Every Day

Seems like a test of every value I hold dear, every value without which I would happily die.  Reverence, humility, compassion, wisdom, respect, honesty, piety, disobedience to our vested authorities -- all of these feel weighed and their worth now decided on by those capable of positing pure mockeries of them.  My soul is being hammered at by the soulless, and one day it might crack.  I may be sanctimonious and naive, but my life refuses to be reduced to a simple formula for easy digestion by a factotum I've never met and has absolute control over my life or death.  It's been a daunting few years, to say the least.

What can I say?  You have to put a bullet in me to stop me from believing in the things that make life worth living.

Browsing With Cops

It took me a while to get it, but I finally did.  I mean, that's a rare one indeed who didn't grow up playing in the dirt like the rest of us.  You've got to wonder, who could fit that profile?  Do they even shit like a normal person?  Did they ever fight with their parents when they were kids?  What were they like on the school yard?


A librarian once told me, when I was surprised he couldn't give me a fact off the cuff (I though librarians were smart) -- he told me, "I don't know everything, but I know how to find anything out.  That's what librarians are for."  So I go to the library, for their wi-fi and a place to work that isn't my shitty apartment and isn't a precinct full of assholes (God bless 'em.)  Sure, the library's populated with ragamuffin scumbags whose socks stink up the place, but I have respect for the institution.


One dude is checking me out, all hateful, so I sit across from him.  Make sure to open my jacket so he sees my badge and holster.  Yeah, you made me.  So?  I'll ask you for your ID if I give a fuck about your priors.  The feeling's mutual, you know?


I open my Dell laptop and stare for a minute at the screen.  I click on Chrome, and it opens up to Google.  Now here's my problem:  the Internet has my answer, if I can just come up with right question...


Now, I'm looking for a pretty godawful piece of work.  If we had to judge, here's our scale:  the worst person in the world is God himself (we've seen what shitheads angels can be, right?), and the best person in the world is my wife.  Our perp is on one of the lower rungs.  Probably has a deep-seated fear that he is not in fact God, and he wants to be...

The Old Man

Death is of greatest consequence to those who cause it.  For them, it is a fearsome spectre to evade.  It is their chosen activity, to kill, and their lives are overcast by hellish skies raining red-gray threat.  Every shadow harbors doom; every hollow they encounter is a possible final resting-place.  Killers may never take their days for granted.  They may never assume tomorrow is a matter of course.

Pluto

To my executioner/hunter:  you and I are both lost.  I guess you thought I was important, but I was treated, on the balance, pretty fairly.  You seem to be somewhat bitter.  Can't you find a nice white lady to give you a hug?  I'll never fathom some of this shit.  Hang in there, and remember:  friends are for life...

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.