220906
life without her, (and with gabo), is like a Massive Attack album.
sad and haunting
empty.
awaiting something.
background music, that's it. I'm in background music at the moment.
went a bit gabo mad today, bought up a half eightball and set up my own gabo fiefdom, had gabo-suitors over to my flat for dinner, others buzzing from the street, what it is to be popular.
and through all this my eyes were blank, cancelled. and all through this her ghost lingered at the sliding door, cigarette in drooped arm held by other arm at 90 degrees across body. Not condoning.
(And I think..."What was I thinking, buying this ball of gear?"...and I know...I was not thinking. My mammal brain contracted the right muscles and organised the score to satisfy itself.)
Or did I? A conspiracist would say I wanted to get myself in such a situation that S would have to come back and show compassion. Fuck yourself right up and she'll feel so guilty she'll be on your doorstep, holding your head in her arms.....
she always said you used guilt to control her....don't prove her right.
rations rations all around, nor any drop to drink.
Two pieces of chocolate left. Cadbury Marble, another discovery of S's. Perhaps I would have tried a block once out of curiosity, and undoubtedly enjoyed it. But this would never have translated into a visit to the supermarket and the purchase of said sugary comestibles. So as I eat Marble chocolate I think of S and thank her silently.
Oh dear god I miss her so when stoned. And I get stoned so I can miss her so....
230906
Wake up. Get stoned. Miss her. Go to get groceries from green flea, knowing she shops there Saturday morning. Some beautiful women there, none are her. Going mad quickly, should I score again? Should I even be thinking about scoring again considering how much I blew yesterday? What else have I to spend money on? Gotta get outta here. Jet rings at just the right time and I pack a doona and head north before the gabo whirlwind can sweep me up again. A little nugget of hope, like crumbs of gabo on a dealer's floor.
240906
Back from Yandina, Jet and Michelle's. (We talked of Peter Carey, played PS2 games, looked for elusive snakes, kangaroos and bandicoots. Fed chooks, played with Fitzy, went to the beach.) - "Do you really think that was a wise place to go" says mum. Without adding "Because they are both 'hopeless' drug addicts". It's the unspoken things that in our family, like many others, carry the most weight. That say what is meant. But adding the hidden sentence at the end would break some rule. A rule that allows problems in our family to drag on for decades. For instance, if we weren't playing by the rules in this case, the conversation may have gone a little more like this:
Mum "Do you really think that was a wise place to go considering that they take a lot of drugs - wouldn't you be exposing yourself to more drug taking?"
Me "Well, look at it this way mum: between midday Friday when I got paid and midday Saturday when I left for Yandina, I had 5 shots of gear ( $100 each) and a 17.5mg dose of methadone, plus however many valiums and bourbons. That's one shot short of the number of shots I took in the entire month of August last year. Then the next 24 hours - driving to Yandina, staying at Jet's, driving back - I took no gear, no methadone, no bourbon and no valium.
Upon my return to Brisbane I had one shot instantly, as my dealer met me on the highway near the Gateway. And another shot an hour later, then a couple of valiums, then a dose of methadone.
In addition to the drug ingestion, I should add that I left Brisbane in a dark dark mood, no doubt due to the heavy gear usage. For the 24 hours prior to going I had obsessed and obsessed about S, kicking myself constantly for letting go of something so beautiful in exchange for something as soulless as gear. About 20 kilometres before I arrived at Jet's, this dark cloud lifted. Life didn't seem so nasty. Hope was alive. I was still stoned from my last shot but I thought life could be salvaged. My idea of a good day was no longer one that ended in my car wrapping around a tree at 100 km/hr.
So yes mum, I do think it was a wise move to visit Jet's. He's a drug user, but so am I and so are a lot of this society's members. Whether it's nicotine or alcohol, a lot of people swallow themselves by swallowing some chemical. And if it's not a chemical ingested, then it's one generated internally by our own bodies - here I refer to the gamblers, the sex addicts, the exercise junkies. I would not be very surprised if around 80% of humans take some chemical or perform some activity that gets their mind to the same state gear gets my mind (see New Scientist August 2006) . And I don't see anything wrong with that. Humans have had millions of years to evolve, and we have this unique attribute, self-awareness, that no other lifeform we have come across seems to have. To me self medication is a perfectly normal activity of self-regulation of a dynamic system. It stops chaotic feedback loops tearing us apart. It helps us slow down when our minds focus too much on an issue. I know that in my case, society has a 'thing' about gear, and therefore I am persecuted for maintaining my self-regulation in a certain way. So what. I will just hide it away. But I certainly don't see myself as any 'lower' ethically or morally from a non gear taker."
Mum "OK, I was just asking. Would you like some fruit loaf?"
But that's in a world where family talk to each other. Really talk, not just go through polite mout moving motions. And I am equally to blame for this. I clammed up to my parents. At times mum begged me to talk to her. But there had to be a reason that I never felt able to tell them anything. This may not have been ther fault, perhaps just the whole "be ashamed of using drugs" scenario I came of age in.
Perhaps if I could say the above to mum and dad then maybe I'd be able to tell them the truth about how I feel about Ms. S. How this is weekend number 3 without her and things aren't getting better. That I think about her all the time. That I write an SMS to her every day and never send it. Because I've realised that she's doing so well at the moment (gear-wise) that simply communicating with her will put her at risk of using again. And yet I know that by not contacting her she will be building resentment against me for "ignoring her". Ignore? How can you ignore something that's on your mind every moment of your waking day? My only relief is when I go to work, and even there she hovers on the edge of my consciousness, as though she's at the cubicle next to me (this spawns a memory of when she'd come into my old Toowong job around the turn of the century and sit on my desk whilst I worked). So I don't think I am ignoring her, I am doing all I can do because I love her and want to see her straight and healthy and not poor. She deserves to buy good things with the wage she earns, not to support some mess.
So I can contact her, satisfy my own needs, and ultimately hurt her (by reintroducing gear into her life at this fragile stage) - or I can not contact her, make myself desparately sad and lonely, make her mad at me for ignoring her, and try to live off the thought that someone I love is getting better (very) partly due to my actions. But because I love them their resentment will keep them from seeing me again.
Thank god for Sigur Ros at moments like these. When we have to choose the unchooseable, music always helps me.
Whilst up north I was sorely tempted to drop in on her sister and tell her sister that I truly love her sister, but I held back. That would have the same effect as contacting S directly.
So I lie in bed in the dark and write SMS' that I never send. And all I can do is hope that she gets healthy and that I get healthy. That there may be a chance one day of trying it again.