heroin.

heroin.

the needle and the damage done.

this song has been playing on repeat in my head for two days now.



this afternoon i was in tua pajet, the regency capitol of the mentawai islands. that makes it sound fancy... but really it's a tiny third world town nestled into the northwest corner of sipura island... just 90 nautical miles west of sumatera and just 2 degrees south of the equator, it is boiling hot in tua pajet all the time no matter what. there are no trees. just shops full of crap brought over on the ferry once a week.
i walked around town covered in my drapie cape to be respectful as always... buying random things, food,ping pong balls, and various requests from my friends back on the island... clove cigarettes, phone pulsa, etc.

i marched around doing my errands with my buddy/boat driver named Budi and listened to Neil Young play in my imagination. over and over again i heard it.

...every junkie's like a setting sun.

i decided on the boat on the way back over here to the island that i wanted to write about heroin.

I think if i wasn't so freaked out by needles back in the day, in my hay day of partying and being self destructive i might have sampled this drug... simply because i am curious and love to say yes to things, but i never did and i never will.

back in the day i didn't have the broad perspective i have now.
back then about 7 of my friends were alive.
back then, i made a choice not to try heroin, but so many people i know made a different choice.

so many people i knew.



so many movies, songs, poems, pieces of art born of, and created for and about this drug.

it must be great.
seriously... i'm sure it is.
really great.


the other day i was feeling a little lethargic and low energy so i googled Mitch Hedberg quotes, because he makes me laugh so hard.
i copy pasted this one on to the desktop of my computer because it made me laugh.
"I'm a heroine addict. I need to have sex with women who have saved someone's life."
Mitch Hedberg

which by the way...

why the FUCK is it called HEROIN?

there is NOTHING heroic about this stupid drug that keeps killing people in my life.

heroin addicts are all the same in the most cliche way.

i have known heroin addicts that are totally competent, together individuals... they work jobs and you'd never know they get loaded.
and i've known that ugly, gaunt, darkly circled eyes, steal your money and apologize later kind of junkie too.

they are all the same though.
they're essentially slaves to the golden brown... texture like sun.
it's like junkies fall in love with HERoin.
they have a seriously abusive destructive relationship with this thing that consumes them. decisions are made based around HERoin and somehow she always wills. she is their perpetual heroine.

but do they think she will save them?
do they really and truly not see that she is going to kill them instead?

EVERY junkie's like a setting sun.

we just sit and wait for it them to go down... because they always do.
the sun always sets... and the junkie always dies.

It breaks my heart to know that yet another family is burying their child, their brother, their cousin, their first love... because the junkie's love affair blinded them to the consequence. and they let this drug take over their life and take it away.

it's not just their life that gets shattered and taken away... it's the life of their mother, who will never be the same... and countless other lives, damaged, destroyed & darkened eternally.



I watched the needle
take another man
Gone, gone, the damage done.






...i beg you to stop using.