If you think you wont, then think again.

So here’s the lowdown on messing around with drugs and thinking it’s going to be all fun and games. I’ve decided to dedicate this blog to offering some extra special insight into the world of what you think won’t happen to you. First, don’t ever think that it won’t happen to you, I can assure you that drugs do not discriminate. Second, never say never. You will almost always find out that you are capable of doing just about everything you thought you could or would never do. Desperation can be quite a motivating force. I think it’s time for me to share some things I did, that I thought I could or would never do when I was at the wise old age of 18.

I can start by getting the obvious out there first. When I was 18, I went from graduating with a 3.8 and being enrolled in college to meeting a boy and doing heroin and crack all over the course of a summer break. At first it was just now and then, and I only smoked the heroin and snorted the cocaine. I considered myself a recreational user. Before long though, I was smoking crack and sticking a needle in my arm for the heroin. All in the name of love. Not only was I addicted to drugs, but I was addicted to loving this boy who introduced me to them. At the time, I truly believed that I could change him or save him somehow. I thought one day we would be clean together and it would all be happily ever after.

I spent about 9 years believing that. But that’s a different story, for another time. Let’s get back to me and the things I thought I’d never do. One of my personal favorites, and all-time lows was the day I went into the bathroom at a park and needed water in order to do my drugs. The bathroom sink did not work, and I sat there contemplating my options for about 2 minutes, before I realized there was only one if I was going to accomplish what I came in there to do. Long story short, the back of the toilet came off and that was the water I chose to use on that summer afternoon. Another fun fact is that you’ll likely end up homeless. I spent about 6 months living out of a backpack and sleeping in the bushes literally. I was homeless plenty of other times, like when we slept on a huge piece of cardboard, behind the same dumpster, behind the same church, for an entire summer. But there’s something about waking up inside of a bush, after it’s been raining all night, that makes you wish you had a roof over your head.

I think I’ll end this by giving you a visual that you may or may not be able to imagine. Once you’ve gotten the drugs in your hands and you’re safe in whatever room you’re in, if you’ve been an IV drug user for a significant amount of time like I was, chances are your veins are just about nowhere to be found. With that being said, you don’t just give up, you try and try until you are sitting on a floor with a bloody rag in front of you and still trying, determined to make this work. Usually time is of the essence, because once blood has been exposed to oxygen it begins to coagulate, and you begin to panic and then you really turn yourself into human pin cushion, just hoping that one of the many times it will work out in your favor. Usually in a situation like this, it doesn’t work out, but that doesn’t stop you from trying. Finally, you’re sitting there and you can only feel like the world has come to an end. Your drugs are ruined and you’re fucked.

Next stop….starting all over again at square one. And inevitably ending up the bloody pin cushion you were earlier and asking yourself how many times you’re going to keep doing this in hopes of a halfway decent outcome. I can assure you, I NEVER thought I’d end up in any of those situations but I did. Final thought being, I used to look at that lifestyle before I started doing it like it was glamorous, cool, punk, or fun but truth is it was none of those. It was death, destruction, despair and dis-function. If you ever find yourself thinking you won’t end up the way that I did, then you might want to think again.

   

Should we let the dogs live?

                Ok, so the topic of child sexual abuse came up today. This is by far not one of my favorite things to talk about. Let me just start by saying that I count my blessings for not having been a child that had to suffer at the hands of some sick f’n person. I cannot even begin to imagine what a horrible nightmare it would be to have to experience something like that. My heart goes out to anyone who has unfortunately been exposed to any type of child abuse in any form.

                The actual conversation was about how some people have the opinion that sickos who do these terrible things to children are punished through the courts and justice is served by whatever sentence is handed down by the judge. Others are wondering if that is not enough. Some believe that anyone who commits these acts against children should be sentenced to death. They argue that after all, when a dog bites a child we put the dog down. How are these offenders any different than a dog?

 First off, let me tell you that as a parent, and most parents I know, the first common reaction is that the courts better get to the person who violated the child before we do because if they don’t, we will kill them ourselves. Trust me when I tell you that is the honest truth and not an exaggeration. I’m sure most parents agree and those who don’t have something similar in mind.

With that being said, I’m sure it’s no mystery as to where I stand on this issue but I will make myself clear anyway. When you consider the age old sayings “an eye for an eye” or “what goes around, comes around” I guess maybe some can take a very small comfort in knowing the general rule when it comes to pedophiles who go to prison. Yes, they end up locked up with men who have children and those men make sure they receive what they have got coming to them. But is that enough? Does that somehow make it tolerable for the parents knowing that the perpetrator is now the “victim”? And what about the children? Would they be left feeling any better with that knowledge? I doubt that is enough to make anyone feel like justice has been served.

                I stand with those who say to put them down like the animals they are. Some people may say “they are human beings”….I say bullshit!!!! Some may say that those people should get help for their sickness…..again, I say bullshit!!!! If this is how that person is hardwired to act then that’s how that person is hardwired to be. We don’t waste time trying to retrain dogs not to bite. I don’t really understand why the topic is even up for debate. They should have been doing away with these monsters a long time ago. I mean really, how many times has the system released assholes like that only to watch them do it again and again and again.

                  I say stop it in its tracks. No releases from prison after a lengthy sentence. Definitely no rehabilitation because then we would be allowing hope that they may have somehow changed. They do something like devour the innocence of a child and then think they deserve a second chance at their own life??? Nope! No second chances! No third or fourth or fifth. I believe someone does something like that, destroys an innocent child’s life, and their life deserves to be over. Plain and simple.

Love Abuser (the best title for an 80's rock song if I ever heard one)

Throughout life I have somehow ended up with the worst boyfriends a parent could ever imagine their daughter having. How did this happen? I really thought I was going to end up with the Ryan Gosling kind of guy that would make my momma proud. Instead, I ended up with “that guy” my mother couldn’t stand to even look at. It’s comical when I look back on it now. I fell madly deeply in love with every boyfriend I ever had. I was loyal to a fault while they were the exact opposite, cheaters extroidinaire. I don’t even know why I found them so completely irresistible. Not a single one had ever graduated high school nor held a job for more than six months. And yet I loved them with all my heart and soul. Aaaaah, young love. It is the best and the worst all wrapped up in one jacked up box of hormones. I remember writing on my folders and journals that I, Angalee, will love so and so FOREVER AND EVER! At the time I believed that loving that guy forever and ever was really this thing that I would do.

 Yet, it was always me who ended these romantic adventures filled with lust, love, friendship, and cheating, jealousy, low self-esteem….you get the picture. It usually only took somewhere between four and nine years to figure out that this wasn’t going to be the guy I’d spend the rest of eternity with. Actually, when I look back on these “love abusers” of my past, I knew right away that they weren’t “the one.” To be quite honest, I am just now starting to get a decent picture of what “the one” might look like, act like, think like and treat me like. But at that time when I was at my most giving with my love, I chose those egomaniacs to waste it on.

Which brings me back to, How did this happen? Why did I waste so much of my sweet, sexy, youthful love on these males that I knew from the beginning were not going to return the same affections? Unfortunately, I think the answer lies somewhere in co-dependency and low self-esteem mixed with a huge hope for what you wish someone will turn out to be. On a brighter note, I think it also lies in the midst of something like forever and ever actually existing. My grandparents were married at the age of eighteen and nineteen and they stayed together their entire lives. It does actually happen sometimes.  I guess when we find that one person we truly can see ourselves spending our entire lives with from start to finish, through thick and thin, we just know it. That must be why people say “you will just know.”

 I have yet for that knowing to hit me like a truck out of nowhere, but I am optimistically waiting. I know what the great “love abuser” looks like when I see him and I can say I am finally no longer attracted to him, it only took about twenty-five years but I did get there.