Letter 9

4/14/11
Reverb'd

This page was able to pass for now...until it was marked on by me. I have a complex simple existence here that I will likely maintain until time has adequately been served. I see I've already given you a too-quick shake and you need me to explain my terms better. What I mean by a complex simple existence is this: Complex because it is the way I roll. Simple as there is very little activity required of me. I'm in a close management prison. Existence...I mentioned there is almost no activity for me here so I am not fully or even partly alive here.

Want to know more about what it's like here: First, last and in between there is nothing about being here that is soft or easy. The trick to getting out wiser than you came in is to mold the personality into being as non-offensive as possible and develop boundaries. Under no conditions is it a good thing to let a boundary slide while you are in here. After leaving, I don't know. I haven't left yet.

 There are quite a few here who have no date that tells them when they will leave, so a lot of them are here on another pretext, guided by the great and powerful self! They must be watched and not trusted, for if they sense a weakness they will surely exploit it. In that state, with nothing to lose, they almost never get to see a female, and aren't bashful when it comes to trying to lure a victim into their hands. Then, there are the guys that act like women...about which I could write an entire library about without scratching the surface.

I will spare the conjecturing rhetoric, as that is what it amounts to in the end, and I'll just go on about what I know or at least can guess at. Out of all the people and posers I've talked with, I'm the only one to have been through what I have and still have any sense left. Ah, I see you've lost me again. I've got to learn not to make sudden twists of logic or make giant leaps without any supporting information, like I just did.

What I'm driving at is how I've been impacted by my history. People tell me I'm not so rare, but then when they hear my story they change their minds. I've led a life of high adventure. High adventure with low-lifes. Drug abuse began early in my life. Before life treated me as a chew-toy, I actually had some sense. I recall as if it were yesterday, not 35 years ago.

On the last day of school I decided to walk home early from the public pool. This was the start of the finish for me. The retelling of this story has the appeal of a long chewed piece of gum. Telling it one more time would be too much for my sensibilities, so I will do my best to cover the after effects of the day while leaving the day itself a mystery.

One of the most apparent and immediate effects was a false sense of well being and acceptance by those I spent time with. Not really my peers. The next greatest impact my fully aware decision entailed was a widespread shift in the crowd I was hanging with at school to new, dangerous friends with interesting stories about their pasts. As I associated with this new crowd I lost all respect for authority. I was reborn into a Missouri mindset. At first these new developments were like cleaning out your closet and finding a forgotten favorite pair of jeans that still fit. Easy to live with and easy to like. I had an endless free supply, being the local lab-rat for the drugs.

Some things only seem good at the time and then they end, sooner or later. At 12 years old, I went to Bangkok to be straightened out by my dad. I made the trip alone. Bear in mind that I'd had an all-out assault on my sensibilities recently. Mom allowed an Indian woman to stay at our house and I found it nearly impossible to adjust to her presence. My arrival in Bangkok was more ordinary than many of the events leading up to this change in location. When there is upheaval in my life, I exhibit a flat emotional response which I think I inherited from my dad. I had been having great surges of emotion but kept it all inside. My conversations with my dad were while I was in this condition.

I felt stupid because I didn't understand the language and couldn't even understand the news on T.V. I withdrew like a snail into its shell. I connected with a guy who was going to med school at a nearby university and spoke some English. He was studying the effect of different medications on people and...I guess you know where I stayed while in Bangkok.

I came back stateside in a backdoor kind of way. It was good that I left when I did as I think enough of my actions were confirmed to my dad's ever suspicious mind that a confrontation was only a short time off. It had been set in motion weeks earlier because I was badly in need of a rest. Partied out, I call it.

My mom was getting remarried to a man I had no use for. I didn't want to hang around for a showdown in which I'd be a loser no matter what. After much finagling I was back in the states. I set about trying to establish enmity between my mom and her husband, any way possible. I did crazy things to generate some dislike. With apologies to my mom now, as this explains a lot of my behavior then and now. At every instance, I was stymied...which, truthfully, pissed me off all the more.

I had a disease that all have had, only with me the symptoms were over magnified to an absurd point. The dis-ease, as I like to describe it, was just being a young teen, with my unique views on my surroundings. This was compounded by the fact I experimented with drug use on a continuous basis. I also never learned to share, which caused me ginormous problems and took me further into the way already set in motion...by me.