20 years today.
Not a big thing to S, she actively squashed and scoffed at my one mention of it today. I was in my dealer's lounge room and mentioned that today was twenty years to the day since I had been hit by a car and given pethidine. The act that 'opened my eyes' to opiates. From a boy that didn't have to give a millionth of a second of thought when offered drink or drugs, who said 'no thanks' politely and casually.
Today I was celebrating twenty years as a junkie.
Then after the accident, the me sailing past a windscreen of Tony Farmer's car, on my bike, the two shots of peth, I learned that pethidine was similar to, or in the same family, as heroin. Endorphine brothers really. Then the hunt began. It took me six months to score my first packet. And it was as good as that first peth. Better really, with all the mystique and romanticism I had attached to the product in the intervening time.
And that led me to today, two decades later, handing over my last fifty in a dingy lounge room, with a man permanently on the nod. I gained some brownie points from the karma accountants for pointing out that Mr Permanently Nodding had nodded off with a tourniquet around his wrist and the jacked back sharp dangling from the back of his hand.
Tourniquets left on lead to blood deprivation and eventual cell death of the tied off appendage, so perhaps he may have lost his hand today if I had not looked up at that moment.
The previous day I had, whilst stoned myself, nearly swigged some poison,. Mr Permanently Nodding had put some lab chemical in a drinking glass and left it on the cluttered coffee table. I had just filled a glass from the sink and placed it near this one. In my stonedness I picked up the wrong one and saved myself only by getting a whiff of nasty alcohol like chemicals.
So in 24 hours a man tried to kill me and then I saved him. The stuff stories are made of, happening in my life!
Anyway, I am here twenty years of junk trials later. My outlook on life is warped. I have faith only in people's selfishness, not selfishness in a nasty way but selfish like selfish genes. I believe every act is the result of a human trying to make their life better. I was moved at a very deep level when at 14 I saw Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane and watched the story of a man sacrificing himself for the good of others. The original bible story I know, but dressed up in modern textual clothes and somehow believable to me. I remember weeping at midnight as the film finished, realising that this was an important moment in my life.
I have been searching for this unselfish moment ever since. I have done crazy things to try to emulate Stacy Keach in that movie. Typing this I realise how many of my attempted unselfish acts have revolved around money. Doing something for someone and not charging them, although I have the right to charge. Why should selflessness be tied to cash? It shouldn't.
I need to be selfless in my heart, to give of myself for no expected return. But everytime I try this I fail, as at the root of my apparently selfish act is a desire to satiate myself in some way. To get laid, or thanked, or thought better of.
How can I possibly distance myself from this.
I still listen to the saddest music, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Palace Brothers. I created my mindset and now I have fed it with the ingredients it needs to stay sad. Opiates, sad music, negative books and films.
I know that the only way to fight time is to spend time with someone, to get inside their head and they crawl up and curl up inside your head. And you know them so well, and they know you so well back that, from a great enough distance, you cannot discern whether one or two people are sitting there on that park bench. One entity is all you can say for sure.
And through this knowing and fellow understanding time slips away, and you just see them as they are, not as physics presents their visage. And then you are seeing them outside time so time has no impact, wrinkles are there but not, skin sags but is still taut. This is the only way to live life, open and expressive, engaged and not disconnected. No man is an island.
A self sustaining world of negativeness.