scribblethings

scribblethings @ 2019-06-30T14:41:00

2019-06-30T13:41:00Z

Collapse

It drops off into nothing at the end
And here the-thing-called-I
stands quietly observant,
desperate for it to break
just a little harder
than the last time

That's what this needs.

There's no real comfort
when it's all just afloat
[And]
Success of rebuilding can't be found
without at first a full collapse

The guttural release of everything
[you thought you were]
Falling undone

We almost had it
-as always-
but layers built up above This Elusive Goal
before completion

Nothing severed, it ruptured me open
[No Outside Force
can influence this entire universe
that matters the most to all involved
-hic est tantum quia nobis-]

All of us are waiting for the crash
When our pieces
-our shards-
scatter together, then

It'll be the way it should.

What's going to hit it hard enough?

[Rebuild]

2018-05-21T12:57:16Z

What's left of me will
tear you out by the root-
No Trace to remain
but the clear point of
Where you end.

Nothing happened

2017-01-21T22:57:07Z

[Petulant Kid]

A voice dangles by a thread
from
The end of my rope-
hanging on the air itself
creating its own solidity and form.
Nothing I did could make you proud
[Then or Now]
Tide is always washing it back
and thoughts make me
laugh alone on the bus
[Then cry alone on the step]
Not believing anything actually
turned out This Way-
Straight roads don't do that
but they were never chosen over
what seemed like a better way
[Again with "The Way"- what is this?]
Having trouble sticking to your own
Convincing Convictions
My denial slices into
whole loaves, it's so thick
and so is the place
where it constantly sits
Fresh each day with promises
that are stale by the end
and no good to anyone.
This isn't what you made me to be-
this is a product of Nothing.

Weird-ass dream

2017-01-20T14:39:05Z

The city was like Venice- all the roads were waterways, except they were full of SEWAGE-water. Sludgy poop was actually covering about a foot's depth along the entire bottom. People were standing around waist-deep in it all over the city, watching some kind of performance or parade in a nonchalant and content manner that wouldn't seem out of place had they been sitting on a blanket at the park.
A not-OLD-but-older-than-me dude on crutches got out of my way, smiling and sincerely wanting to help as much as possible, because I was walking my mom's old racing bike along the upper path. [I was confused- if there's an upper path to walk on, there's no need for anyone to lower themselves down into the filth... but that's just what they do here.]
He was clearly struggling- I insisted he go first but he kept insisting that my bike & I were more important than his injury/disability. Although he was speaking in Punjabi and I in English, there was nothing but understanding, almost as though we each had the HGTTG earfish.

My Luffy hat blew into the water and past some family who refused to help me grab it: "Uuuugh, I'm not putting my hands in THAT filthy water" [yes, while standing waist-deep in the very same filthy water]. I just let it go then, whatever- it's covered in pissy-poop-water by now anyway- it floated away and the [very hot] guy I was suddenly walking along with was wearing a bright white t-shirt without a speck of any grime or dirt. How can it stay so spotless in this place? How does he do that?

Something happened then, that made us happy, but the detail of it escapes me now. Perhaps a part of the performance that was particularly good?
He hugged me and it was really really nice. I wanted more hugs so I hugged him again - he almost kissed my neck because of the awkward way I grabbed him- but his mom was standing there and I got embarassed in case she figured out that I thought he was beautiful and wanted him to kiss me, so I let go before I was ready to. I'd told her before that "it would be too weird", and felt like a liar for changing my mind.
Then a long bell sounded, and as a joke I said "oh, we best go in, then!" Meaning it was like a school bell and recess was over, but not clarifying that. They both hesitated and kind of fake-chuckled to appease me yet obviously not knowing what I meant. They just knew they were expected to laugh.

That's when I woke up to the fire alarm going off in the house.

[Unlit fuses can't start fires]

2017-01-18T15:21:52Z

Apologies to every daughter
whose lungs I refused an allocation
of even a single breath
I know you'd be The Only Perfection
But your existence would be resented from
the very moment of conception-
as your father I can't just stand by
[being far too selfish to bear you myself]
"Parasite, your host is toxic"
You're better off finding
somewhere else to form yourself
and in its perfect time
Come back to me in external solitude
and we shall form separately,
together.

Soon It Will Be Bold Enough

2017-01-03T15:53:09Z

Counting backwards to 23
The age of an age
Now one below
In a Circle Of Circus
[Extended Extensively]
Spun from a flurry of black mesh imaginings
to weeks of OverGreen
Floodgates of what was once mundane
-it was almost wrong to be another way-
[but way leads onto way]
All these priors forgotten
until drunken fingers do their dance
and it's not the same when
Decisions have been OverMade
Over Time
in such abundance and
with fire forged from ruin

Sweetness-

We just forgot.

-Cassis-

2016-12-12T23:06:33Z

[So I wrote another thing. It may be expanded sukoshizutsu because it's so much more than this, but for now it's all my brain can do.]

Cassis was never Creator Of The Crossroads
Entering from the East amid Battlefields Begun
Standing suspended
[Existing only as a bystander]
Providing the soundtrack to epiphanies before
even being aware of her own existence
[Again Alliteration Accompanies Anti-Allegro]
So we get lost in this sound, what of it?
All of us here agree on at least one thing-
Too many to take you on.

[Cusp]

2016-11-24T19:30:29Z

Clinging onto all this shit
Having no sanity left to show for it
Abandon it all and set yourself free
End up where you need to be
What was lost before was taken by force
The choice of what you lose is now only yours
You can choose chains or you can choose change
Even though it's scary and strange
You could step forward and take a huge fall
But possibility of reward beats not knowing at all.

scribblethings @ 2016-11-23T19:36:00

2016-11-23T19:36:04Z

When you're getting a bus through the place you live and all the buildings are familiar so you know your stop's coming up, but you still don't get any comforting feeling of "I'm almost home".

If "Home Is Where The Heart Is", it's no wonder I never had either.

.....It must be getting colder about this time of year

2016-10-25T15:52:53Z

[gnilaeH]

The Endless of this version
Second-In-Command
[we've decided to dub him Hector]
whose old wounds are never
given the chance to flake over
Without them he wouldn't know his own face

[You can't look at things like that anymore]

So sure he's not in nearly enough pain
[they have to match, you see]
He's gonna tear it down
and shred himself out one by one
until the burn exists without
the flesh it survives on

[And we won't feed this perpetual fire]

Perspective is like a nickel
falling from the tallest building-
in your hand it means nothing
but the velocity of it can crush your skull.

[Horizontal with no bells and my feet still dance]

2016-07-31T00:50:28Z

Krish-na Goes To Sleep

And whatever that is which we call God
showed itself
through one reverberation of
the second string from the top
of a violin
held in place by the middle finger
of a man still unknown to me

I already explored the world
by burying metal diamonds in
extensive expensive carpets
by the age of 8
[to be diligently re-retrieved
with all the force of nature
obeying nonchalantly at my fingertips]
in a house with an infinity reflection
somewhere upstairs
We owned none of it
but took full flight
and the fireplace was bigger
than any of mine were-
We're back to being small enough

You can't top this by
creating false shadows

We'll allow none of it
simply bask in our silent contentment
and keep our gratitude between us
and that violin string chant.

scribblethings @ 2016-07-01T11:36:00

2016-07-01T10:36:31Z

[Last Summer was full of Pre-emptive Turquoise]

scribblethings @ 2016-06-15T15:56:00

2016-06-15T14:57:32Z

We Got Ourselves Another Major Heist

That's the way it always goes down
"We'll do a simple Edge Job"
she says
"It'll be fun!"
she says

A piece of equipment
vital to the operation
becomes compromised
we'll have to find another way
to get under
clandestinely

but if the void we inadvertently leave
drowning in our wake
[thwarting edges adjacent
upon extraction of the execrable]
is nothing but transparent,
we'll clock it as a win.

We're not even sure if the bowl is orange or plastic.....

2016-06-04T10:57:25Z

I am

A chain of concentric
lies
In a bowl
[Spiral attached
Spiral detached]

Each link appearing
Strong
but each is also
far more true
and twice as false
as each before
and after

When you begin to question
whether
yourself is the one
that you so confidently
thought it was

[......drift.]

He was just sick of it all.

2016-04-19T13:20:55Z

::SUICIDE PIGEON::

MONKTIONARY!

2016-03-31T20:26:41Z

I'd compiled one before but it was lost, so here am starting a new one [and keeping online somewhere so it will not be lost again!].
~~I shall update this post when new terms emerge.~~
I shall try to update this post when new terms emerge.

::The Monktionary::
------------

Prepostrophe- [n.] An instance of an apostrophe being bastardized, in reference to the offending punctuation mark.

Origins: Preposterous- [adj.] Contrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous.
Apostrophe- [n.] A mark ['] used to indicate the omission of letters or figures, the possessive case, or the plural of letters or figures.

[Variations: Prepostrophous: [of having] the apalling nerve to use such an offending item.]
------------

Schadenfreudian - [n.] When your joy at others' misery stems specifically from a difficult time in your past which you overcame yet mock others in the same situation.

Origins: Schadenfreude - [n.] A German word which, when simply translated, means "joy at the expense or misfortune of others".
Freudian slip - [n.] an unintentional error regarded as revealing subconscious feelings. [Pert. to: Freud - [n.] The last name of famous Austrian neurologist Sigmund [1856- 1939].]

*note: I am not going to pretend I'm THAT smart- I did just have to look up his birth & death years.

------------
[may 4, 2016]
Well, lookit whatcha got here! An update to the Monktionary! It's not as witty as the others [cider] but I'm still counting it.

A Bit 24 - [adj] To describe an instance in which someone becomes overly critical of a grammatical term which is in fact the correct one, yet they are simply too far lacking in suitable education or experience to discern or differentiate.
Going/gone a bit 24- [v.] to describe someone who's suddenly adapted the traits of "being bit 24"

[Point of reference : A YouPoop video ]

------------------------------------
[July 23, 2016]

Pasthole- [n.] Someone detrimental to your health [mental or physical], happiness, progress and/or wellbeing in general who only exists to you in terms of history for these very good reasons.

Origins: Past- [n.] A time which has been and gone and will not return.
Asshole- [n.] Not a very nice person. This can be because they are slimy, manipulative, deceitful, inconsiderate, or a number and combination of any such undesirable characteristics.
============================

August 1, 2016

Jehovah's Fitness- [n.] A person so passionate about working out, eating "clean", and anything related to maintaining a healthy body and lifestyle that they will discuss it at length to an almost Evangelical ["Bible-bashing"] degree.

Origins: Jehovah's Witness [n.] A religious nut who goes out of their way to try and get others to convert to their beliefs, taking it to a level of extreme annoyance to all those around who do not share the same beliefs nor have any wish to convert.
Fitness- [n.] the condition of being physically fit and healthy.

scribblethings @ 2016-02-14T21:34:00

2016-02-14T21:34:45Z

The Floating 4 [Cartilage Control- Alliteration Abundant]

Hypocritical Hypotheses
[leading to]
Circumstantial Conclusions
[via]
Experiments Expended
[Exhausting Everything]-
An attempt at separating
every
single
water molecule in a container
simply
by
wishing it to be so
presumably
on
some distant ball of gas that's
long
been
dead.

"These are all part of you"
she said
"But don't let them touch".

Contradicting Conditions
Coexisting Conflictions

A stillness rests while
occupying the
Shared Space
[of]
Relentless Restless
Soothing calm rents space
from eruptive images
Blunt objects do the
dirty work
While
wishes
bring you nothing
Because this universe is-
the universe I am
and the universe I love-
so infinite
beyond any capability of
simple grasp
yet limited to a tiny
harrowing
allowance.

Operation Overkill:
Ineffective Immediately

::UnThunk::

2016-01-22T18:46:10Z

[Found in notepad. Don't really remember doing.]

::Nov. 5. 2014::

It changed last night

Was it because I for-once wasn't drunk?
Things thought clearly that hadn't been thunk
Laid the path, somehow, the habit
now in my right mind it makes sense to grab it
Conjuring up stoned images of raves
that you weren't at but facts don't phase
Photoshopping internally
things that you did to me
[Except in the dark,
a more secluded part]

Not much left but sticks and dust
in desperate times we do as we must
scrape out my grinder for any remains
and grow a pair, it's a barren terrain

Texted Patrick like a week ago
"where's that big ladder from the small room, do you know?"
no reply so I gotta make do
MacGuyver that shit like we always used to
Tapes get fucked and a pencil's the key
Fixing broken stereos at 8 years old, me.
The fan's so high and escapes me a few
but I just lay into it and scowl: I fucking own you
Sure enough it obeys after that
and the tags still sit where they were made to be sat
Probably shouldn't have been stoned at the time
but with them out the way, this space is all mine.

What the fuck was I thinking on the stair?
Words that aren't here, should wander back there
It was a pretty good one but I'm just too drunk
Things that I thought were so easily unthunk.

=========================

sigh Oh, YDEK. :/

2015-10-19T12:17:22Z

You've Done Enough

Overlapping loops work in this
twisted metal vibration

but not in your conveyance
built with purpose to
disturb the sediment
with false sentiment
and still we're lost
as to what any of it meant
the words you throw like knives
I can't dodge
and can't dislodge
they never hit down deep
where it could kill
but you disarm and disable
using confusion as a tool
to gradually loosen
everything I built without you
one tiny hinge at a time.

scribblethings @ 2015-02-04T00:22:00

2015-02-04T12:22:39Z

[But her eyes were dead]

and i'm not ashamed of what's on the inside-
bare it all!
there's nothing in this
twisted labyrinth of
conjurings that wouldn't get
someone put away for murder
or madness
But It's so
flippantly exposed
"I don't care what you think of Who I Am"

yet

this disfigured husk of
shame and disgrace
If THIS gets out
I'll never be loved
As much as I hate it,
I want to want it
Oooh, ho!
It came close!
keep it away- Hidden
in the highest tower
in a deserted wasteland
nobody would care to pass through
so nobody can see
[malignant tumors: medical definition-
"A mass of diseased cells or a
growth
that causes lumps
that will worsen and
eventually lead to death"]
I have two of these mutations
and don't need to be reminded.
"I'm so ashamed of What I Am."

just reflexion

2015-01-30T20:07:54Z

If She Went Back In Time

She'd go to her time
it was 1989
[she had a crush on Mighty Mouse
so ran around with lipstick on
outside her house
pretending to be in some kind
of trouble so
that he would come to the rescue-
she was eight].

She'd say to her mom,
unsolicited one day,
"I'll testify.
just leave him.
It'll hurt, of course it will-
he's the father of your children!
But many say
"we need to stay
together for the kids
being apart is not
a good example,
a good environment"
To that I say "What is?"
Is it better for kids
to have:
Parents like the ark
[two by two-
a complete set]
who throw plates at the wall
smear the gravy all over
broken poppies
who
hold The Weaker One down
by the throat as we watch
him smash her head
against the floor
[how many times?
It didn't occur to me to count]
And. God. I think now
how it would have felt for her
unable to breathe from the grip
but what choked her more
was glancing over
and seeing that her children
were watching from the doorframe.

I feel ashamed and stupid now
If I'd known the severity
his shins would have been
dust from my wrath
but we just stood there
because
this was normal.

OR
Is it better to have kids
[this is a fantasy now]
who lived with only one
but those days were
filled with music
and freedom
and laughter
who were brought away from
the brink of accepting
violence as a
normal escape from yourself
because it's all they'd ever known?

If I'd stood up,
I'd been who I wish I were.
If I'd stood up,
She might still be alive.
even if she'd still have died,
I could have made things better
for that time
instead of the worse
that was what I'd
only learned how to bring.

Kody sat down on the avenue....

2015-01-26T15:33:23Z

How awesome would it be to escape? As much as I loved the places where I grew up, I'm slightly wishing we'd gone to NZ/Aus instead with the rest of my family. So many things... good god. So many things wouldn't have happened, and so many others would have.
I want to do it now! I want to say "I can go there, leave all the shit behind me, and start fresh". But I know that's bullshit, as nice as it is to think of. I'd still be there. Following me around like I always do.

Like always, other people have to provide the words I can't find:

I'm so sorry 'bout the attitude
I need to give when I'm with you
But no one else would take this shit from me
And I'm so
Terrified of no one else but me
I'm here all the time
I won't go away
It's me, yeah I can't get myself to go away
It's me, and I can't get myself to go away
Oh God I shouldn't feel this way

Reach down your hand in your pocket
Pull out some hope for me
It's been a long day, always

[Matchbox 20]

I just... I really just can't. Anything. Anymore. It's been verging on "over" for decades. The edge is almost visible now, and I want to know what it feels like to jump off of it into sweet blissful nothing.

All "life" is, is just waiting around to die anyway so nothing aaaactually matters. That's why sleeping all day is a good idea- you don't have to be conscious in The Waiting Room and time still goes by without you having to deal with it. It's just so booooring hanging around in the dreary monotony of Fuck All, and I want to jump ahead to the front of the line.

I just don't get why it's so HARD to finish it. Must be the primal caveman Survival instincts still fucking everything up. We're not cavemen anymore, we don't need to stay alive just to keep a species going that's full of liars and assholes. LET ME FUCKING GO GODDAMMIT! Even that can't go right for me. Maybe .... I dunno. I'll find a heroin dealer or something. That's a drug I never wanted or thought I'd want but loads of people die from ODing on it, and they're probably really oblivious to all the shit when they go. People are sad when others kill themselves but I admire them for having the strength to do it... then feel shitty because it reminds me of yet another weakness among many that comprise the entirety of Who I Am. Fuck.

This is my punishment. Being made to stay alive and be aware of all that I am, in a room that stretches on for eternity with not a single door or window in sight.

Cunts.

[EDIT]
Okay. So I just realized, there is actually ONE THING worth staying alive for- for now.

Shine ga muri, ore wa BEKI miro Luffy no Kaizoku Oni naru made! ONE FUCKING THING! It's a good one, but... damn. One thing in life worth living for, and it's a work of fiction! [Genius fiction, yes, but .... that does rather put into perspective how shit the rest of it is, if all you've got in your life to stay alive for is a FUCKING CARTOON SHOW.]

I read a good article about addiction.

2015-01-23T14:34:28Z

The link can't be posted for REASONS, but here. It's..... Yeah.

It's a bit long so if you would rather skim than read it all, I have bolded the bits I think are most relevant. :)

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.

I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs.

I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.

If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about the head home when the war ended.

But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more.

Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)

When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach.

Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit.

But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.

But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.

Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture.

This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes no sense.

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record -- guaranteeing they with be cut off ever more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world.

There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions.

This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs.

One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care.

The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.

This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's -- "only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.

The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander -- the creator of Rat Park -- told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog.

But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts.

Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention -- tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction -- and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever -- to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.

When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

=====================================
The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com.

Johann Hari will be talking about his book at 7pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma's in Baltimore on the 4th February.

The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book's extensive end-notes.

scribblethings @ 2015-01-21T19:07:00

2015-01-21T19:08:09Z

Quotes are appropriate today!

=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=

From AHS 4:7-

"You're stuck on this rosy notion that the world operates on goodness, decency. But the truth is that all this will guarantee you is an early grave. But the biggest joke of all, the thing that will sink you every time - is hope. Hope that the world will right itself, that the just will be rewarded and the wicked punished. Once you buy into that horseshit you're dead in the water without any way to survive in this disgusting godforsaken world."

SOA 5:5-

"It’s hard not to hate. People, things, institutions. They break your spirit and take pleasure in watching you bleed. Hate is the only thing that makes sense. But I know what hate does to a man: tears him apart, turns him into something he’s not— something he promised himself he’d never become. That’s what I need to tell you: I want to let you know how hard I’m trying not to cave under the weight of all the awful things I feel in my heart. Sometimes my life feels like a deadly balancing act; what I feel slamming up against what I should do. Impulsive reactions, racing to solutions, miles ahead of my brain. When I look at my day, I realize that most of it was spent cleaning up the damage of the day before. In that life, I have no future. All I have is distraction and remorse."

SOA 7:10-

"You're right. About me, about everything. This is my criss-cross. Because... when I'm with you I don't have any secrets. I mean, I can't. I have to open myself up ... for this, and you see everything. All the things that I hide, all the shit I hate about myself, you see it all. You see it all.
And through all that you still love me?
Man.
I've never had that before with anyone, in any "box". But when I try to get close, to feel..."
"Normal?"
"Normal. Yes. I just- I can't... I can't hook it up. But I want to.
I want to.
I wanna feel what it's like..... for you to be mine."

SOA 7:10-

"I can't do this anymore.
I don't know what I was thinking.
I'm... Jesus, I'm an idiot.
It's not you, [Filip].
I always put myself in these situations that just can't go anywhere.
It's like I seek out shit that I know is gonna crash and burn.
I'm sorry.
I should've never let this happen."

=================================================================

[EDIT 2:06 AM]

AHS 4:9-

"Now, you you carry your shame on the inside. You keep it trapped in there. It eats away at you, feeding on you like a living thing, till there's nothing left but the rot."

"I've been fighting it for so long.
I just don't have any fight left in me."

"You never were strong, [Dell], no matter how much weight you could lift, or how many steel bars you could bend.
You always been weak. Step up on that chair. This ain't gonna take much. You're gonna let the weight of your body do the work.
Step up to that rope and get it done."

Yeah, so this is happening.

2015-01-08T00:33:06Z

It's Not A Battlefield, Pat Benatar, It's A Parasite

I can't tell you how much you scare me
[shitless]
so I rise, like a man facing down a bear
trying to make Me seem
bigger, scarier, in the hopes you'll run away first
because after years and years
my feet are too tired.
"Can it be managed one more time?"
How many last-times turn out to be
nothing more than merely
[persistently]
approaching penultimacy
at a pace reminiscent of Iced Tea on Southern porches?
"A few more feet" was such a promise.
It was water in the desert. I could almost smell freedom,
and it was like trees giving me their oxygen.
A slight miscalculation and a few miles away,
I'm still dragging my feet
no more free than an ant in a jar.

I am fully aware of our position-
a showdown at Low Noon,
knowing I need to turn tail
one last time to save whatever's left
[I SWORE IT WOULD NEVER TRACK ME DOWN AGAIN]
the only escape from this
is to escape from this.
And an unseen force builds
tiny cities around my heels
in an instant
Realizing too late that it's
become too late-
I got complacent, too comfortable,
let my guard down for a length
in which microcosms
bloom and self-destruct
yet a firefly didn't have time to blink-
just enough time for it all to seep into
the crack in my wall where light used to
make me feel like a living person.
Insignificant but sufficiently sufficient
to fulfill the purpose and seal the way behind-
I can't run.
It's in me now, like a parasite
and it's surprising to find myself
unweak from it.
Wonderful it would be,
could the blame be placed
on someone else for a change.
Resenting you is pointless
and impossible
and frankly undesirable.
This undoing is my own doing-
WE ARE AWARE-
futile as it is,
disheartening and soul-crushing as it is,
the rest is petrified and static
.......while
my feet follow their old habit mechanically.

Just to avoid confrontation with
whatever's happening inside me
or try to find out if there exists a collaboration
of vocabulary
that could convey just how much
You scare me
by conjuring the thought that
maybe
I need to run away faster
because this is the one time
I don't actually want to run away at all.

Fuck.