I'd Say It's The Same...

...Sometimes, someone breathes the same air another breathes.  Sometimes, someone touches his penis to another's vagina.  In the end, the person you love gets sick, and they could die.  It doesn't mean they don't love you, or that they're bad, it just happens.  It's nobody's fault.  Sickness is part of life, and can cause death.  It's sad, but it happens.

The Stud

Duran Duran's "Hungry Like The Wolf" plays on the shitty PA.  The floor is packed fins to gills.  There's no making headway through this crowd without a bullwhip.

Best as I can I squeeze between dancers and revelers.  I'm trying to get out.  It's too much -- I need to get outside and breathe.

I cannot escape the feeling of being watched from within by some great, unblinking eye.  It stares through my thoughts, my silences, and my lies.  It leaves me naked, sputtering on the floor.

No one comes for me, but I've heard they will.

Present-Day Hauntings

The most recent updates about Philip Seymore Hoffman's death indicate not that he overdosed but that his junk was bad -- some of the fentanyl-laced heroin currently on the market.

Where is the quality control?  You'll never find a more reliable consumer than a heroin addict, so it's stupid to kill them from a business standpoint.  Is the contamination intentional?  I hope not -- that would be a terrorist act; even if the targets are "drug-addled losers," they're still U.S. civilians.

The corrections industry, the rehab racket, and entrenched bureaucracies fight us every step of the way on harm reduction, testing, safe injection sites, needle exchanges, et cetera.  On the one side, you have the prohibitionists who know goddamn good and well that their agenda is inhumane and a force that undermines civilization.  On the other, you have the compassionate and the contrite fighting an uphill battle for social justice, public health, and the enfranchisement of those whom society marginalizes lest lynch mobs run out of strange fruit.  One side is in it for lucre and temporal power; the other, fairness for all.  The former has money and hopes to continue raking it in; the latter operates on a hope and a prayer.  Prison guard unions, the DEA, axe-grinders, Carrie Nations -- these fight Quakers, ethical medical professionals and social workers.  Meanwhile, "organized crime" tries to run its business on our backs as it makes Faustian bargains with governments (the mob always tries to go legit, but let's face it:  governments need a foil in the war on drugs and are known to leverage dirty work out of made men.)  It's a kiss-up, kick-down, double-dealing world populated by scumbags and hypocrites, many of whom wear badges and suckle at our teat with too-sharp teeth.

The pawns in this twisted fracas:  drug users.  People, we are only as free as those among us who are the most crushed.  When the vast majority of Americans who don't think about narcotics and the war on drugs finally get off their collective dead ass and realize that they, therefore, by extension are just as oppressed as the most maligned and persecuted, we might stop hearing the pigs accuse the powerless of being pigs.  We might see pigs fly.

Hoffman's death is an unsubtle reminder that drug users count among their number our best and brightest people.  Genius is a touched and wild thing.  It often finds itself hitting a pipe or shooting up.

End prohibition and save lives.  Who knows?  Some of them might turn out to be worth saving.

The Glass Man

The room smelled of cigarette smoke and a musky animal.  It was small and dingy, though tidy.  Its only three windows looked upon an airwell.  The Honeymooner's brick wall that was the view looked about ready to sprout arms or teeth, then make a monstrous lunge for the apartment's sole tenant, an old man with no television.

This old man liked to listen.  It was one of his favorite things to do.  Behind him, above the twin bed he occupied, were two canvasses:  one painted with nine mouths; its partner in the diptych consisted of nine eyes.

Sometimes the old man heard people in the airwell.  They talked to him or about him.  Some seemed hostile.  Then there were the people who talked through the walls.  Some were his friends.  Still others professed hatred and a desire to kill him.

They wanted to kill him in the most amazing way:  they were going to shoot him and trick him into thinking he hadn't been shot.  It was very novel.  They would try to pick fights with him as they (almost supernaturally) managed what and who he might see or hear.  Who was real?  Who was not?  It seemed like a hunt.

But he understood there was disagreement among them about what to do with him -- somewhere beyond him.  This world felt so full of love and support (he certainly was a kind old man and a good friend to others.)  Where did these threatening people come from?  He'd never really quite met them.  Whoever among them whom he might be able to see kept their distance.

He seemed somehow tragically wedded to their desire to kill him.  He felt drawn to them as they encircled him.  Sometimes they claimed to be authorities, such as cops or government people.  Or they were doctors and nurses with a grudge.  It made no sense to him.  It was like someone else's nightmare, to which he was addicted.

When they were cruel, he barked back, or laid down in bed and let the hatred just wash over him.

The old man got the sense of constantly being rescued as a stranger's voice (sometimes a man, sometimes a woman) seductively and sadistically entreated him to "feel pain for once in his life."  They liked bullets a lot, delighting to tell him they could wait to shoot him through the wall as he lay in his bed.

It had gone on for years.  So many times he thought for sure he was going to be killed.  Dead certain.

He took hope as much as possible.  But death was such a reality for him.  He knew his own was inevitable.

And the voices saddled him with obligation, or tried to, implying often that he was responsible for some vague offense necessitating his execution.

He remembered his childhood nightmares.  One, he recalled, was about a great cyclone come down from the sky to devour him.  In another, a man dragged him headfirst through a car window; the car then collapsed on his head.

The voices threatened his family, or said they had killed them.  He laughed -- what family had he left?  He was very old, and alone in the world.

Sometimes he laughed at the ridiculousness of it all.  They seemed so stupid.  They never stopped threatening and just did what they said they would.  They seemed to have so much patience, yet so little:  one day soon he would die anyway.  Couldn't they just leave be?

He got by, and still liked to chat with some of them.  One girl flirted with him.  Someone else said the bad guys were all done for and everything was fine.  Good news was nice.

He supposed, one day, towards the end, that he should stick to expressing gratitude.  Overall, there seemed a shadow of regard and respect for him among them.  At least people care enough to do even what seemed like the wrong thing!  It have him hope not only for his own hide, but even for his professed enemies, who surely if attacking him was their pastime led very self-destructive lives.  But at least they took interest in him, someone other than themselves.  That's a redeeming quality.  He finally grew to view them with compassion, and to feel some love for them (though they informed him in no uncertain terms they had nothing but hatred for him -- perhaps they didn't love anybody.)

He found them in the end honest, at least.  He thanked them.

He continued to wait.  Some say for years.

I Know I've Been Something of a Hassle...

...And let's hope that turns out to have been a good thing.  I got the message:  it would be nice for me to stick around for as long as possible.  For my part, I aim to have a future, but we must ever mind that the world is an uncertain place, and the universe in which it spins like an infinitesimal mote is a rather indifferent and hostile universe.  We can never hope to encompass and thereby control everything that is, and we should be wise enough never to want to or to try.  Time is fleeting, and not all of us will make it to tomorrow -- I am no more deserving of a future than anyone else.  So fingers crossed, and I'll try not to get killed.

Love and thanks to everyone again, and best wishes.

Flowers

Too Twisted To Ignore

To date, what should be the most infamous death in San Francisco (certainly, the circumstances surrounding it are the most godawful) is that of the late, lamented Lynne Spalding.  How does a good, blooming, hearty Englishwoman die so shabbily at the hands of those to whom we all of us as a matter of course entrust our lives?  Two weeks in a godforsaken stairwell, unfrequented even by quotidian rounds of security guards I had expected our tax dollars hired.  I hope her family musters all the umbrage blood loyalty and national chauvinism will allow, and that they sue the pants off of the attending physician, nurses, and the county hospital's (in this case) arm's-length benefactors.  She was slandered in the Chronicle article, for crying out loud!  That article  gratuitously mentioned that she sought treatment for a urinary tract infection (shit-talking if I've ever heard it.)  My mother recently pointed out also that issue had been made of the good woman's tippling (a forgivable and culturally specific indulgence -- and by the way, do we not inhabit a three-sheets-to-the-wind city?)

Something dreadful and, not to her but to us, shameful is at work in this case.  Offensive enough is San Francisco's miserable track record at solving homicides.  This case, though, is an especial affront -- tragedy plus insult.  My heart weeps for Ms. Spalding and her I hope soon-to-be-avenged family.  Here's a prayer that her bereaved survivors come here from jolly old England with lawyers in tow and packing enough inconvenient questions to make my sordid little hometown pop like a full tick.  Godspeed, Spaldings, godspeed.