From Dreams to Despair: Essays from an American 2016-2023

By William Lobb

A collection of blogs and posts from 2016 to present. A lot or readers have requested a compilation, this is the result.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Lobb
• Release date: Apr 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798987565148

William Lobb

I was born and have lived my entire life in New York’s Hudson Valley. Leaving a few times, but always finding my way back.I started writing at a very young age–poetry and short stories. Early on, I was influenced by Steinbeck and Hemingway. Finding myself alone once in William Faulkner’s Pirates Alley, New Orleans study, sitting under a photo of Hemingway, communing with the ghosts of that room, in a cathartic moment something changed, and I began to take my work as a writer seriously.I write stories that more often than not are loosely or not so loosely based on people and places I’ve known.Today, I find myself a landlocked buccaneer, trying to cope with 20th century mediocrity.The Berry Pickers is my fourth novel, preceded by The Third Step, The Truth is in the Water and The Three Lives of Richie O’Malley. Richey O’Malley won a few awards including 2021 BEST THRILLER BOOK AWARD, 5-star reviews from Readers Favorite, and a Reader's Choice Award. The first book, The Third Step is a pretty good story but a mechanical mess. I hope to one day revise it.

Book preview

Legacy

Sept 26, 2023

I remember most how she’d lick the spoon after she stirred my coffee, then put it back in the cup, and oddly smile. The effervescent joy she’d find in the strangest of things, an egg or a cup of sugar to sweeten her bitter fruits, dandelion greens and cranberries. Her gifts from God, I took for granted and saw as not very important at all…

She had an old photo on her writing table of a monument in Sea Bright, New Jersey. The statue was dedicated to all the brave mariners who were lost to the sea, and she told me that’s what happened to her daddy, and the little seaside park was for him and other lost and shipwrecked sailors.

I knew she was lying; I knew that, but maybe it wasn’t so much a lie as it was just a way of her owning the sadness her daddy gave her. I heard he was a mean and abusive drunk, and he didn’t die at sea, but he was beaten to death, out back of a bar, not a mile from her home. And he was such a mean and abusive drunk that the county sheriff called it an accident. The one who delivered the beating was his son and her brother.

World War One darkened her horizon, the inconceivable madness of a world at war, but it was still someone else’s war, a far-off war, in a foreign land she’d only seen in fancy postcards. News in 1916 was largely word of mouth and newspapers; radios the toys of wealthy.

She drove a farm truck and worked the fields and orchards around the home where she was born and would eventually die. A 1916 Ford truck; it was a point of pride to her that such a fine and new piece of equipment would be entrusted to a girl. She could work the Model-T pedal shifters as well as any man, better than most. But to the men she knew, girls were more suited to washing the farm hand’s clothes and making babies and supper and fucking in dark places. The fucking never spoken of once it stopped. Her brother was her armor, her shield against the ugly world of the father.

She rode the train with her brother to the docks at Hoboken. Waving from the shoreline and crying, her slippery ‘go to town shoes,’ becoming soaked in a cold, torrential rain. The young girl, not quite twenty, watched her protector sail away that day, never to return.

One late summer day, as she was loading baskets of sweet and tart Macintosh apples onto her truck-bed and smiled at the crisp air and blue sky and oranges and reds coming to life in the trees surrounding her, a man, an older man approached her. He carried a letter that said her brother was dead, a hero. He was a hero to her long before he went off to some world war in a place called France.

She knew the man with the letter. He was a friend of her dead father. This man and her daddy used to get drunk together and some nights he’d stumble drunk into her bed, but he never raped her, and to her that was a point of honor.

Soon they married and she left the orchard and her apples and her truck. A part of her died when she left that place to become a mother. The children came as did the Great Depression, and it hardened her heart more than her father’s rape or her brother’s death.

Her protector gone and alone with the stranger that would be her husband she stopped living and turned ugly in the heart and inward.

The depression years reminded her of the brutality and injustice she knew as a girl. She lost two boys to the time, 1929 and ‘31 and from the cold of the babies’ first winter, and no money to heat her home, and fever and hunger. When the second boy died, she realized her daddy’s rape stole her childhood and her memories and dreams, but the fever that took her boys killed her.

Unable to face her truth, she fabricated a better story and found that story telling suited her and allowed her to create a place where living hurt just a little less, and she was able to walk in the dark again, without fear of attack.

One day she looked in the mirror and she had no idea where the pretty young girl had gone. She realized, but never admitted to herself in that moment, in the mirror, she’d lost her mind, and it was never coming back. Everyone and everything she’d ever been was now and forever lost to the wind.

The story around the farm and the little town is that she poisoned the man she married, and then a few more, but that’s all it was, just a story. Sometimes the world doesn’t mold you like clay, it breaks you like a China cup. The cuts and rapes and beatings the world pushed in her way made her who exactly she claimed to be. Her broken pieces swept under the rug, hopelessly scattered, ignored, and forgotten.

A swindler and an opportunist, a forgotten song, a life spent in the cracks between truth and lies, her affections weaponized and contrived. Each of us afforded our own individual piece of the shattered chalice, each confused by her love.

I wonder these days if her daddy knew the weight of the damage he caused in that darkened room.

Spiraling and rudderless, she sailed into the remaining decades of her life, dead long before she knew it was time to take her last breath.

In A Mood

July 26, 2016

Last night I was in a mood, I was looking for it. Looking for trouble. This happens when I’m in a situation I don’t like and I’m mad about something totally unrelated to the current situation.

I don’t like me in that mood, I scare me when I’m in that mood, it is so strange, it’s almost like watching a movie starring me, playing a role I just don’t understand or want to play, but I’m drawn to it. There is a very real part of me that is scared of this part of me.

I’m old, older than dirt. Nearly every bone in my body has been broken, some more than once. There was a time when I would have multiple things broken or fractured or dislodged and any one time. It’s annoying. It was as common to me as a head cold.

I have no business going toe to toe with big guys half my age, but I did and I have done it before and will probably continue to do just exactly that, for reasons that, at best, completely mystify me; at worst scare me.

Herein lies the problem.

They back down and that feeds this thing. This need. This desire to challenge people, apparently the bigger, uglier, dumber, drunker and smellier the better.

I mean, I’m looking up and into this idiots nostrils and I’m saying shit like, so, am I in your way, should I move and I press in further. Then he backs away and it feeds this bullshit in my head. It reinforces the myth that I know is a goddamn lie. I take my anger and frustration out on the big guys half my age and they let me.

They just feed the myth that even I don’t believe, but I insist on perpetrating.

I’m simply asking one of them to grow a pair. Don’t back down, I’m old as fuck. That is really, exactly, what I need. I need one of these man-mountains to wipe the blacktop with my face. Then maybe I will get scared and stop this nonsense.

Or maybe, they just feel sorry for this loud mouth old man. They know they could kick my ass without spilling their beer.

Someone said it was therapeutic to write about this, hmm…

The Broken Bones of Age

October 2, 2016

Face plant. I feel the pebbles of the pavement on my cheek. Thirty seconds ago I was hitting it hard, my fourteen pound titanium bicycle and I were tearing up a short, punchy hill.

Slow motion and silence… again.

I lay there on the pavement. I do a quick inventory. First it is about time. Did I pass out, without looking I know my helmet is broken in two. I don’t think I passed out. Next a quick check on what hurts, what is bleeding, what is broken. Shoulder is dislocated, another collarbone. Fuck that hurts. A few ribs, fuck ribs, I spend half my life with broken ribs.

A few more seconds pass and I enjoy this perspective not many get to see. Not many guys, or women for that matter, ever take a moment to become one with the macadam. As long as a muscle doesn’t move there is no pain.

Realization comes back in a wave. Asshole, you are in the road. Move before you get run over by a car. Movement brings pain. My hatred of broken bones isn’t all about pain. They are a huge inconvenience; you walk funny, move funny and you have to answer a thousand stupid questions. More comments about Eval Knieval, fuck you, fuck that, fuck this…

The bike is Ok. What the fuck? I see the broken pedal, I’m more pissed now. How many of these crash landings am I willing to accept?

A family comes running out with ice and paper towels. They want to call an ambulance, I say, no. What about a cop, what the fuck, no! The guy who came out of his house offers me a ride in his brand new truck.

Dude, I’m a filthy, sweaty, bloody mess. Put me in the back, ok. He insists I ride in the front. I’m trying to not bleed on his interior.

Are you sure you don’t want a ride to the hospital?

Yes, I’m sure, no, thank you.

We ride in awkward silence for a few minutes. He asks how much my bike costs, how much it weighs. He says he needs to get in shape. He should get a bike and start riding.

Really, dude, you really think that’s a good idea, right now, look at me.

As we ride along hitting every single bump in the road I look at his beer belly with envy. This guy is happy, probably on pills for his blood pressure, his dick, cholesterol, maybe he’s on that shit for restless leg syndrome, but as we sit here he is much better shape than me. I pass a comment about the ribs. He tells me the time he broke his arm. Your arm, I ask, you mean that’s the only bone you’ve ever broken? I’m in some sort of awe that a guy could live forty, fifty years and only break one fucking bone?

He lets me out. I go to get my bike, shit hurts. He helps me, comments about the broken helmet and the blood. I shake his hand and thank him. I say to him, You seem happy, you seem ok with who you are. You seem to have made peace with your life. Accepting of your age.

He says, I am, aren’t you?

I guess I can’t answer that.

I shower in denial. I’m ok. A handful of Advil and back to work. My daughter says I get pissed when people as if I’m ok, so she texts me, I’m glad you are not dead. I smile.

A few hours later I sit, alone, sore, angry. Angry, sore, alone and aged. I’m fifty-nine for Christ’s sage. Why can I never accept my age like the guy with the truck did. Aging gracefully, grandkids… kicking back in a comfortable chair, rehashing old memories. Living on laurels and glory days.

In an early summer non-race, race, I was holding off a group of kids. At my age kids is anyone under fifty. I didn’t have it that night and I let them pass me in the last half-mile. That was June, mid-June and now it’s October and I’m still pissed about that night.

Now, badly broken for the fourth time in six years I ask if I’ve had enough. Am I done; can I be done? Why the fuck can’t I be done. I tire of being me.

When I was young I looked forward to these days. The days when the crime and madness was passed. These days are as mad as any day in my twenties. I’m always the old guy now, always broken. Always the oddity. How cool would it be to live like the guy in the truck with a beer belly and a limp dick and a serious concern for a football team, or baseball, or soccer team. Maybe obsess about mowing the lawn or raking leaves.

As I consider my days of trying, of denying my age, of fighting everyone and everything, this thing, this me, sits solidly in my gut, refusing to budge,

I look at my old steel bike. It’s needs a shifter cable and a rear tire and a saddle…

I’m my case the wisdom of aging is just a stranger from some foreign land.

A week and a day after the crash I’m back on my bike. My ribs and collarbone hurt like boiling-hot-fuck. There is no honor in this. Nothing that resembles pride. This is a desperate act of a coward. A man so afraid of the inevitable approaching and encroaching aging, old age, death that he licks his wounds and binds his broken bones and runs as if chased by the hounds of hell.

We Are Consumers and Profit Centers – The War on Drugs

October 25, 2016

I was watching that embarrassment last week, the debate, wondering when or if those two would get around to heroin and prescription pills and the addiction epidemic.

The debaters did, for about thirty seconds. Hilary mouthed some pre-packaged words about the war on drugs and police and enforcement and then, I don’t know… she lost me.

Then Trump went off on some stupid shit about his wall. Fuck his wall. Fuck him, Fuck her. Fuck congress. Fuck the state governments. Fuck the local governments. There is no war on drugs, there is a war on addicts, a war on people, a war on our kids.

The CIA is the largest criminal organization in the world, the largest the world has ever known. If you want to shut down the drug flow into the country, shut down the CIA… You didn’t need to waste your youth hanging in bars with spooks to know this. It’s widely documented and of course, widely denied.

If you think for a second the government, at any level, has any interest in ending the plague of addiction you are sadly wrong.

We are consumers. We are given credit to buy shit we don’t need and can’t afford. Then there are credit repair companies, debt relief companies, Hell, even bankruptcy lawyers and losses for banks. The bad debts are packaged into credit default swaps and derivatives and sold.

Cancer is a $200 billion dollar a year business. $200 billion dollars, American. Think about that for a minute. You really think the people involved in cancer treatment want to see an end that cash cow? That’s a trillion dollars a decade.

Big Pharma. We are consumers when we go to the doctor and we are prescribed Percocet for a goddamn hangnail, we are the best kind of consumer, an addicted consumer. I can’t think of a better customer than one who cannot live without a product. Did you know, or do you care, Endo pharmaceutical has made $14 billion on that little gem. That’s one fucking pill. One pill. I’ve gone to doctors a number of times, told them I am a drug addict, a drunk, and been giving a script for that garbage, just in case you need it. I’ve dealt with shady looking guys behind bars and alleys with more scruples.

The US has about 6% of the worlds population and we use 75% of the opiates.

We are a fat, lazy nation that needs pills to manage everything. They have a pill for restlessfucking leg-syndrome, for Christ’s sake. We are given pills to keep us just well enough to need more pills.

A for profit prison system… 5 billion a year, it’s not cancer or Percocet, or heroin, but 5 billion isn’t pocket change. Bust them for drug possession, and keep the prison population full. Again, the US has about 6% of the worlds population and 22% of the prison population.

You don’t need to look too far or too hard. Just follow the money… Maybe you don’t see where all this ties together. I envy you.

We are consumers. That is what we are here for. There are countries where there is a real war on drug abuse and addiction, and they are making huge and important strides. They have stopped treating addicts like criminals and started treating them like sick people with a disease. The US is not one of these countries.

We are here to consume. I stopped being a consumer of drugs twenty three years ago this Friday. I still deal with junkies and their families and friends – fucking daily. There are people so isolated in their own little bubble that they see drug addiction as a choice, I can’t even fight that fight anymore. I envy them their ignorance. But, fuck that ignorance. It will be very real shortly. Your kid, you niece or nephew, grand kid, friends kid… they will be a name in the paper and the it’s a choice crowd, will ask, how could it happen, he/she was such a nice kid… Because it happens to nice kids and nice families. I say this every fucking day of my life, but , no one, NO ONE, ever woke up and decided it would be fun to be an addict, but it has become almost a civic duty.

Deadly, dirty heroin is so cheap today people who can’t afford their Percocet use it for pain. But they can’t and don’t stop. As if heroin wasn’t bad enough it’s now laced with Fentanyl and large animal tranquilizers. Every time I post something like this I get private messages and texts, from people who apparently feel some guilt, and don’t want to publicly admit a problem about a cousin, child, niece, nephew, themselves, who just recently OD’d. Many, far too many, don’t make it. But that’s ok, with heroin this cheap, there is a whole country full of consumers. We lose twice as many people annually to heroin and other opiates than were lost in the entire Vietnam War – EVERY YEAR – and no one says a goddamn word about it. Keep it quiet and follow the money. Always follow the fucking money.

I recently was asked by a kid, using heroin, if I thought he had a problem. He was sure, they are all sure, they can handle it. I looked at him and said, You are taking a dirty needle, you got from god knows where, and putting some shit you bought on the street, not knowing if it will kill you today, or tomorrow, into your bloodstream and you’ve got the balls to ask me that stupid, fucking question?

I’d love for one of these choice people to see dope sick. There is nothing like dope sick.

Those puking, shaking, sweating kids are lost and dying. The governments answer is jail. Dope sick in jail and back on the street for more dope. Consumers.

We had two people in this country with Ebola and everyone lost their minds. It was news for weeks. I still see signs when entering hospitals, if you have traveled to West Africa… I was actually asked that recently entering a health care facility. I lost my mind and told the guy to stop insulting me with stupid questions. Just stop being part of the problem.

A handful of terrorist attacks. It seems any idiot with an assault rifle who can scream, Allahu Akbar, is a Muslim terrorist, and everyone is shaking in their boots and seeing something and saying something …

Meanwhile, 100,000 people every year are dying from this war on drugs. Not a goddamn word is said – ever. At least, not by anyone who could actually do something, those who could end this.

We are doing what they want us to do. We are consumers. We consume. We consume more, we go to jail and we die.

This country, the shitstorm that masquerades as a government wants us exactly as we are, doing and dying and working the plan.

We are not citizens of a concerned compassionate government. We are collateral damage. We are fodder. We die, and four more consumers come up to take our place.

Every week, not once a month, not three or four times a year, every goddamned week, I hear of another loss. I see the suits and ties and pantsuits taking about the war on drugs, and I just want to start breaking shit.

It’s a war on people, for profit.

Twenty-Three Years of Sobriety, But the Day Ain’t Over Yet.

October 29, 2016

October 28, 1993… that was the day I dumped the last of my Oxy, Percodan, Xanax and sweet Seconal down the toilet. God, I do love Oxy and vodka. Vodka is like air to me.

But, on that day, 23 years ago, I simply could not puke and bleed and shake anymore.

All I remember of those end days was the constant taste in my throat of blood and vomit. I didn’t flush the vodka, I kept my last emergency half gallon. Actually, my first day not using I drank a quart. To survive a day with only a quart of vodka was quite an accomplishment.

I didn’t want to die around my little girl’s birthday. The plan was to die in January. It was actually late November before I can recall anything or eat much solid food. The first sensation I remember was not shaking, then realized I didn’t need to puke.

My demon still sits there smiling, taunting, every single fucking day. Every day. Somedays I don’t notice him anymore, but he’s there, if I let my guard down, he’s there, waiting and welcoming and smiling.

Recently sitting with some friends on a hot summer day, a glass, iced, filled with Blue Moon Ale. A sip and another and it’s like a hidden door is open. Like a sea rushing in, that moment as I tasted that ice cold beer was a fast ticket to my rage and my insanity. I jumped up and left, quickly. No one asked why. They knew, as I knew why.

Most days, after all these years, I like to go drinking with friends, me drinking seltzer and cranberry juice. Most days I’m fine, I like being around people drinking and laughing. It was never like that for me – ever. Laughter? How about fuck you, while I go for your throat. I swear I never went to a party to party; it was always to go get severely fucked up and work a deal.

I got invited to fewer and fewer parties…

I still sit in amazement at those who can take it or leave it. But, if I suddenly stand up at a table and have to leave – immediately – Don’t ever ask why. You don’t want to know.

The addict, still very much alive and strong inside me will rob you blind and stab you in the heart and fuck you up to get high. You don’t matter, family doesn’t matter, friends don’t matter, trust me the law doesn’t matter; nothing matters. There is no right or wrong. There is only the need – not desire – the need to get fucked up, big and hard.

I used to look at normal people, sober people, in wonder and awe. How do they live their lives? How do you manage to get through the day?

If none of this makes any sense to you, if it is foreign to you or seems made up to you, consider yourself fortunate and blessed.

Some days I wonder why the gift of sobriety was wasted on someone like me. There are many more deserving that never see this gift.

It is not a choice.

Some days I just cannot do the nursing home.

October 31, 2016

Some days I just cannot do the nursing home. I swear to God I do not know how the people who work here survive it, every day, every gray and unchanging day. There is no tomorrow or yesterday here, only the unchanging now. The endless now.

Most days they line up the inmates against this long wall, with pictures of jumping cats and sailboats lining it. Offering glimpses as to what it was like to be alive. Seashores and farm fields. Its like facing a wall of ghosts.

I walk by there quickly; trying to not see the vacant, sad eyes, some of them moaning, help me, I want to go home, but this home place is this unreachable and twisted memory of a better place and a happier time. This panacea that doesn’t exist because it never existed and each day – home – gets further away and the illusion grows more precious. The illusion grows in the fertile madness this unchanging place cultivates.

The ghosts reach out to me, as I hustle by, with opaque skinned, bony thin, shaking hands. Reaching out to me as if I offer a way home and if I can’t give them home they want to pull me back into this Hell with them.

Most of them would rather be dead than suffer the indignity of this place.

The nurses and aides are so cheerful and strong they sing songs and laugh and talk about sunny days after the rain and puppies and the place smells of piss and sadness.

A place where the only thing you look forward is dying.

God, this fucking place sucks.

Veterans Day

November 11, 2016

One of the toughest and bravest guys I ever met spent the battle of the bulge, WWII, shitting his pants, literally.

He was a 19 year old gunnery sergeant from Chester, NY. The most antiwar person I’d ever met.

I always found it remarkable that here was a guy who really was a hero, volunteered to go to stop the Nazi’s, here was a guy who had every right to wave flags and talk down to an obnoxious young hippie in the ’70’s, but he never did. He spent the time we had talking about war, which was not that often, instilling in me the need to examine the motives of our government and others, to truly understand that war was not some bullshit you saw on TV or the movies. People, American kids and German kids were there for reasons they did not understand, and many were dying brutal painful deaths. I saw these deaths through his eyes and words.

Frank B. Currier. The bravest, most humble and thoughtful son-of-a-bitch I ever met.

I’m always amazed that the ones who talk the least are the ones who did the most, saw the

most…

Possibly heroism teaches humility.

Humility, is something sorely lacking in leadership now. Strangely, now, it seems the ones who have the most to say and find themselves in leadership positions have actually done very little to defend this country, other than talk…

That’s my salute to veterans.

Hector Luis, his long road home

February 24, 2017

I’ve been thinking about my friend Hector Luis… He didn’t make it. I think about Luis a lot, often. When he died his wife found a number it his wallet, my mom’s old house phone. We’d not seen each other in 20 years, but he always told his wife to call me if he got arrested or in trouble. When she called I was humbled and sad. Deeply sad.

I’m not so sure how we became friends. We met unloading a truck. We worked in a grocery store. He was older than me, married, had a kid. We were sitting in the nose of a trailer full of canned food and huge fifty pound bales of sugar and seventy-five pound bags of rice; drinking warm beer on a really bad for hot summer day. It must have been one hundred and twenty degrees inside that trailer. It was the kind of job on a day that hot when even the boss, a world class dick on most days, made something of apology for making us do it.

I was a skinny, white kid on acid, looking for whatever it was acid heads sought: peace, truth, stars, wisdom; carrying a copy of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan with me everywhere.  One day I just found myself in the same place at the same time with this dark, viscous, drug and weapons dealer from the Bronx, packing  a Saturday Night Special. I think I wanted to be a little more viscous, I didn’t like or trust the whole acid head-hippy thing, and Luis wanted to be a little less of the earth and more of the stars. He wanted me to lift him up. I wanted him to pull me down.

Luis and I used to sit in his father’s car, pop a handful of Seconal and split a quart of Clan MacGreggor scotch, to take the edge off, then go to AA meetings. Then we’ d split another quart after and commend ourselves for getting sober. It was a long time after our time committing crimes against man and God ended before I actually even envisioned the possibility of sobriety, before I considered it even possible.

I’d been clean 5 years when I got that call from Pat, his wife.

Even with his long list of crimes he was a fundamentally better personality than me. To this day I’ll never understand why some of us never cross that line again and some do.  Sobriety is a razor thin line, veiled in a transparent sheet. Impossibly easy to cross back over into madness.

When I heard he had died I didn’t have the time or the connections for pills. My plan was to simply become profoundly drunk. It wasn’t a decision, it wasn’t a need or a hunger, it was as if I was being led. The liquor store was strange, like a scene from another life. I’d forgotten how to walk in, find the cheap stuff, in the half gallon bottle, pay for it and leave, crumpling that bag around the throat of the bottle, feeling that pathway in my hand.  A weapon in my hand. A tool of distraction and my destruction. The drive to the cemetery was silent. Even the voices in my head and the million memories of this fucked up Puerto Rican refugee from the Bronx had gone silent. I could still see him, sometimes I called him Pancho. Short, stocky, strong as mule, jet black hair and a handlebar mustache. He was almost as handsome as he often tried to convince the ladies he was. But he scared them, he scared me. He scared himself.

You could always sense the tension, the pending explosion. He’d light a Marlboro and his black eyes would glow with rage, and I’d know we were off again, another battle, another score to settle, another deal to go down. His life was plagued by idle threats. He hated white people and often, daily, told me I was the whitest motherfucker he’d ever met. He’d talk, late at night when we were both totaled about His grandmother and how she was from Guayama, the town of witches and how he had witches blood and he was cursed. Some days I believed him. Tonight as I drove to the grave I believed him.

I walked to the headstone, it was small and off to the side of a cemetery of rolling hills and stones dating back to the 1700’s. An inscription read loving father, he was, though his son frequently said he hated him. I sat down on the still fresh dirt and I cracked the bottle open. I took a long, deep breathless draw on the bottle. Immediately I tasted the rage in my throat, immediately I was at war again. I didn’t drink vodka I blended with it, and I passed into insanity instantly. The crazy bastard, the one I had successfully suppressed, thought dead, silent for years was alive and open for business. I took another long draw from the bottle, from the sexy neck. I could feel my body fighting to reject it, but I needed it in me. I needed it now.

Suddenly, I was there, just as I’d left it. A fucking putrid mess, full demon forces in attendance.  I could smell his death, I could feel his death. I felt a punch to my chest, pushing me back against the headstone. I began to puke out the poison, I was pushed back across the razor thin line, through the veil. Fleeting glimpses of sanity rose in me, holding the long and no longer sexy neck, I slammed the vodka bottle into the headstone, watching as the clear liquid and ten thousand shards of glass flew in a hundred directions. I pummeled the cemetery dirt with my hands until the knuckles bled, cut from the dirt and the glass. I sat back and cried, and wailed hard at the passing of my friend. My partner in crime. My brother.

I fully understand the tenet of gratitude, with regard to sobriety. I could never fully apply to my life after Luis. I still to this day think something, a cut in the fabric of time, a cosmic mistake, allowed the demons to take the wrong guy. I know who I am. I’ve no more reason to be taking this breath than my friend. A roll of the dice, a quick and poor decision and a life gone, buried in the cemetery dirt like it never happened.

The War On Drugs Is Killing ALL of Us

March 5, 2017

Another news story about the War on Drugs.

I just read a county in Ohio had 24 overdoses in 48 hours. Is it me or does that seem a lot?

Jesus…

This not a rant about Trump, this mess goes back to Nixon. There is plenty of blame to share.

The war on drugs has got to end. It’s a dismal failure. It is part of a machine that needs to be dismantled.

This war has left us with an addicted population, a for profit prison system, a huge increase in gang violence, a heavily militarized police force and lot of dead bodies and some very sick people – and little else.

We are going to lose 60,000 people this year to addiction. A few years ago it was 30,000 and that was too far many. 60,000 people… That is the size of a small American city. Ponder that. That is Portland Maine or Pontiac Michigan, Muncie Indiana, or Daytona Florida gone… just gone.

Ghost towns.

Everybody dead.

I cannot imagine the panic in the streets and declaring of war and chest pounding and saber rattling we’d be hearing if this much death was caused by ISIS or Al Qeada.

I know the grandmother of a baby born addicted to heroin. Every 25 minutes, in this country alone, a baby is addicted to heroin, or cocaine, Percocet or a slew of other opiates. I hear nothing… Silence.

I see people raising money through crowd funding for their cat, or for a birthday party for their kid. Maybe some of those are legitimate, but when I try to raise money to help an addicted baby?

… silence.

Someone suggested the resistance is people are worried the money might go back to the junkie mom… maybe that is a legitimate concern. But that’s where it stops. That is where all this stops. It stops at wall of concern or worry or ignorance and we proceed to turn our backs, turn on the TV and wait for ISIS to attack us.

I simply wish people would start demanding solutions to the threat is killing us, killing our friends and kids and families and stop being sucked into the fear machine that the government and the news media feeds us every fucking day.

Globally – the entire world – you are three times more likely to die from a lightening strike as you are from ISIS.

The president wants 54 billion more for defense. That’s not my issue here, let him have it. Let him have 100 billion. My issue is simply we need to start demanding funding – a lot of funding – goes toward rehabilitation and education, we need to fund and find real solutions to this situation that is killing us. We need to stop the endless cycle of jail and ineffective rehab and jail and rehab. We need to end the criminalization of a sickness and start treating it like a disease that is killing us.

In the handful of minutes you took to read this someone in the US died from addiction.

No one is going to die today or tomorrow or this month, or probably, hopefully, this year from ISIS or al Qaeda.

We need to stop being afraid of the Boogie man and deal with the drug problem like intelligent adults, not imbecile politicians. We need solutions, not bombs and rhetoric.

We need to tell everyone, from the President of the United States down to the local mayors and village board members, they can feed their war machine and buy as many ships and airplanes and bombs as they feel they need to, but we need some attention to what is really killing us.

A trillion dollars for infrastructure repair? That is fantastic! I’m all for it, but we need to start the discussion about addiction and stop taking about this idiotic war on drugs as if it is a solution.

The war in drugs has to end. It’s a war on us and it’s a failure.

And it is killing us, at an ever increasing rate.

lá sona Naomh Pádraig

March 10, 2017

Ireland 1847 – No green beer. No corned beef, no cabbage. No potatoes. No shamrocks or leprechauns. Starvation. Betrayal. Ruined lands and lives. Watch the heavy laden ships sail to England, with the crops and cattle of your land, while your family starves to death. Swear allegiance to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Ireland 1916 -Maybe while you are partying you can think of Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh and the others murdered by the English, for the crime of being Irishmen and wanting what all men want, Freedom and justice. I do, i think of them every day. Not just the day for the wearin o’ the green

Ireland 1922 – The Free State, Michael Collins pinned between a rock and a hard place and murdered for trying to hold his county together. Swearing allegiance once again to the British crown under penalty of death. IRA and the Free staters at war. The Home Rule act. An Ireland where it was illegal for an Irishman to speak Irish in Ireland.

Ireland 1980’s Bobby Sands and Maggy Thatcher. Men rotting in dying in prison, again for the crime of being Irishmen.

The traitor to his own blood, Ronald Wilson Reagan…  calling the RA terrorists

Ireland 1981 Irish hunger strike -Bobby Sands  died in prison, starved to death.  Then Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara

Ireland 2017 – A friend is quick to point out