d brought upstairs, because my roommate had just been snorting crack.

It took about a week or so before I stopped routinely teasing him for being a crackhead, each time he would end up with this sheepish, uncomfortable look on his face while still smiling and chuckling about it.

Those same downstairs neighbors had a difficult time staying out of trouble, quite unlike we more civilized folk upstairs, as one might expect from the sort of people who would trade crack for methamphetamine as an equitable exchange…and the company they kept was equally classy. One of these lovely individuals ended up coming to our door and finally hanging out in our apartment after the downstairs neighbors had left and she discovered that she’d left her baby in a running car that she’d locked herself out of before going into their apartment (more than likely to procure some substance or another from them). We weren’t happy about the position that whole situation had put us in, because we had to actively argue with her for a good long while before she would agree to let us call the police to help her get into her car.

That wasn’t the only time the police came around because of incidents directly relating to those neighbors. One night I was laying in my dark bedroom, preparing for one of the increasingly rare intervals of sleep that I was enjoying, with the window open when I heard the distinctive squelch from a police radio just outside. I quickly and quietly got my roommate’s attention and we split the supply that we had on hand and snorted it all to insure that there was no trace of it there in the apartment if the officer outside was there to see us for any reason.

It wasn’t long before there was indeed a knock at our door and an officer was standing there to greet me when I opened it up. He was there to ask me if we had heard any strange noises from downstairs because there had allegedly been an altercation involving the junkie couple that lived there. The line from Sid and Nancy was absolutely correct, “Never trust a junkie.” We hadn’t heard anything, and told him so, and the officer thanked us for our assistance and went on his way.

We were wide awake by that time and there was no chance of sleep coming for either of us any time soon after what we’d ingested in our panic, so we settled down in front of the television and happened to catch the beginning of The Illustrated Man (the film loosely adapted from Ray Bradbury’s short story collection) on one of the channels…it was a pretty good night, all things considered.

There was a bit of a scare with the traffic coming and going at the former cop’s house and the possibility that someone who’d been privy to what was going on there might be talking to the police and it was discussed as an option that the Mexican would be shifting his base of operations to our apartment temporarily because there was no obvious connection between my roommate and I and what was going on over there. Had the apartment not been only a two-bedroom with insufficient space, that might have happened, and I must admit that I’m relieved that we weren’t put in a position like that.

My roommate’s behavior began to get increasingly erratic as our drug use persisted and his attitude seemed to be shifting in an uncomfortable way. He had lost his job a while before and wasn’t having any luck obtaining a new one, and we were all becoming more than a little bit worried about him. His best friend and the former cop who were providing us with our supply (perhaps at the behest of the Mexican living there, a man who apparently wasn’t terribly fond of my roommate) determined that it might be best to cut him off for a little while and they requested that I not let him know about anything that I was still being given.

I felt the same concern that they did, of course, and I thought that cutting back might be a good idea (but I couldn’t bring myself to cut him off entirely, and ultimately neither could his best friend), so I downplayed what I had available (as did our suppliers), hiding the bulk of it differently than I had before and doling it out more sparingly.

This slow drip access led to the unexpected side effect of my roommate being more productive around the apartment than he had been for a while…primarily when trying to locate any stray traces of crystal that might have fallen on the floor or into any of the furniture. I came home to a clean house a couple of times because of this, and we both got a bit of a chuckle out of his displaying the stereotypical behavior of sifting through carpet fibers for drugs that had spilled.

He was definitely behaving in such a way that our concern was merited, sneaking around and searching for any methamphetamine that might have been hidden from him. One evening, before I went to work, I cut us off a couple of lines and intended to do the same with some of what was left after I returned home. When I did get home though, what was left was only about a third of what had been there before I left. He came into my bedroom when he heard me breaking up what was left and nervously asked if there was enough for him, to which I raised my eyebrow skeptically and said that there was a lot less than I thought there had been.

It was another month or so before he confessed to me about sneaking into my stash that night and apologized for it, and for the deception. I reminded him that I wasn’t a complete idiot and that I already knew, that I’d known that night.

It was shortly after that when the initial Mexican fellow needed to return to where he’d come from south of the border, a replacement being here to take his place in the region. I was asked if I would like to accompany my roommate’s best friend in driving the Mexican back to where he needed to go. Apparently my presence had been specifically requested by the Mexican in question and I was all for that opportunity for adventure until the former cop pulled me aside and warned me that there might be some unpleasant or undesired conditions that would go along with meeting the people these specific Mexicans worked for.

Hosting the Mexicans in his home, the former cop had been privy to some conversations taking place between the two of them and had seemingly heard them discussing me in addition to their business matters. My first response was to daydream a bit about becoming intimately involved with a large scale criminal enterprise like that…a certain moral flexibility I exhibit, that you should be aware of by now, made that prospect very appealing to me.

It took me a moment to consider the somewhat sinister undertone to the story when the Mexican was telling me about how he hadn’t seen his daughter in a long time and that this was going to be his chance to see her again. I had children of my own, and the last thing I ever wanted to do was have them dragged into anything associated with that lifestyle because of my stupid, impulsive desire to live the life of an actual criminal. I had to decline; though I do sometimes wonder what direction my life might have taken if I had not.

It was around this same time, as the binge period was beginning to take on a darker tone, when the degenerate reappeared for the final time in my life.

I’ll end this here. This seems like a good place, as good as any other. Don’t worry; I’ll get back to it soon enough…just not right away. Something else is on my mind that I feel I need to share, related to moral flexibility, before I get to that.

Part Thirty-Two: The Degenerate Returns

When I last discussed the degenerate with you it was when I got convicted of disorderly conduct for what could have easily been attempted murder, or conceivably even voluntary manslaughter if my friend had gone into a different gear that night…things could have been much worse than disorderly conduct.

Following that incident was a period of peace; well, peace where the degenerate’s presence in my life was concerned (in that he wasn’t present in my life), the rest of my life was plenty devoid of peace.

It was more than a year or so later before the degenerate appeared in my life again, relatively stable by comparison with how things had left off before, though the application of the word stable where he is concerned was always a relative thing at even the best of times. This guy has always been a self-serving, erratic piece of shit as you’ve likely become aware from my previous stories relating to him…and some people are simply congenitally incapable of change, no matter how necessary it might be.

This brief reappearance didn’t end in violence like the previous two intervals had, but it did end with him taking off with one of my favorite long coats. He’d needed a coat to wear one night and I was kind enough to offer him one of mine, because I’m a charitable sort of asshole if you catch me on the right days. It was only a couple of days later when he took off again, to destinations unknown, my coat keeping him warm. I knew he was selfish and short sighted, I knew that he was prone to unpredictable behavior, but I let him run off with my coat anyhow and I never saw it again. Life goes on.

The next time he came around was during a time when the waiter was my roommate and the girl from Indiana was my significant other. They had both been warned of what could be expected with him around, and both of them justifiably questioned my judgment in welcoming him into my life all over again like I did. I was clear with them as far as my motivations were concerned; that some part of me wished to see him redeemed and that I might be able to somehow facilitate that redemption or that he would ultimately need to be put down like a rabid animal and that I felt like it was my place to be the one to put him down…it was one of those Old Yeller scenarios, “…but he was my dog. I’ll do it.” I don’t know that my explanation in any way instilled any greater confidence in my judgment, and looking back I don’t suspect that it should have.

The situation was tense at times, knowing that things could get pretty fucking strange and potentially dangerous with him around…but I did my best to maintain some small amount of control over him and kept a close eye on his every action while he was around, hoping that I could anticipate the break as it approached.

All things considered, I did a good job of helping him to stay level and reasonably steady for a couple of weeks…but I’m not perfect and he was damn far from perfect as well.

The breakdown happened regardless of my attempts to ward it off. My girlfriend and I returned home from dinner on Friday evening to find him drunk and still drinking with an underage coworker (and friend) of mine who was abjectly horrified by the time we arrived home because the degenerate had taken to treating this friend like he was a girl (and may have actually been perceiving him as being a girl for some entirely unknown reason); and a fetching one at that, one he had taken quite the shine to.

My coworker took my arrival and the distraction that it momentarily provided as an opportunity to get the hell away from his potential rapist and make his intoxicated way to work at the ABC affiliate where we were both employed.

I received a stern reprimand from one of the directors there later on for allowing an underage coworker to get drunk in my apartment just before he had to be at work, even though I had been neither present nor privy to that activity until after it was already done.

The degenerate’s extreme state of inebriation combined with the aggressively sexual and disoriented demeanor he was exhibiting led me to the obvious conclusion that there was no way I was going in to work for my overnight shift while he was still in the apartment with my girlfriend. I attempted to be polite in asking him to leave for at least the next 12 hours or so, but something set him off and his aggression became less sexual in nature and more all around hostile.

He ended up grabbing the first thing he could find, which happened to be a large steel cooking fork from the kitchen as a weapon when I made it clear that I would physically remove him from the apartment if he wasn’t willing to calm down and leave on his own. He drunkenly brandished the cooking fork, his behavior becoming rapidly more unstable and animalistic, and I took that as a sign that I should usher my girlfriend outside before she ended up getting hurt.

We quickly made our way down the stairs and I knocked on the downstairs neighbor’s door so that we could get her inside to use his phone in order to call the police. He let my girlfriend in to make the phone call while I did what I could to keep the degenerate distracted outside so that he wouldn’t follow her as he initially tried to do. There was a clear trend with this bastard, to focus on the women in my life instead of dealing with me directly until he was forced into that position.

Seeing that my girlfriend was on the phone in the downstairs doorway, he retreated back upstairs to my apartment and I followed him, determined that he wasn’t going to be running loose in my apartment until the police arrived, creating further chaos for me to clean up after he was gone. Against all better judgment, my girlfriend followed me.

Shortly before the cops showed up, deflated and knowing that he was going to be arrested, he collapsed onto my living room floor with my girlfriend and I watching him from the open doorway where we could avoid being cornered by this man who had been heaving less human by the second.

He began stabbing at his own thighs with the tines of the cooking fork, with increasingly frenetic quality before raising it and placing the tines against his throat. We could see the pressure increasing as the tips began to further dimple the flesh of his neck more and more and both of us gasped as it suddenly jerked in his hand as the tension disappeared, appearing as if it had just punctured into his neck. Apparently the tips had slipped along his skin rather than jabbing in as the pressure he was applying became too great for the angle…but for a moment there my girlfriend and I were equally certain we had just witnessed the man committing suicide on our living room floor.

Much like the night that had ended with his skull wedged beneath the tire of that 1970s Monte Carlo, some part of me wishes that he had died that night on my living room floor just like some part of me wishes that he had been crushed that previous night…if only to save myself the trouble of dealing with him later on, because I was, of course, stupid and reckless enough to not make that the end of my dealings with him.

He was arrested that night (the second time the police hauled him away from my apartment in only a few short years) and I was almost arrested as well. I had apparently missed a court appearance for some offense that I no longer recall, perhaps the accidental shoplifting charge from ShopKo a while before, and there had been a bench warrant issued for my arrest. The officers were reasonable and considerate enough to leave me be after everything that had happened that night; knowing that I was already running late for my overnight shift in the master control room that night due to the bullshit with the degenerate, as long as I agreed to arrive for court the following Monday morning. I did indeed appear in court as promised; because, unlike many of my friends and acquaintances, I actually believe that treating police with respect is the key to being treated with respect by the police…and that reasonable and adult attitude is what I believe has led to my never being unduly harassed or mistreated by police officers since I stopped being a child, even looking like a less than productive member of society or an all around worthless creature, as I do. That isn’t really relevant right now though.

That was the end of the degenerate’s presence in my life for a little over a year, and the next time he showed up in my life would be near the tail end of the interval of methamphetamine use by my roommate and I, so that is when I suppose I will have to go next in this journey through my life. That next period you’ll hear about will be the final chapter to include the degenerate, not because I finally did kill him or because he did us all a favor and actually killed himself, but because I finally just had enough of his presence in my life.

Some of us, you see, are capable of exacting change within our lives…because some of us recognize that each new day is an opportunity, if we take it, to reinvent ourselves and take a different path from the one we were on the day before. That much is true for all of us, not just your not so humble narrator, if we only accept it…it isn’t always easy, but rarely are the things worth doing the easiest options available to us.

If I can learn that lesson, so can you…assuming that you haven’t already, and if you have, then you should be actively trying to instill that lesson in others instead of reading about my pathetic life.

Part Thirty-One: In Love and Meth

I’m forced to temporarily merge a couple of different threads of this disordered narrative that is my abysmally ludicrous existence, because there is an unavoidable correlation between my disastrous love life and my final bit of drug binge debauchery. I told you already about my roommate (the former waiter) and I stumbling upon a steady supply of methamphetamine shortly after the time that I’d forced a wonderful woman out of my life for what I told myself was her own good.

It was entirely recreational use at first, a nice way to compensate for the occasional fog that I experience as an unmedicated insomniac in addition to boosting creativity and productivity quite a bit. Even casual use tends to have a fairly profound impact on emotional stability and thought processes though, and the next half-year or so was most certainly influenced by that chemically altered state of mind I was fostering.

After The Chemical Toilet did what she does best by disappointing me and disappearing, I was in a position to actively pursue other women, even though I wasn’t inclined to actually do that. I did however begin catching the occasional ride home from a girl I worked with at the local NBC affiliate, a girl who happened to be the cousin of my roommate’s best friend. One night we ended up sleeping together quite unexpectedly, the girl and I, not my roommate’s best friend and I…just in case there was some ambiguity in my statement.

That incident felt far more intense and meaningful to me than it probably should have, almost certainly more than it would have if I hadn’t been indulging in the specific substance that I was…or maybe it would have. Fuck if I know if things would have been different if I had been sober at the time, and I have no way of comparing it to a sober iteration of me because this wasn’t a god damn experiment with a control group included, though that prospect does intrigue me and I would love to have gone through my life precisely that way, with a control me insulated from my less brilliant decisions. That’s entirely beside the point, what I do know is that I felt an intense attachment to the girl in question, and she supposedly reciprocated.

We began a relationship together and it wasn’t a bad one while it lasted, I don’t think. She was sweet and affectionate towards me and I apparently treated her better than any other guy had previously. Some of our coworkers were skeptical of our relationship and even poked fun at me for being involved with her, because they were assholes and because they didn’t happen to think much of her…but I didn’t give a damn what they thought because she made me feel good, which was something I most assuredly needed.

A couple of months later she ended up taking a trip to visit some family in North Dakota and ended up returning home entirely broke because she had taken one of her cousins and that cousin’s boyfriend along with her on the road trip and those two had managed to do the exact opposite of contributing. Finances were a bit tight for my roommate and I, but I did have my bass guitar that I wasn’t actively using much. I took my bass down to a nearby pawnshop and collected a decent bit of cash so that I could help her get by until the next paycheck.

She began growing distant towards me shortly after that, spending less time with me and not coming around even at times when she said she would be. Things went on like this for a couple of weeks until one of my days off she called me to let me know that she wanted to come by and talk with me after the 10:00 news was over.

I knew what was coming, and I dreaded her showing up around 11:00 that night, but I sat there waiting for her to let herself in. As I had predicted, she only wanted to talk to me for the purpose of ending our relationship face-to-face…I can respect that. At least she didn’t try to end it over the phone or something silly like that.

As soon as she left I made the decision that changed things from that point on, I made a call to obtain an address I hadn’t previously wanted to know, I put on my coat, and I walked to the house where my roommate and his friend (the now ex-girlfriend’s cousin) were hanging out. This house was the proximate source of the methamphetamine that we had been using for the past couple of months.

That night was when the transition from recreational use to something far more extreme took place. Until that night I had never really tried to consider the sort of quantities that were available in order for my roommate and I to enjoy the free or damn near free surplus that we had been receiving…but it became difficult not to think about that sort of thing when faced with it, and good lord was there quantity. It sometimes felt like there was a lifetime supply readily available to us right there, which could be an accurate assessment if we actually did consume all of it.

The methamphetamine was higher quality than anything I’d experimented with previously, with an almost perfect glass-like clarity…which stood to reason, being trafficked (as it was) up here directly from Guadalajara, Mexico by various Mexicans including a Mexican fellow I actually happened to like, enough so that I began working on developing some degree of conversational Spanish in order to better communicate with him.

I may be making light of the situation a bit more than is justifiable, because these were the sort of men who carried illegal firearms along with them as they illegally crossed the US/Mexico border with massive quantities of high quality methamphetamine and occasional cocaine. These were dangerous men who were members of a dangerous organization…and I couldn’t possibly have cared less. Being closely involved with organized crime wasn’t the sort of thing that tripped alarms for me like it probably should have. Maybe we could casually place the blame for that indifference on the drugs, but it really seems like a bit of a stretch if not an outright copout…in reality I just happen to suffer from a bit of moral flexibility which makes proximity to dangerous criminals the sort of thing I didn’t even consider to be an issue worth worrying about.

These Mexican fellows were arriving here with their cargo, setting up a base in the home of a former police officer, and distributing their materials outward from there. My roommate and I had hit the jackpot simply because his best friend was staying with said former police officer. This placed us right there near the epicenter of the action…and we both milked it for what it was worth.

My state of mind was not the greatest during the succeeding months, as one might suspect…and that was exacerbated by the fact that my recent ex-girlfriend arbitrarily decided to show up over the following three months or so, sometimes for sex and sometimes just to spend the night with me. She would appear at work when my shift was ending just to give me a ride home (and often stay with me) or she would show up somewhere along my path during the walk home to pick me up for the same purpose. Her appearances weren’t the sort of thing I could count on or predict with any efficacy, but it was surprisingly frequent from someone who had broken up with me just a short while before.

The only thing that could be predicted from her during that interval was that she would once again disappear if I even suggested us being together again or if I questioned the fact that she would have left me in the first place just to continue behaving as if we were still in a relationship of some sort.

Between the drug use becoming steadily heavier and this girl seemingly delighting in torturing me and promoting a state of near constant confusion…I’m surprised I managed to come out the other side with anything approaching sanity. Before you interject, let me just say that you should shut up because this is my fucking story and I am sane if I say that I am. Your job is to listen, not to be a backseat narrator.

This seems like a reasonable place to stop, before I go into further detail on the experiences over those months. I have a thing or two to discuss before we get there anyhow, because I clearly have a coherent plan in place regarding what I’m sharing with you, if you couldn’t tell. Bear with me, it won’t be long before we’re back on track. You can deal with the brief hiatus, or you can just stop reading now.