There was a time, in a place where nothing much mattered to me except the next fix in the multi-leveled structure of my own personal addiction. I had no friends only varying degrees of enemies that ranged from the casual sideline spectators in the herd to the deadly serious and just as dangerous fellow predators who lurked in the same urban jungle foliage as I did, ready to take advantage of any slip I might have made in my own disease. The only rule was that if you were in the game you were fair game. I very easily could have taken the easy way out time after time and surrendered to the downward spiral and its promise of oblivion of conscience, madness and eventually walking death, instead I justified my behavior with the belief that the whole world and everything in it both animate and inanimate where involved in some sort of conspiracy to keep me in the gutter and so chemically pickled that I would never be able to be consciously aware of some hidden true perception of reality and any subsequent avenue for dimensional ascension. It took me a long time to realize that all I was doing was slowly dying by chemical addictions suicide, it took and even longer time before I was able to humble myself and decide to live.
It was a complexly layered reality I was addicted to. It was a reality geared for escape and ironically it became a reality of prisons. I was imprisoned in my mind and soul by my delusions and fears a much colder prison than any of the many ones of stone and steel that I surrendered half my life to when the constant needs of my disease forced me to compound the crime of myself abuse, by abusing the laws of both morality and society. Trying to escape the reality I was born to live in, I created a prison of chemical dependence that created a prison of illusion and delusionary transcendence, in trying to feed pains of need that threatened those illusions and delusions with realities return I created a prison of denial.
I did have my moments when I would wonder why it was I felt the things I did, why I did the things I did and I always assumed that it was hopeless to even try and find an explanation for those kinds of questions because to me everything I was experiencing was new. Sure it was the same technical kind of lifestyle and experience as everyone else but what led me to my own experiences were unique and personal things. I would find the same physical and emotional negativity that lies in wait for everyone in the wasteland of addiction but what led me into my own instigated ambush was where the problem was, the same kind of problem everyone will eventually have when they find themselves firmly in the grip of chemical and sub-cultural environmental bondage and addiction.
Everything Evolves,
Along with the physical aspects of my life my emotion also had its own evolution.in my rapidly evolving sub-cultural niche the stimulating factors of emotion were constantly evolving into complex structures of content, action and reaction. Now the end results that lie on the ends of any emotions spectrum are basically familiar territory whether good or bad but what led me to each emotion and its subsequent path of evolution were chemically stimulated situations with factors as complex as any mathematical equation. The song and dance of my addictions reality was predicated on a rebellion of mind and soul, a generational evolution of new desires, beliefs, attitude and defiance against the structure of society and its code of behavior and morality. The things and feelings I wanted. I was unable to even visualize. What I would have to do and the drugs I would use to do it were drugs undergoing their own evolution becoming stronger and stronger fueling my sense of sub-cultural expression into behavior more violent and dangerous than I could have ever imagined possible. My music was new, my style was new, my slang was new, my fears were new and my dreams were of a new kind of reality.in actuality though I was always in the same places, they were just illuminated by new shades of situational light. Living in a world during a time of constant and rapid evolutions of cultures and sub-cultural expressions I was bombarded by new realities with new standards of physical nature, required emotional content and acceptable morality. Chemical variety and intake, environmental toxicity, sub-cultural expressions and music with certain behavioral expectations and the blurring of racial lines in addictive chemical realities were all major factors in my own evolution but along with it all came new evolutions of frustration, despair, futility and shame and other negative emotional stimulations that helped to perpetuate the descent into my addiction and the effects of my own personal disease.
I am no expert on evolutionary change as a scientific whole dealing with the entire human race but by virtue of my experiences and most important my survival over much more than my fair share of little lifetimes and the multiplicity of fractional eternities that came and went in stuck on stupid seconds of vacuum that pulled me in every time a rush hit or my conscious awareness faded in the bitter end of another hectic high I do consider myself an expert on the evolution of my addiction and addiction in general. Constant and countless daily little sacrifices of self almost destroyed me as a rational, distinct and singular personality, and it almost destroyed my health and body, my capacity for emotion, my morality, my ability to dream, my ability to even comprehend my behavior and its effect on those around me, my capacity to feel, my desire to exist at times and my future. The thing is though is that I am probably not too much different than someone you know, someone you could become or maybe even just plain old you.
Everything Evolves,
Mine was an evolution of selfish personal desires, ignorance at times, physical tolerances and an increasing capacity to absorb pain. It was an attempt to escape the prison of a hated reality constructed by my own misconceptions, defiance, and confusion, twisted sense of need and definitions of fulfillment. I had evolved into the world of addiction, not the simple addiction of a substance but the total addiction of mind, body, soul and to a certain environmental setting, a different world right in the middle of reality with its own set of faces playing in the same game of illusionary life. It was a world of chemical addiction and mental disease too consuming and desperate to escape. It was worse than I could have ever imagined it being, worse than I ever admitted it to be, it was the best thing I ever felt.
Where the boundaries began I could never quite recognize, when it took control I cannot say, why it happened I really didn't care, where I was going didn't even matter.
Taking looks back at it all now and then in moments of clarity during my far from perfect days of now as I struggle with the complexities of life I effectively masked in my addiction I think I am sometimes supposed to hate but who or what. What I have become is still unfocused, who I feel like fluctuates and what I have to do is still more than I can visualize, whoever I am I just have to accept though.
It was easy to make excuses, just as easy to ignore reality. It was easy to fail; it was real easy then to say why not. It is so hard to accept responsibility at times but in order to succeed in my fight to live I realize it is not as hard or final as death.
Mine is a personal story, the same old story, the history, the reality, the future.
Everything Evolves,
Yeah it seemed like no matter what I ever did I couldn't escape my stark and critical evolution of soul in a world seemingly without pity, my world in all of its inglorious immorality and decadence. It was a cage of my own careful creation, a hell of my personal design and an addictive existence I just couldn't get enough of. Whenever I would think I had enough I would easily construct a reason to give it one more chance. I was unable to figure out how to co-exist with the flow of my normal society that clearly to me saw me as the different kind of person that I was, so I used the crutch of "rebellion" and its accompanying chemically induced paranoia to evade responsibility for my failure to co-exist declaring that it was all about survival and personal fulfillment of my twisted desires, a mentality that only guided me deeper into the ignorance of my addictions illusory escape.
With my often forced sense of optimism I enthusiastically embraced a hopeless notion that there was some kind of place of illumination and soulful release hiding somewhere on the fringes of my reality of addiction. I hypnotized myself with a promise of a great moment that would expose a hidden but truer scope of life that would justify my existence in social rebellion rewarding me with something better. The only thing I ever gained though was forever nothing.
Everything Evolves,
Over time the last vestiges of youth and any innocence were gone along with the simple right or wrong it will all pass so quickly flexibility of my childhood. No longer could I view life as a carefree series of unfocused days safely tasted in well- defined controlled environments, now the raw grainy and emphatic urgency of the constant critical situations I constantly encountered in my self sustainment requirements kept my adrenaline at full flow in the make or break, right here right now demands of a gutter, streetwise, hand to mouth existence. Everything I wanted I had to steal, hustle, weasel away with or con and the only thing I could take for granted was the fact that no-one cared for me in the slightest bit in my self imposed exile from the reality of normal life beyond what I could be to them or what I could do for them at the lowest possible cost to their own physical and emotional content and of course at the greatest cost to mine.
My own emotional landscape was soon devastated, torn apart by a relentless pounding of deceit both felt and admittedly practiced. I couldn't with all my presumed ability to rationally think discern any possible reason why I couldn't find what I was looking for from my snake eye level view of the society that gazed down in passing at me and my peers with barely disguised hostility as we wallowed so shamelessly in the muck and mire of our callous chemically stimulated immorality.
I had evolved figuratively into a singular personality but I was none the less indistinguishable from those around me, all of us being embroiled in our own brand of Internal Anarchy that chaotically seethed beneath the surfaces of haughtily exuded in charge mentalities, trying to fool each other with auras of self- confidence that cloaked insecurity and farcical images of innocence that masked the impurity beneath.
Home became a figurative word and world as the literal reality of my personal space was the streets, cheap motels, mass habituated squats, someone else's façade of home, dirt lots and alleys all of the visibly deteriorating with each passing moment and all blessed with the distinct aromas of fear, confusion, lust, desperation, mildew, human waste, sweat and the always prevalent resonating odors of stale casual drug induced bought or sold sex that assaulted the senses with the base degrading musky ambience of nature's cologne. Daylight was usually a dreaded source of illumination for my hectic reality. It slammed home the impact of those pathetically filthy and habitually sordid cesspools of humanity. It was a time of frantic and forced haste as the vital material substances that fed me and my shadow world were sought. Nights were always a blessed time of sensory relief and freedom from the literal oppressive weight of the sun on my tired and blood shot eyes. It became a world of darkness that denied society a good look at what life often didn't see those like me in the grip of a chemically induced disease. Hiding from the assault of that society's sights and sounds at full daily throttle, the muted artificial glow of the street lights provided an unfocused representation of my life that hid the ravages of time, chemicals and turmoil on my body and soul afflicted by my addictive reality.
Every night was a figurative black tie affair as the weight of negativity as it seemed my reality was always expectant of my inevitable soulful death by slow chemical strangulation. My only sense of romance was directed towards an evident if vocally unexpressed love for my personal journey of self- destruction. There was a history to be read in my eyes that often ended up in chemical thrall staring without focus at nothing in particular, eyes that could have exposed a vast sea of my inner soul in turmoil if I gave anyone a chance to look.
Everything Evolves,
So had I, just like so many others before me and to come destined to follow the same addictive path of escape. My own body was always riddled with the tracks from the countless razor sharp needles that autographed my arms with the signature of my personal demon of addiction as I delivered a steady stream of poison into my frantically beating heart. My soul was tarnished by a steady stream of inner frustrations tears as I followed that worn and eroded path that scarred my soulful landscape like so many other lost and still losing losers, flowing in a current of hopeless desperation to the self- induced slow and premature suicide of addiction to mind altering, sensory numbing chemicals consumed in a toxically tainted environment all the while chasing viscerally rooted delusionary dreams.
I constantly craved more and more of what affected me less and less in a quietly destitute vacuum of rational while trying to escape the echoes of every minute nuance of life that was transformed in my disease into a crashing symphony of hectic irritation..
My thirst for the great moment of illumination took me to great heights in my chemically simulated meditations, trances that in each end only exposed the delusion warped wonderland of my own Alice like imaginations creation.
Fueled by the fire of my subconsciously boiling sometimes perverse desires I was always drifting high above the reality of self. The true intent of the purpose of the disease that numbed my mind and soul against the mostly imagined pain of reality always showed me what I was ultimately destined to do, to chase feelings that never ever returned after the rush of the hit, the moment, the experience.
I would chase those feelings a thousand miles each trip without moving an inch. Entranced in my stupors by the taunt of perfection, perfectly aware that by virtue of hard earned experience that the only places I could ever go was down and crazy, that all I could feel in each instants eternity would never be enough.
The inevitable plunge of my comedowns exposed and instigated a hellish state of mind that reached out beckoning with cold scaly fingers to pluck me right out of the artificial reverie of my high, pulling me further and further each time into the turbulent depths of a burgeoning insanities endless sea, a place that did contain a technical "Nirvana" of soul, not of joyful bliss but the blank indifference of madness's lobotomy of soul. Languishing in a coma of reason that denied my true existence nothing could be done except to rail against my self inflicted disease of life. In an inane acceptance of that irrational logic I always swore that it would only be a matter of time before my lofty gutter presumptions and the mind altering sense of my addictions twisted perception would expose some great secret path to the door that would lead the way out of the self-created prison that held me hostage in a grip of visual and sensory denial, of course assuming all the while that I alone was special enough to survive this kind of trial and come to attain a higher awareness prying victory from the forlorn hope of my personal rebellion.
Little did I know that the only place waiting for me was a living death where the shell of my soul would be added to the pile other countless other failed and lost addicts and left to bleach in a hells fiery light. In ignorance I forged ahead on the road to that fate, losing all concepts of time and reality in the swirling hypnotizing spell of the rush. At every rushes explosion I always felt like a million bucks in my plug nickel world at the cost of another piece of my irretrievable youth, my sanity and the future of my life yet to come. I was rotting away on the inside as my body shuddered with the numbed ravages of my internal decay and the constant pounding of disappointment from constant deceit that ripped away at the layers of my emotion. My every action was a clichéd response of reflexive instinct from the physical nature of my bodies movements to the dry predictability of the vocal intonations of my words and phrases which were all constructed to further quench the thirst of my addictive desire to have it all for me and to leave half of nothing for the world around me.
It would only be a times when exhaustion and the end of the line mentality because my pockets were empty and all doors were closed to me option of the last resorts disappointment forced me to drop like a rock into a nightmare wracked coma would I stop trying to find a way to find more of the poison that was destroying my being with the false touches of hyper awareness and pleasure that masked the spread of my diseases slow and steady march through my being.
Everything Evolves,
Soon it was more than just a physical need that had to be fulfilled; my disease became mental, soulful and environmental. I had to have it right now, it had to be just right and it had to be somewhere adequately suited for me marinate in the toxic stew of chemical death I was convinced was actually life every time I indulged and the rush of the moment would take my breath away. I would always think that what I was feeling right then was how it should be forever. Like a flash it always exploded and in a flash it would disappear with greater speed than the time before until the frequency of my need was one long continual stab of pain in my body and soul that had to be numbed at any cost. Like a twisting puppet on a burning set of strings I was dancing to the beat of a pitiless master's chemical song of control.
It became a time of feeling all alone in the shadows of countless other victims of the same disease, right in the midst of a festering boil of humanity, in the heart of a dingy little corner of a city where in a sea of millions of faces I couldn't find the eyes of a single friend. I was drowning in the aether of negativity and disregard that flowed into my brains core in a never ending torrent. Every gaze to me held the face of a potential enemy, every place was an already conquered territory, every thought felt like a line in an open book exposed to the whole world to scrutinize and throw back into my face with the spittle from a venomous laugh of spite. I automatically assumed it was the survival of the fittest in a game everyone else "Had" to be playing. A macabre sense of form dictated how I thought about everything and subsequently everything I did in the great game of life I was dying to play. Of course the thought that all of my sometimes psychotic imaginings and paranoid fears were the product of well documented and long declared side effects of my chemical intake and abuse mattered not to my warped reasoning of mind. My assumption of a universal engagement in something deceitful against me was a predominant factor in my behavioral actions and reactions because I justified all of my selfish intentions with that thought and did whatever I thought and felt was necessary to get the material substances needed to fuel my addiction and disease. So blinded to reason I soon became enough of a creature of habitual instinctual action that I would just take to have and hold, to use and abuse and leave anything that didn't help me out in the emotionally empty landscape to further stain the parody of the world I lived in. a place of existence I delusionally thought was all the life I would ever find. Lost in that conscious nightmare, I would dream of the dream of an emotional paradise that I wanted so desperately to be my eventual destination. I never realized that the mirage-like specter was just an illusion created by the chemical fire in my soul, drifting in the smoke that billowed from the emotional bridges I burned in my campaign of survival by way of a personal rebellion against the occupying thoughts of logic and self- control that always tried to tell me it was all for nothing and that nothing would remain of my soul if I didn't stop. Subsequently damned by the treason of my own mind and soul, all order of life that could have been was plundered in the chaos of a state of Internal Anarchy that indeed reigned supreme inside. There was no-one or anything that I could turn to for help and the personal messiah of my conscience lay effectively muted.
In the rare times I thought or dreamed of actually trying to escape the grip of my disease and change my habits the inevitable "one more hit before I quit" would welcome me back to the disorder of my addiction. Looking into the mirror of inner reflection what I see was a thing so consumed it made me presume that there was no recourse available to me to arrest the downward spiral of my souls flow.
Not being able to make the adjustment necessary to return to the mainstream of a rational society's reality there was no other choice it seemed but to remain entrenched in the irrationality of my addictive existence. I was never more alive though than when I was dying a bunch of little deaths every day. As I said I had no friends but there were countless other addicts surrounding me all of us victims of the same disease of body, mind and soul, sharing the same symptoms, headed for the same seemingly unavoidable final destination. The only difference was in the individual stimulations that led us to an identical infection and guided the heart and soul to different levels of addiction, entrancing each and every one of us with a false sense of amnesia used to mask the trauma and disappointment of yesterdays. A frail yet intense specter of illusory reality that was used to transcend the harsh actuality of each day with an expectant (if ludicrous) hope of a tomorrow transformed into something more pliable, substantial and forgiving. In each and every beginning there is an end, mine seemed to be one that would never be able to be forgotten until a blankness of madness, a soulless finality of a cruel and wasted death by the finger of a victims retribution, a despair of suicide or the agony of creeping death by disease or lunacy brought to a conclusion another little chemically over dramatic vignette of counter-existence that would leave no lasting impression of its tragedy as it passed into the computations of another impersonal set of statistics, an end that could never ever justify the means of the addictive extremes of diseased life.
Everything Evolves.