Addictions

How I long to suffer so simply as she does. My friend she is and she was once a heroine addict. She is still an addict to any number of things but she is no longer a heroin addict. Well perhaps she is and perhaps she is not… She simply doesn’t do heroin because of a single person who she has not met in years. She lives in general terror of meeting him again.

But I know what that’s like. My drug is different yet so very dangerous.

Imagine this if you would… A comfy chair, your favorite music is playing in an eternal and randomized loop and a good book sits in your hands. Insidious isn’t it? What would you give to get that back if you someday lost it? What if you realized the price was to high and left it behind?

Long years I stagnated in the basement. Years I did not live yet endured. Goals that lacked any meaning where the only ones available to me. I searched for fellowship and found nights hopping from bar to bar alone and never saying a word save to order the odd drink. I searched for friendship only to end up spending my first ‘romantic’ encounter with someone who asked for the money first.

So after flunking out of college and faced with a lifetime of secluded living in a basement working a minimum wage almost fulltime job I decided to leave.

But the chair, the book and the music…

Anyone will tell you that it is difficult to get a place in Victoria on the kind of wage I was making. They aren’t lying. I could have gotten a nice little closet for one and a half of my paychecks. But what is the point of a place if it is not big enough for chair, book and the music?

So I wondered the dreary spring streets of Victoria, rarely eating, never resting save for a few precious moments spent in long, long blinks. I still worked my dead-end job and on occasion slept there. I lasted two weeks like that.

Then one morning around 3am I asleep upon a pile of laundry bags heard a noise. I jumped up to my feet taking a fighters stance. I fell right back down to tend my sprained ankle.

The doctor prescribed some pills and suggested an ankle brace I couldn’t afford. I very slowly hobbled out of her office to the bus stop.

I was terrified. I would have to go back to that place again. Wouldn’t I? Maybe not.

I had spent a lot of time with ladies who ask a fair wage. One had once been a wanderer just like I was. She was my only hope.

Deeply embarrassed I came to her home and asked if I could have a place to sleep. I couldn’t walk all night on a sprained ankle.

She advised me to head to the homeless shelter. She had company.

I nodded and thanked her. She told me it might be to late and asked if I had a blanket… I didn’t but I lied and said I did. If I had admitted that I had lacked a blanket she would have forced one from her own bed upon me. I could not stand to think of that.

I managed to get a narrow hospital sized bed and collapsed around 2am.

First I met scum. One fellow ran off with one of my slim paychecks by pretending to want to be roommates. I have learned since then that if I let people woo me with tempting stories of happiness and joy I had better be paying them by the hour.

Then I met the desperate. I had a brief relationship. I soon learned that you get what you pay for.

Then I met folk who where like me, people who had tried and failed.

Time went on and I met one dismal failure after another.

I lost my job.

Then I met her. She asked for a smoke. I rolled her one.

She was hardcore and had the habit of popping out that vein in her arm to prove it and yet she was soft and full of joy and so very not a needle junky.

She pointed out that I looked like the kind of fellow who played dungeons and dragons. I was so I agreed with her statement. She pointed out she wanted to learn.

I sat in her radiance and learned what it is to be alive. I learned to abandon jealousy and how to care.

I hounded work for my holiday pay until I got it and could buy the books, dice, pencils, erasers, staples, stapler, liquid paper and other such niceties needed to play the game.

And then she was gone and I learned to stop wanting.

Then I learned I had to want and started wanting to want again.

Then I discovered a sweet nectar. Those who lived life. Those who had not failed. They shone with life. They weren’t depressing reminders of what I might become. They where all I could never be. They had fun and lived and laughed and rutted with unending glee and emotion as though they could never run dry as though they could never fall from supernova to mere brown stars as I had. They where hippies. They where the rainbow crew.

Can’t very well survive without wanting the things you need to survive.

I began to collect people. Can’t play dungeon and dragons without players now can you? I had the books. May as well use them.

So I lived happily for a time. Eating in soup kitchens and playing d&d.

I didn’t need welfare. Food is free, shelters will shelter you for half the month and the rest of my nights could be spent with the rainbow crew.

So I couldn’t get that nice desensitizing fluoridated toothpaste I wanted or some dandruff shampoo… But is it worth it to be a welfare bum just for those two things?

I prefer to be a penniless bum thank you very much. No begging, no asking for help. I would do this on my own. I would put my skull together myself and I would succeed using money I earned.

I am the only one of my kind in this city. A homeless vagrant with no income. I still find it funny.