I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that lately writing blogs about my life feels like the toughest thing to do. I feel stuck and I know change is coming. That is to say, I felt stuck, and I can’t really talk about it right now, I just have to let it happen to me.
Of course, I’ll try my best to steer it in the exact direction I want it to go, but there is no promise that says it will happen that way. But I have to try. If I just accepted the situation I am in, I wouldn’t be doing justice to the architect. So I’d be screwing myself over by creating what I wanted, then saying, “Nah, I want something else now.”
Obviously. No one forced me to go to California and get a job as a bartender again. It was what I wanted to do. I think sometime in the mid 90s someone asked me what I wanted to do with my life and my answer was genuine. All I wanted was to make enough money working some job to live comfortably and have a few days off in a row to go somewhere or do something.
That was my dream job. I could have accomplished that so many different ways, I guess this whole time it wasn’t really a struggle to get here, because that vague description of who I wanted to be when I grew up is the person that I am now.
Fucking, finally. I have made this life for myself and even though I’ve been trying to find out what to do next, the next thing to do, has already been done. If I’m smart and lucky, I can stay up all night and get a lot of things done, but that doesn’t make sleeping more than three hours even a possibility yet.
And I stress, “yet.”
It’s been quite a ride so far, and I’ve been driving, my car, ANY car for the first time in 2 and a half years and I wonder how I got along without him before. I think this time I just know how to make it work, but I also know my limits, even though I strive to one day live limitless.
The restlessness will fade, and the rest will fall into place. A new day is coming, and I am finally free.
My roommate came home yesterday and saw I was using my clip on fan. She made a comment about what the fan was clipped to. For the fan to be able to be placed anywhere, I figured out clipping it to a 5×7 plastic picture frame works. However the picture frame she was referencing was an image of a topless Miley Cyrus.
“You sure do like boobs.” She says.
And she’s right, I do enjoy boobs, however I don’t put just any nudity on the wall, and normally I would have hid that frame before she came home, out of respect. Even though I like boobs, there is more to this mild obsession with Miley Cyrus and a few other female empowered artists aside from body parts. I don’t just put up random tits on my wall, and in my car, they have to be attached, so to speak, to artists whose music and I enjoy as well. Over the past few years my taste in music has flourished to include a few main stream artists with top 40 hits under their belt onto my Spotify queue.
They are always 99% female, and they sing about how love didn’t work out, but they are stronger because of that experience. as well as living through the heartbreak, failure, and self doubt that comes along with it. Wow. Sounds like my life a few years ago. I can definitely relate, and ironically, they seem to have a knack for writing those sad lyrics in a catchy pop melody or, anthem if you will, that reminds me what it felt like being younger and making decisions while dealing with the mindset not knowing who I am yet, but wanting to fight for the right to choose whatever I stand for in my way. It doesn’t matter if it is someone else’s opinion or the rules of some collective group of people in power. Basically I’m referring to cops and the government. Damn the man, but also I do not give a shit about what the man or other people say or think of me either, and those ideals are prevalent in pretty much any song off of Miley’s Bangerz album.
I first heard “We Can’t Stop” while I was on a date in 2014. The girl I was with pulled me onto the dance floor at the bar on Hollywood Blvd whose name I can’t recall but which has probably been changed by now anyway. It was catchy and I wouldn’t say I immediately was a fan, but after that night, I would eventually listen to that song over and over again because not only did it have a positive memory attached to it, when I heard the lyrics, it reminded me of MY life. I was at a point where I had to do what I had to do, and I couldn’t be told otherwise. Sometimes people don’t understand or judge something simply because they haven’t been through it. Like they don’t go out at night but…
Can’t you see it’s we who own the night?
Can’t you see it’s we who ‘bout that life?
I was about that life for many years. My life. About a year later I left L.A. for Seattle. I needed to figure out some things about my life, and during the process I guess I did find out I am a sucker for “love” so I also got my heart broken as soon as I got there by a girl who was almost half my age. Exactly like a character in some song or just like an idiot would. I also think I told her we should get married like two months in, but I’m pretty sure I just said that as a tactic to try and get her to stick around a little longer.
Anyway, one night after we broke up I was driving to the grocery store and for some reason the radio was on. They were playing this really cool song that sounded familiar, but I knew I never heard it before. I needed to know what song this was, so I pulled out my phone and Shazamed it. The song was Style by Taylor Swift. Of course.
Of course it was Taylor Swift because she’s the next logical step from Miley and that’s the name I put my ex girlfriend’s phone number under. It was an inside joke, T.S. is calling I used to say but after I got home that night and downloaded the 1989 album it was starting to seem less like my ex and I were going to work it out, and more like I was on the road to becoming a Swiftie.
Taylor is a little different than Miley in regards to music and lyrics, but I can still relate. Taylor is the modest but crazy ex I dated once who I know is an artistic genius but who also is a drama queen who I prefer to just watch and listen to from afar. I like that Taylor writes her own music, but why are all of her lyrics about either living happily ever after, or destroying the life you have now and living in hell?
Where’s the middle ground? I guess that’s what my life was like for awhile, so it suited me. But as I matured emotionally, or just got older, Taylor grew out of her old Reputation and into the Folklore of American Grammy Award album winner and it does sounds new and brilliant and possibly her best album ever.
By the end of the summer of 2017 I was regularly listening to both Miley and Taylor, and now Halsey, Lorde, Haim and Lady Gaga. It seemed like all of a sudden only female pop artists were able to write songs and release albums that I HAD to listen to over and over again because of how good they were and how I deeply I felt every emotion they were singing about. Halsey’s “Bad At Love” sums up my dating and relationship issues with just the title of the song. I was like, yep…that’s me. Im good at a lot of things, but I suck at love and that’s alright. That’s what I needed to hear.
Then there came the time to move back to NJ where I would realize I was totally alone and addicted to the rush of feeling happiness. I tried to medicate it and it worked for awhile, but the songs I were hearing were all telling me that it was far from over yet. In fact, it felt like I was heading into the eye of the storm and I had no idea how long it would last and there was no one there to weather it with me.
I had a Miley picture in a frame next to my dresser as a reminder. It was of her brushing her teeth, which I needed to be reminded of at that point in my life. Then it was a framed picture of her above my bedroom licking a mirror, then four more popped up all over the apartment, and more followed.
At one point I believe I had something like 50-75 picture frames with Taylor, Halsey, Madonna, Lorde, Miley and Gaga adorning my living room, and every couple nights I would find myself at the Walmart picking up printer ink again to print more pictures to frame. I will never be able to have every picture of every thing even though that information is a google search away. I would start looking for one thing and had downloaded forty eight other images I found along the way.
My favorite was the middle finger collection of pictures I amassed during that time. I moved out of that apartment, but I left those pictures in the frames, right there on the wall on purpose. I’m sure they probably threw them out and thought I was saying to fuck off, but what I really did was create an art piece.
Again, I go into the night misunderstood and unsatisfied, but I had my muses. All of them were packed up in an eleven by eleven inch crate and I would take them with me when I went to California and had to turn around almost immediately after getting to L.A. I would put them up in hotel rooms I stayed in as a sign of comfort and to make the place feel like my own. For the next few years, it was just me and Miley, Taylor, Stefanie, Ashley and Ella. (Those last three are the real names of Gaga, Halsey and Lorde, respectively.)
I’m sure you’re probably thinking, Christian, having framed pictures of twenty something pop stars hanging on every wall isn’t that unhealthy, its just really weird and totally a huge red flag to probably every woman I would meet. But I don’t care, and also I don’t want to meet a woman that wants to date. No way am I ready for that bullshit and I don’t know if I ever will be.
I’m sure a therapist would earn their money dissecting this little nugget of obsessive compulsory and possibly a blockage in my emotional and mental state of mind and tell me I am using the pop stars to fill the void of a girlfriend or woman in my life. And they would also maybe say the loss of my Mom three years ago was the catalyst to this blatant cry for help and understanding by the female species, but I’m not trying to attract any women at all. That’s why I’m walking around in a Billie Eilish t-shirt, at the age of 46. I just like her music and I’ve been wearing band t-shirts since I was 14, so why would I stop now?
So, the deal with me and Miley and Me is pretty simple. She will never break up with me, or tell me she is in love with my best friend. As far as I’m concerned, these muses only exist to keep me alive and inspired which I do feel often, especially now as I am finally finished writing the blog I have been wanting to write for over a year and half, but just couldn’t put it into words that made sense, and didn’t make me look like an dorky idiot creep who has an obsession with twenty something celebrities.
I do think I have issues towards dating and love and maybe I’m closed off to women, but I don’t need any of those to survive. OK, maybe love helps, but it also hurts, and I realized I can mimic that feeling by putting on a song that I love, and imagining that it’s me they are singing about.
Alison Wonderland came out with a new album last week. Her last album helped me through the loss of my Mother so when I put on Forever, I cried when I heard it. I haven’t cried in two years, but I also haven’t felt much emotion in that time either. It didn’t make me sad, it validated my life and it seemed to understand exactly what I’m going though right now. I posted a picture of the album cover on Instagram one night last week at like 1:30am when nobody really gives a shit what you post. In my opinion it is her best album yet, so I hashtagged best album ever #loner, #forever, #alisonwonderland etc. etc.
A few hours I get a notification. Your post received seven likes. Big deal, right? Seven likes is not very good if internet points actually had monetary value, but one of those seven insta-likes was from the artist herself, Alison Wonderland.
I have never tagged a celebrity in a picture and woke up to find out the celebrity was looking at my Instagram and liked a post. I don’t think it means anything long term and it’ll probably never happen again, but it does feel good to be understood and acknowledged for once, even if it comes from an outside source I’ll probably never meet in real life. Maybe it’s better this way.
I can hear her voice any time I want to, and it might give me chills or make me smile, or I might sing along, but I could also just ball my eyes out after the first verse of the first song and that would be alright too. At least I’m feeling something instead of the numbness from the past three years.
I don’t care how old I get or how strange it may seem to anyone, I’m going to continue listening to music that makes me feel like it’s ok to be who I am. Taylor gets me, and Miley does too, but I only get emotional for lyrics that hit close to home. Its funny how home has become a state of mind, rather than a physical dwelling, and its amazing that these lyrics to that song I heard are so simple and so revealing at the same time. Its almost like magic.
In another world, I did NOT get new tires before I took this road trip. In that other world I broke down somewhere north like Willits California, the “Gateway to the Redwoods.”
It said so on that arc of a sign I saw lit up like I just pulled into Reno, but smaller and with no Casinos. Just your standard roadside fair of fast food and gas stations that all look the same, and all seem to produce the exact same deja vu moment of sudden familiarity as I grab the foot long wooden rod the bathroom key is always attached to.
In my past, not too many years ago, I was in a similar situation and I decided to save the $400 for the trip, instead of spending it on the tires which I needed but thought they had more miles on them. The Summer of 2017 roadtrip, was 300 miles cross the border from Oregon in California when I was made aware of the flat tire.
Another driver on the freeway pointed it out to me. I was in the passenger seat, Jake was driving and I had JUST gotten Triple A 36 hours prior. Fucking glad I did, but I still spent $550 including the tow to get four new tires put on my Acura.
I wouldn’t make that mistake again, but what if I did? I knew this place was familiar, but I didn’t know how or why. As I covered myself in my blanket, ducking down in my car which was parked in the back of a grocery store, I tried sleeping, yet I couldn’t close my eyes without hearing a car approaching, or without deciphering the lights on top of the vehicle that just pulled up behind me.
That’s not a cop. I said to myself.
I looked again, and I realized, yes, I was wrong and it actually was a cop. He/She/They had been sitting there for ten minutes while I panicked in slow motion. I didn’t know if I was going to get out of this situation, or if I was even in one right now. Something wasn’t right. Ten minutes is long enough for the cop to run my plates or at least get out of the car to investigate, but maybe he wasn’t even there for me.
Instead of the cop doing anything I think they would do, another car pulls in and a civilian approaches the police cruiser, hugs him, or her, and then proceeds to take a bag or some box and walk off into the woods with it. WTF did I just see? She returns about two minutes later, and I realize now I’m not in trouble for anything, because they’re not even aware that I am there.
I guess I was worried for nothing. Probably my gut reaction from growing up in New Jersey where I believe I was pulled over forty seven times by most of the Marlton, Berlin, Mt. Laurel and/or State Police but here in 2022 I’m suddenly home free because the cop leaves. They other party leaves, and then after 90 seconds of relief, a white truck drives in. The lights shine through my back window and I notice a layer of steam has coated them like a couple kids had been making out in the back of a car.
What is he doing? I see him get out of the car, walk to the same spot the girl went to, and back to the car he goes.
Weird. Why would a cop drive all the way to the back loading dock area of a Safeway, sit in his car for ten minutes, meet a civilian, hand her something and then she puts it in a place for the next guy who shows up. There is no coincidence.
Did I just witness a crime? What could it have possibly been other than drugs, or money, or a gun? I’ve always suspected that people in law enforcing positions would break the laws that they are, in fact, meant to uphold but I didn’t see anything really.
On one hand, I was definitely glad I wasn’t discovered car dwelling in a public parking lot, but the kid at the Safeway told me, no one would notice me back there and he was right. They definitely did NOT notice me, but I most definitely noticed them.
In that other world I missed all this excitement. When I left at 5:30 this morning to get my coffee, I felt like I got away with something. I don’t know what, but that feeling was good.
Regardless of what other people choose to do or not do with their life, I’ve bent the rules, because they CAN be bent. Was I even doing anything wrong? Probably a few things I was thinking, but mainly I like the feeling of getting away with some thing I shouldn’t be doing, even if it’s only in my mind.
This is going to be short, but sweet. I have had so many great ideas for blogs in the moment of life.
Then a few minutes later I have another idea, might not even be on the same topic or thought process. Unfortunately, that’s how my brain works. Maybe it’s fucked up, but we all are fucked up in our own way, who cares if I have 25 thoughts a minute.
I guess I do because I think they are great in the moment, but then that moments gone and I don’t write it down. I’ve tried recording my voice for a quicker more efficient route to the end.
Not like the “End” but the end of an idea…when it becomes a reality.
That’s what we’re all trying to do here I guess, but there about 35 recordings of supposed brilliance I swear I was going to listen to to transcribe, but I haven’t
Remind me why I’m still alive?
I wrote down 5 ideas I just had, three of which will probably make it to print. But just because I won’t use those other two doesn’t mean they were a bad ideas. The only bad idea would be to NOT write everything down and think I can just recall them whenever I want.
I wish it was that easy but, its not for me. Everything all the time is a perfect way to describe what life is like for me. Up until today I felt nothing. Or maybe I just forgot what it was like to feel?
See, that’s a deeper question meant for a blog all its own. It’s not this one, but it soon will be. Forever.
It’s been kind of a slow and less thought provoking life I’ve been living lately. I’m sorry if I’m hard to live with but it’s living that’s the problem for me. My manager at work was let go last week. Thursday I text him to tell him I’d be out that day when he replied with the news that he was fired and I’d have to call the Chef myself.
Justin and I weren’t close at all. I think we may have had one or two moments where I might have made a positive impact, but theist month I’ve kind of been in the middle of drama. I know there is a only a short span of time left for me here. I was never completely sold on the idea of this setup lasting for very long, but I know it will last as long as it needs to until I can find a new path. I may have found it, but I’m going to try a little harder to let go this time.
I told Justin I was sorry that he got let go through a well manicured text at 7:30 in the morning, and I wished him the best of luck and said it was a pleasure working with him because he is one of the only managers who ever got behind the bar and made drinks when it got busy.
I respected that and I told him. His response was probably something he didn’t think about for very long, but it will be something I’ll think about in the future s much as it is something I think about today.
He said I hope you can find something to be happy about in the future. I know you’re trying to find it in a job.
All I want is to be happy. But I know it doesn’t matter what job I’m doing to make money my real job is to keep my expectations of myself at a level where I can learn to give myself a break and know that life doesn’t always have to be a quest for something that will make me a better person.
How does this guy get that about me so quickly and with not a lot of interaction that isn’t work related? I guess it’s because I told him myself in a meeting I had a 2 weeks prior to this one. I guess I probably come off as someone who has a hard time faking it and being somewhere he doesn’t want to be for the money aspect of it. And that’s the only reason I still work there, but I think that’s not enough to make me stay.
I can get up and go. Tomorrow, in 6 hours, at the end of this sentence, it doesn’t matter. I’d probably like to get some sleep before I drive so I’m gonna need at least 6 hours, but after that, I’m good.
Maybe that feeling scares some people, or maybe they haven’t felt that way in so long, or couldn’t ever get up and go. I imagine with families and kids the latter becomes almost something of an impossibility. To me, nothing is impossible, but you are listening to the words of someone who knows how to get out of wherever and has done it well. I’m not afraid of starting over, I’m afraid of staying in some place longer than need be.
I suddenly have four days off in a row. I could get another job somewhere and slowly transition over to renting a room somewhere for a shit ton of money I don’t want to spend, and I almost would do it too, if there was something more in it for me than just material success.
I want to be happy with who I am, so I can learn to appreciate it when I’m not happy again cause I know that’s going to happen. Ive been searching for something my whole life. Without the search, life just feels automatic and I’m not needed in control.
Justin is right. I do just simply want to work somewhere that does cater to my happiness, and a bar at a private golf club is a far reach from happiness in my mind. I must have started seven blogs in the last week and half and couldn’t finish one of them.
But I I finished this one and I’ll finish the next one, and one day I’ll remember how simple being happy can be, if I just decide what makes me happy. Today it’s finishing this blog, and going to sleep.
I’m drawn to certain colors in this life, and I have stuck with them over the last fifteen years or so. Blue, purple, gold, sometimes red, and of course, black. Black may be the absence of color, but in reality, it’s all the colors mixed up together to form a perfect circle of darkness. I like green sometimes, but rarely will you catch me wearing an article of clothing that is pink, yellow, white, periwinkle, brown, or orange.
My Mom however, was a huge fan of the color orange. It didn’t matter what it was, if it was available in orange, she wanted that one. I never understood why she was drawn to that color, but over the years I would always keep a lookout for something she might enjoy, and something that was orange. I think there are a dozen or so pictures of her wearing this Dunkin Donuts beanie she got one winter. One time I was walking the aisles of Walmart and looking for her, and the only reason I found her was because I spotted that orange beanie from the home and garden section.
I never really liked the color orange on me, and I think the only time I wore it was when I was wearing Philadelphia Flyers fan gear, and even then, orange wasn’t necessarily the primary color of the shirt or jersey. There was some orange in it, but that’s as close to that color as I wanted to get.
I wasn’t scared of orange, but at the same time I knew it represented being in police custody, then pumpkins. I like the latter, but me in an orange jumpsuit would never be a good look.
Four years ago this week, I put on that orange jumpsuit for a few nights and days, and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I was in fact in the custody of the police. I remembered why I wasn’t very fond of that color. It’s not actually the color itself, but what accompanies it. Steel. Handcuffs and orange jumpsuits were like my shirt and tie I wore to the office.
I swore when I got out of jail, I would never wear orange again. I hope I didn’t swear on anything or anyone important, because less than a year after my Mom died, I would find myself wearing that orange jumpsuit again, but this time it was a lot longer than a three day weekend.
I would sit in my cell and wonder if there was some rhyme or reason to this madness. I get why prisoners wear orange, but was my Mom looking down on me from Heaven thinking..”I’m not happy that you are in jail, but at least the orange jumpsuit really does look snazzy on you!
If she had the chance, I’m sure she wouldn’t even comment on the color of the jail attire, but she would have used the word snazzy exactly the way it was intended.
So when I finally get out and start working again and buying new clothes, I load up on the black. I also go to the nearest thrift store and get a maroon shirt. a purple, a red one, and a few different shades of blue and I am content for the next few months, until I buy a new Bitcoin t-shirt with just the orange logo on a black shirt. I think to myself this is probably the first time in over a year I had worn orange and to my surprise, my PTSD wasn’t triggered. I don’t even know if I suffer from PTSD, but for awhile there, certain things I heard or smelled or ate reminded me of jail and my Mom dying and that really sucked. It definitely was something I knew was going to take awhile to process, but it was under control.
A little before my probation was done, I decided to purchase a new backpack to carry my laptop and to provide ample storage space for my move back to California. It’s a black 5 compartment urban backpack with orange inner lining. It’s really fucking cool and it reminds me of Halloween, which is just a few weeks away at this point, and so is my departure date. In fact, I left Philadelphia on October 31st of 2021 at 830am., and I never looked back.
But, if I were to look back, I’d see my orange and black backpack, and my orange shoelaces which I found myself purchasing as if I was looking for them all along. I spent a little money this week because I have been saving for months now, and sometimes it feels good to buy that thing that will give me instant happiness. The art of finding it on the shelf, thinking it was made for you, and then purchasing that thing is what I like the most. I know that no one has ever owned this particular shirt, or pair of shoes and I wonder if the inanimate object I’m gushing over loves being owned by me as much as I love owning it. I don’t think I’ll ever get an answer, but I do feel connected to that color orange now, and I’m just going to go for it,
I went to freeross.org and donated $25 and purchased a replacement t-shirt I lost after my arrest. Ross Ulbricht was the alleged creator of the Silk Road. The first of many free online markets places, otherwise known as darknet markets.
Anyway, they had about 7 or 8 choices of color. I looked at all of them and realized Heather Grey is not a good match, light blue makes me look like a cotton swab, forest green is just a few shades away from crappy brown, yellow and white look nice but I know I would spill something on it immediately.
’ll take the orange one.”
Why did I choose this color for this shirt? I have never worn an entirely orange t shirt since I was in jail, and ooohhhh , riiiiiight that makes sense now. I need to be reminded of it and I need to remember my Mom too. Plus, I know what it’s like to be Ross Ulbricht. I didn’t run a drug market or order 20 fakes IDs to my apartment in San Francisco, but he is in prison for life. No eligibility for parole and I believe he is the only non violent offender who was denied bail and got a life sentence.
He’ll be wearing orange for the rest of his life. My six months felt like a lifetime for sure, but they did pass and now Im here and I’m lucky to be out.
I guess I met the power of Orange, and I’ve learned to just steer clear of the steel, but indulge in the color. It actually does look good on me.
The day I left jail I walked into a grocery store and I was blown away from all the colors on the shelves that I forgot existed. The shampoo bottles were so bright and alive, I felt like I was tripping on acid. It was one of those moments I have just so I can be reminded of where I came from and where i never will go back to.…..which was a four story concrete building attached to a courthouse in Mt. Holly New Jersey where everybody walked on the right side of the tan hallways while wearing Orange onesies, or Red if you get into a fight.
No one is as good as I am at two things in this life. Number one, I’m the best at over thinking any situation at any time of the night or day. I proved that theory immediately with this blog that I didn’t want to write about a situation that I don’t want to be in. But, life is always a constant trade off of doing things you don’t want to do, in order to do the things you do want to do, so here it is.
The second thing I do better than anyone else is sabotaging my not too distant future, by making a shitty decision or decisions in the immediate present or a few minutes ago. I think I’m making a smart choice by eating that handful of goldfish behind the bar as I’m working, but I forgot that I have to chew them for at least 25 to 30 seconds and there is no way to hide what I’m doing without a mask on, or without moving my big ass lips. Which of course, I immediately have to do as I turn around and see that a guest has walked into the restaurant,
“Hello there!”
I say from a muffled position next to the sink. And if it’s not a guest coming around the corner, it’s my Jim, the other bartender I work with three, ah, two nights a week now. He is the complete opposite of me in almost every aspect of the job, except we both have twenty plus years experience doing this job. In fact I think Jim has 30. Recently I have been made aware of an issue I did not know I was having at work.
I guess being in your head a lot has it’s advantages. I’m always prepared for anything, especially when someone else is trying to sabotage me. I can smell that from a mile away and it has been happening for the last month or so, at my work, and the Toad, err, Jim is responsible for the saba-tagie!
Thing is, he picked a pretty horrible time to try and get away with it. I’m the master of self sabatoge, so when I’m making a conscious effort to change for the better, any sort of distraction or negativity towards that effort sticks out like a sore thumb, and it’s even MORE obvious to me now when I just caught that Toad blatantly talking shit about me to a guest while I was in the back. Luckily, I appear seconds before either one of them realized I was in earshot so I’m able to catch the last few words of a conversation, which immediately goes quiet when they see I’m closer than they thought.
So, if you haven’t figured it out, I’ve been having some issues with one of the bartenders I work with. He is older, and rounder, balder and sadder than me, yet he isn’t jolly nor do I even think he has a sense of humor. I wonder sometimes if it’s a good thing that he has 32 years of bar experience, or if he just hasn’t evolved since the early 1990s when he first started mixing drinks and nit picking his workspace.
So, here I come with my sense of familiarity blazing, because I’ve done that trick before where I’m talking about someone I work with just as they re-enter the audible space we’re in. I’ve had my hands resting on the bar and tried to signal the other person I’m talking to by waving a few fingers in the air. I know it got way too quiet when I walked up at the right time to hear, him say
“Yeah, I have problems trying to manage some of the people I work with as well.”
Yet still, even though I called him out about talking shit about me he, then tried to sell me on the lie he was just “waving goodbye” to that guest. The guest who was still sitting at the bar? When was the last time you waved to anyone who is still sitting directly in front of you and not a few feet away, which would constitute the need for a wave.
It’s so ridiculous that it’s not funny. Its perplexing and confusing. The reason why is because when I started there I was not up to speed with my walking and drink making skills. It had been four years since I tended any bar and now I found myself in a private golf club establishment on a mountain in Santa Rosa wine country California where everyone has a name, a member number, and is that unfamiliar shade of white privilege. Rich enough to afford to bitch about the little things, but dependent on them because the little things are what keeps you in balance.
I get it now. I used to get worried and stressed because I wanted to make a good impression. After all, these members literally pay my salary, so when I had the chance to sharpen my skills so to speak, I took those tips the Toad gave me and I ran with them. I bought the little notebook, I left the bar and took some tables, I laughed at jokes that weren’t funny, and I made a few myself right before I walked back into the kitchen with their extra ramekins of ketchup, ranch, bleu cheese and garlic aioli. I gave 110%, I didn’t complain about anything or so I thought, and I started becoming almost happy to be there.
The funny thing is, it fucking worked. I started implementing these suggestions he gave me and within a week or so I was getting extra tips on top of the gratuity. People were handing me cash or coming in to see me Friday night and maybe sit on my side of the bar instead of the other side and I could tell they noticed a change in me because they were smiling and not giving me a hard time just to see how I’d react.
I did what I needed to do. I stepped it up and I got noticed and I took advice from this person who now, suddenly is being so petty that he has resorted to micro managing me while I’m drinking a glass of coke through a straw behind the bar. He was once giving me tips on how to make a black manhattan, until I guess I started making the drink too well. I made it so well that I didn’t need him anymore to give me help, although I appreciate it, I think I got this now.
What started out so meaningless for me, actually became something I looked forward to. Work. I wanted to be there. Honestly I thought he’d be happy that I got to be a better, stronger, more confident soul behind the bar, but it appears that not everyone liked my new found popularity and my success has only made him bitter, like the bottle of Angostura I put in each and every Old Fashioned.
There are only two explanations for this sudden about face. I’ve thought about this for a week now waiting for this chance to have a sit down with the him and the managers, and the only two things that make sense are if this is about money, or if it’s about spite. And, believe me, I hope it’s about money and popularity because that would be easier to stomach instead of knowing you’re acting like a bitch and poisoning the well for selfish and childish reasons.
If it’s about money, I really don’t think two hundred dollars here or there makes that much of a difference in how you treat someone, but its it does, take it. My life isn’t complete or falling apart if I don’t make a certain amount of money every week. It used to be that way, but I’ve grown up.
I didn’t post a blog last week, nor did I write in my personal blog which no one has even seen. It’s not that I wasn’t motivated to write, in fact the opposite is true. I was so inspired that I had too many ideas floating around my head and I got overwhelmed with which one thing to write about so, like the master of disaster I am, I tried writing about all of them. I am left with 6 text edit files scattered around my desktop with two or three paragraphs each that sound ok, but I don’t feel the need or desire to finish them and make them a complete thought.
But just when I thought I couldn’t figure out what to write about, I was reminded of why I was so distracted last week. It was the week I received the contents of my old desktop computer, the one that has been in police custody since April of 2018, some four years ago this month. Man, that was a fucking trip. Going through all those pictures of my life prior to the arrest was intoxicating and uplifting, but at the same time, extremely grounding and massively thought provoking.
I had finally figured out what has been missing in my life. I saw it in those pictures. In almost every single image I clicked on I could tell that they were created during a period of my life that I will never get back to, no matter where I live or with whom I have as a friend in my life. The summer of 2017 I moved from Seattle back to New Jersey. This was a move I didn’t want to make, but I knew it was going to happen anyway, even years before I packed up all my belongings into my car and a moving truck.
I could tell what was going on in my life immediately when I saw Tasha and I in Seattle in this picture, and I remember taking that sunrise picture on Interstate 40 near Kingman Arizona when the light hit the windshield of my car just right to capture an emotion as well as what I was seeing. Maybe you don’t feel the emotion, but you see how it can be possible for me to miss that aspect of my life. The beauty of this roadtrip, and the inevitable downfall of my life are both prominent in this picture. It’s like being able to see the good and bad for what it was, and now, to know that I never have to go through that again.
I have been searching for those feelings of meaningfulness for months and I found them looking right back at me through these pictures I took, but I would never in a million years want to go through that ordeal in my life again. And I know these pictures wouldn’t exist without the tragedy that I lived through a year after they were taken. You can’t spend $100 on something and still have $99 left over. I can’t pretend to now what happiness is without first knowing what unhappiness and emptiness feel like. I think you get what I’m saying.
I was looking for something that doesn’t exist anymore. I’ll never have that summer back and even though I was happy in that moment, in that picture, there was still a lot of anger and frustration and epic craziness that went on during and after the summer which I apparently also took pictures of. When I looked through the pictures from my old phone which I had saved on that desktop computer, it showed everything leading up to the day I was arrested. Before April 27th 2018 I had a inkling that something wasn’t right and I could almost feel what was about to happen wasn’t going to be good. but when I looked at these pictures…. Yeah, I did see it coming this time. It was quite obvious to me, but again, I have the knowledge now of how it played out because I lived through it. And now it’s time to close the book on that part of my life. What I was searching for was actually found.
I never missed anything or anyone in my life before that summer. I’ve spent the last three years hoping they were just a nightmare I would wake up from, or praying to have those good times from 2017 back again in my life now, but they can’t exist without all the other shit I had to go through which… I don’t want to go through again. So I won’t.
I have to find a new way to replicate what being happy feels like, and maybe it will never get to the same level as before, but my life doesn’t have to be dramatic to be memorable. Maybe my happiness today just comes from finishing this blog, and finally completing one out of the seven attempts I made to get these thoughts out of my head.
Or maybe it’s looking at this picture of my cat that I forgot I even took and how friggin cute she looks sitting on the bed of the Motel 6, but most importantly, how looking at it doesn’t make me sad anymore because she’s gone.
I’m just happy that I found this image of her that I didn’t know existed until now. That’s a moment I can get behind, and one that I don’t fall too deep into. That’s the kind of moments I need to have more of in my life. So it starts with this one.
I wanted to write outside this morning, but the reflection of the sun cast a glare onto my computer screen that made it impossible to see what I’d written. So I’m stuck inside on a beautiful day trying to write my way out of this headspace I’ve gotten myself into.
Recently, I received a package in the mail from my sister which included this laptop, a hard drive, and two old cell phones that hadn’t been turned on since April of 2018. I’ve been living the last 4 years without the contacts in that phone, and with the knowledge that on that hard drive were the digital memories of my mother and pets that have since passed away. I had my lawyer contact the DA after my case was over to petition her to get these items back to me, something that rarely ever happens in the New Jersey State Police system. I knew these items held the key to my past life and I remember it vaguely, but I what I really wanted were the files and the pictures and the voice memos and videos of those 13 years of my life back where they belonged, in my possession. When I finally got the phones, laptop and hard drive back, I was beyond disappointed.
It was an older hard drive that required a power source and a five pin USB cable which I had to order from Amazon before I could even see what was on it. One morning in February I had all the pieces I needed and when I plugged the hard drive in, it registered under the name “Slow HD” on my computer. I immediately knew that there was probably nothing of value on there, and to my lack of surprise, sure enough all it contained were three old porno movie clips that I guess I had left on there from back when I got arrested and all these devices were taken from me.
I felt so foolish and cheated. For the past two years I was under the impression that the police confiscated my two computers, and my two cell phones and the hard drive which I thought contained all the pictures and video files of my life since I first got a computer back in 2004. I was wrong. I was so wrong in fact that I sat there in disbelief unable to comprehend what ever happened to that hard drive that I knew had everything on it?
And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had that hard drive in my possession a few weeks after my arrest while I was walking around Scottsdale Arizona with no ID and no drivers license and no way to prove who I was. The hard drive, and my collection of illicit substances were in a plastic bag that I had been clinging to for miles as I walked through Paradise Valley in the 106 degree heat looking for any landmark that was familiar.
How I got to that point is another story all together, but at some point during that day I looked down to realize that plastic bag had ripped open and most of my collection of advil, xanax and that hard drive were long gone, probably sitting on the side of the road somewhere near Camelback road and McDowell Ave. I’m actually just guessing at the location of where I was because I had no idea what street I was on, I just knew that I had to keep going until I found something or someone to help me.
Fast forward to 2022. I’m sitting on the couch in the trailer I live in for the time being, staring at these three movie clips in disbelief thinking this whole time I was pining for a little black box that I thought held all the keys to my past, when in reality all it contained was some wank material I had forgotten about four years ago when I must have put them on this drive. This whole time I thought the police were in possession of the memories I made prior to my arrest, but aside from a burner laptop and phone, and a desktop computer that is 3,000 miles away from me, all I was left with was searching my old broken Samsung Galaxy 8 that doesn’t hold a charge and can only be turned on through safe mode.
How pathetic. Not only was I confused as to why there was nothing of value on these devices, I believed for almost two years that when I was arrested the police not only took my life as I knew it and scarred it with a felony, they took the proof that I had written, recorded, or captured anything close to the good life that I remembered having. The whole four years the laptop, phones, and the hard drive sat in an evidence locker in Trenton, I was unaware that they had nothing of importance on them, except a text file with log in and password information to the multiple email and website accounts I had created over the years. Ironically, one of them, was the login and password to this blog.
I got to say, it was a pleasant surprise to regain access to this website because at some point, in 2017 it was gaining popularity and I had two hundred or some subscribers and I thought, I wonder if any of them knew what had happened to me, or if they just thought I stopped writing for the last 4 years and that my blog was now a dead link. Maybe they thought I was dead too. It certainly felt that way for awhile.
I immediately made a new post to this blog and I have since been writing about the arrest that happened and how it got sorted out and whatever else comes to mind because a lot has happened in the four years I was gone, and I realize now that although I’m grateful to be posting on my original site, it doesn’t matter how many people see this post, what matters is that I post it in the first place and I keep posting and writing what I’m feeling because at the end of the day, this blog is my therapy. I’m brutally honest because I HAVE to be. It’s in my nature. And even though I’m writing these posts for myself, it’s good to know someone out there is reading them and hopefully they can relate or empathize with my ever changing situation.
I definitely felt lame as fuck when I first got everything back from the cops, but the one thing I wanted so badly is actually on it’s way here now. I walked my sister through the arduous task of turning on my old desktop which sits in her spare room in NJ, and I mailed her the cords needed to power it on and a new external hard drive so she could copy the home folder and mail it back to me so I can finally have those pictures and memories of my past life. I don’t know what I expect to find on those 257 gigabytes of data that were copied and mailed to me, but I’m not going to act as if everything in my life depends on whether or not the copy is readable or if somehow the data got corrupted when the computer logged itself out with 30 minutes and twenty gigs left to copy. Nothing is going to bring back my mom or my cat or my rabbit or my life before this regardless of how much I wish they could all be back on this earth.
The silver lining is at least I got this blog back, and I wasn’t even expecting it to happen. I may be locked out of all my old Gmail accounts because I don’t possess the phone number attached to the security protocols, but I have all my contacts from years of living in L.A. and maybe I should start hitting them up to see if there is a possibility or a way to get me back there, but only if I’m ready.
I have been wanting to get back to Los Angeles since the day I left there, January 28th 2016. I’ve been struggling to fit into ANY place I’ve lived since then and I know that it’s not the same place that it was when I left but I have been dying to find out if the shape I have become is still a shape that fits into that southern California backdrop. It’s the only move I have left to make, but I can only make it once and I have to be ready for whatever happens. Am I ready? I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. I’d rather be wrong and know the truth than wonder what could have happened if I just took a leap of faith one more time.
I got in my car just now and continued to listen to the random shuffle of the three thousand two hundred songs on my Spotify playlist. It’s just all the songs I’ve liked since I opened my account, so when the song Falling Apart by Stonebank and Pegboard Nerds came on, I didn’t think I’d get that deep about the ride to the Walmart Marketplace I just came back from. I was wrong. This is gonna be pretty fucking deep.
I have become desensitized over the last few months. I’ve bordered on the baseline of thinking I have anhedonia and and it’s a problem I’m working on, but I feel like I should at least remember where I came from
I hear the lyrics of the song and I turn the volume up and pay attention.
“Watch my life pass me by, never knowing where I belong. I can’t breathe. I can’t see. I’m losing sight of everything. I feel the walls closing in.”
I feel more often than not that I don’t know where I belong and lately it feels as if this life I built for myself here is crumbling as I’m repeating the same notions over and over and just watching life pass me by. It’s either that, or I’m so lackadaisical about it that I don’t feel anything and instead of life falling apart it somehow remains together enough for me to live with. I can’t find a routine that works for me, because I don’t like routines. I find them boring and predictable and the one thing I hated about being sober was the routine that I got myself into. I remember it feeling so pathetic to be alive.
I would buy my food from the Walmart across the street because it was cheap, it was close, and they always had what I liked. I think there was a total of 15 items I would purchase regularly as food for my body. I rarely changed it up because I had a strict budget, but I did not enjoy eating the same thing over and over for almost a year. Food stopped being a source of enjoyment for me, unless I ordered a pizza or went out to the diner which I could only afford to do once a week at best.
I loathed the alarm clock I had to set every night to wake up for the warehouse job I hated going into, and I hated the nights I couldn’t immediately fall asleep while my brain would run on overdrive, so I wished for a small bite off a xanax bar to give me what I wanted.
What did I want really? Did I just want to be able to do drugs again and not be sober? I mean, in some sense yeah, but it’s really not as clean cut as that one statement. I know I wanted to at least have the choice to do that or not.
And then the song that randomly played on my shuffle playlist, the one that I’ve been listening to for three days says to me..
I just want to be free.
That was it. That is what I wanted. The freedom. I wanted to be free from the monitoring, the reporting, the drug testing, the fines and penalties I had to pay and now that I AM free, I find myself going to a different Walmart on the left coast, buying the same but slightly different things to eat and going to work at a place that pays well but is becoming so toxic for me and I look around at my lonely little world of picture frames and pop star photos and I think to myself
is this the routine I really need? Is this what being free meant to me back then, or is it something different now?
Is this the best use of the freedom I worked and slaved for or am I just wasting my time, slowly falling apart and watching it happen like a horrific train wreck. I hated routine when I was sober and I hate it now that I’m not, but that didn’t stop me from joining a gym this morning or blowing off my first day working out for smoking pot and eating red velvet Chips Ahoy cookies.
I got what I wanted. Everything I told myself I would get, I have. I left New Jersey, I saved my money and I found a car, a place to live, a job, and the freedom to do what I want, in California and I’m complaining about not being able to feel happy or joy anymore in the place that I created for myself to be happy.
That doesn’t feel free to me.
I forget that just because I’m not in jail anymore, or no longer in a state sponsored drug addiction program doesn’t mean that I’m free. There are still limitations I have put on myself maybe as a way to curb my happiness or to be more down to earth about my expectations.
I used to be a believer in the power of positive thinking. I used to not dwell in the past as much as I do now, and although those are some good qualities to have, I also got hurt a lot easier back then, and I was too sensitive to everyone’s words and I’m not quite sure if its a fair trade off, but I’m ok if some of those traits of Christian before me, don’t ever come back.
And yet, I still find myself wishing that I could figure out who I am without the drama, or what I stand for without the dreams.
Even though I struggle with the world around me, and I sometimes can be a little too petulant, I end up falling back together into a routine that I never wanted to create in the first place. I guess it’s inevitable and I suppose I am a creature of habit. I should stop fighting it so much and maybe try to figure out a way to make routine work for me.
I grabbed my two bags of groceries from the checkout, and I walked back to my car as some girl who is far too young for me makes eye contact like she knows me. Me, in my blue hoodie, orange shoelaces, and matching bitcoin t-shirt, ray bans on with a black face covering masking my lonely as fuck life and my old enough to know better than to do anything other than just walk away demeanor.
I love it here in this free life I chose for me. I keep telling myself that anyway. Maybe one day it’ll be true.
The last 11 years of my life can be found on this blog site, and also the following sites that are listed here in some what of a reverse chronological order.
Then back to This blog for half of early 2022 to present day
There is nothing for late 2019-mid 2020 and there is a good reason for that. I had zero computer access for almost one year. I haven’t read the stuff from 2018 to 2020. Something about those years now remind me of how glad I am that they are over.
However I would be doing an injustice if I didn’t acknowledge them and how far away I was to who I am at the time of writing. I think its important to learn from the past, but not dwell or live in it anymore.
8:45am. It’s early for me to awake but I was lucky enough to sleep from about 9pm to 2:30am, when I awoke from a strange dream that I had to document before I bit off the end of a flualp pill and sent myself back to dream land for another 6 hours. It’s amazing what a good amount of sleep can help me accomplish the next morning. I guess I have been taking sleep for granted, thinking that if I stay up later than normal I’ll get more done than if I list-fully doze off for the required 6-8 hours my doctor recommended last week.
He also told me I was in perfect health and I couldn’t help but laugh at that fact because I certainly haven’t felt perfect in a such a long time. If I ever did at all.
What’s perfection anyway? A flawless morning? An afternoon at work with no challenges or hurdles to jump through? Is it a car ride on the 101 without any asshole merging over into my lane and almost forcing me to crash or use the carpool lane to safely avoid an accident?
I don’t think nothing going wrong is perfect because if nothing went wrong, how would you know the difference between a perfect morning and a chaotic one?
I sometimes have a good 24-36 hour run where I’m able to do all the things I needed to do like chores and run errands and I still have energy left for the fun and creative stuff I put off for another day. But yesterday, I just couldn’t do anything I wanted to do.
I got home from work and I hit the bottle. The bottle of Ibuprofen that I have poured out into a 3 inch by 5 inch drug baggie which is less noisy to access and gives me a much more detailed look at my advil stash. I’ve been getting these creeper headaches lately.
They start off as a slight tinge of dulled pain behind my sinuses and if I’m not within arms reach of my bag of advil it can get out of hand really quickly. I think maybe I can avoid such pain if I drink enough water or have that fourth cup of extra strong coffee but in the end, if stress is making these headaches a reality, than no amount of liquid or pills are gonna make it go away forever. I think, but I’m not sure that it requires a shift in my daily life, or maybe I just need a good night’s sleep like I got last night.
Sure, my fingers are cold as fuck and I work at 3pm so I’m probably just five hours away from another headache but in this moment, I feel really good and I don’t want it to end.
It’s been such a long time since something as simple and sleep has given me what I need to get through the day. I wish I could sleep forever.
There are some truths about myself that I’ve tried to change since I moved here. I think I’m doing a good job at being a responsible adult and holding a job and getting all my shit taken care of on time. Yet, I still find myself on the edge of the sofa almost falling off onto the floor when it comes to social interaction with my co-workers and other guests at my work.
I know where I come from, and it’s not money at all. In fact you could say that the last three years I have been on the poverty line or unemployed and 6 months of that unemployment I was incarcerated so I give myself a pass on.
However, since the summer of 2017 to March 2020 I have worked a total of three jobs for 9 weeks. That’s nine weeks total out of a possible 156 weeks. less than 10% of my time was spent making money or interacting with other people. My social media accounts have been deleted or changed or abandoned since that time and now that I put it into words, I think I can see why I’m surrounded by a golf course full of round holes, and I’m looking at my trapezoid frame wondering how the fuck I fit into this place at all.
I’ve always had polar opposite reactions as to who I really am when I finally open up and be me. Either you really enjoy my flair and colorful personality, or it drive you fucking nuts and you can’t stand to be around me. Well, I guess that’s not my fault at all now that I think about it. I’m not for everyone. So what? The idea of be liked and accepted by everyone os the bar that I have been holding onto for too long and it’s so stupid for me to continue trying to fit my square triangular ass into a smooth round hole without fucking up the grass around it.
Just this morning, I’m ok with that now. I hope it lasts throughout the week and I hope I never have to feel the need to fit in anywhere but that doesn’t mean I’m not still a little lonely on Saturday nights and it doesn’t mean I’m content to be so disconnected from social life. It used to be so important to me to have that structure and those friends around me, but after four years of living through so much drama and pain, I look around and I see that the spectators have all left. I don’t even think they want to know anymore about anything, and frankly I’m just tired of talking about it.
I was always so desperate for attention that it wouldn’t matter to me if it were because I had just landed a national TV commercial like in 2011, or if I had my mugshot plastered in the local Police blotter like in 2018. There are Christian haters out there even when I do good things, they are the last to even notice, and when I do bad things, they are the first to call it out.
What did Taylor say? Haters gonna hate. Actually I think she stole that from a hip hop song, but regardless, it’s true. I just got to shake it off. Fuck that noise. Can’t make every person at the bar a lover of who I am and I can’t go changing my personality like I change my socks, which is every day by the way. If you’re not wearing a new pair of socks each day, you’re doing it wrong.
I guess that is why I relate so much to lyrics in songs written by women in thier 20s going through a crisis of hate mail and stalker status. It’s either one or the other for me. It’s all or nothing, it’s the whole fucking cake I get to eat, or I get an empty plate.
There is just no other way for me to live. I’ve tried to be that circle shape when I know that my points are gonna stick out like a sore thumb, and it just feels unnatural and insincere, and I know people see right through that act. It’s time to retire the concern and the need for acceptance from other people. It’s time to just go back to not giving a fuck, but giving enough of myself to the thing that needs the most fucks given to it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go open up the bar in the private club in the hills where I work and certainly would never be able to afford to me a member, but I’m not. I’m just the bartender you love to see or you hate work with. Either way, it’s not my fault or my problem anymore.
Coke is one of the worst if not, worst drugs of all time according to most people I know (including) myself. I can’t speak for heroin, because I never took any of that, but I have in the past glanced over to the clock which read 5 something in the morning, feeling like the euphoria of the drug I felt hours before was now just a distant memory and had been replaced with the gnawing and unnerving feeling of regret and remorse as I would close my blinds as tight as they could go to block out any light from the sun which was always about to come up when I was coming down.
Coke is a rich man’s drug, but somewhere along the line, regular people decided to act as if it’s their drug of choice too. My guess is that because the act of snorting a line of China White was so normalized in the 70s and 80s, if you tell someone now you do cocaine, they don’t react as if you’re doing anything wrong or illegal. What they don’t tell you about cocaine is this.
Outside of Southern California the price of a gram can sky rocket from a normal fifty dollars to upwards of one hundred and twenty doallrs, and the worst part is not only are you spending more, you’re losing quality as the purity diminishes the more north of L.A. you go. It can and will be cut with all sorts of fillers and other additives like baby laxative to, in a sense, water it down and stretch the profits for whatever dealer you are getting it from.
It will fuck your mind and body up for a good 24 to 36 hours and you will crave more and more every 20 minutes that goes by until you’re left scraping the tiny glass jar for the last of the last remnants of that white powder. If you don’t have enough to keep you going the next day, or you didn’t plan ahead and get some sleeping pills to help you come down, you may find yourself laying in bed, tossing and turning uncomfortably, unable to watch TV, or listen to music or do anything other than hear the thoughts inside your head that tell you how stupid you were for just wasting $160 on a bunch nose clogging, heart racing, guilt ridden pixie powder that you swear you will never do again. That is, until the next night at work.
After about ninety minutes of the worst sleep I could have gotten, I would get a shower, eat something, drive downtown and clock in to my job around 4 or 5pm depending on my schedule. It would start getting really busy around 5 or 6pm, right after happy hour ended and every single dot commer and tech junkie flooded the rooftop bar of the Motif hotel where I worked on 5th and Pike St.
The pressure of getting forty five drinks made in fifteen minutes, and the awkward work relationship I had with my ex would take it’s toll on me by around 7:30 8pm at which time I would motion to one of the servers to come to the bar, who also happened to be the closest drug dealer in the place. Sometimes I would trade drinks for a $20 bag, but most of the time, I would just take money out of the register, pay for a gram, grab it and go back into one of the bathrooms to snort my pain and anger away. At the end of the night, I would replace the $100 I just spent with the $100 I made at work and either walk down to the bar underneath the hotel and drink until 3am, or if it was a lucrative night of say $300-$400, I’d pick up another gram and head home to engage in my favorite thing in the world. Doing drugs alone in my apartment, and trying (unsuccessfully sometimes) to jerk off while watching porn all night until the sun comes up.
You ever hear of whiskey dick? It’s a classic saying for when you have had too much to drink and you can’t get your dick to stay hard long enough to finish, or even begin the process of sex or masturbation Well, coke dick is just like that, but 10 times worse because your libido is going harder than ever, but unfortunately your dick can’t keep up, or get up for that matter. I would try and try for hours as I watched the pile of my boner killer get depleted until there was barely anything but a line left, and the cold chill of the new dawn would creep into my apartment reminding me that it was yet again, another day where I spent the whole time rubbing this vienna sausage of a dick, and spent half of my tips on a little baggie or two of cocoa plant reduction that I shoved up my nose until I couldn’t breath out of my nostrils anymore.
Nothing helped to get me to sleep. Melatonin was a waste of time, counting sheep was annoying because I would start to lose count around 345, so eventually I would try taking a few shots of Jameson to chill me out and maybe smoke some weed, but all that did was amplify the fact that I was tired, depressed, up all night and clearly in need of some serious therapy or soul searching.
All I really wanted to do was sleep at night. Before the alcohol and the coke even started becoming an issue, I couldn’t turn my brain off at night to get to sleep anymore at any reasonable time. I kept replaying moments in my head where I thought maybe I could have done something more for Dapple before she died, or maybe if I approach my ex THIS way she’ll have a change of heart and fuck me again, or maybe just come over and lay with me until I fell asleep, but who was I kidding? She wasn’t even looking at me by this point and I couldn’t figure out why but I sure as hell blogged about it, thought about it, kept myself inebriated and coked up for a few months just to kill the pain of having to live a life that used to be so fucking perfect three months ago, but now, it was a fucking living nightmare that I couldn’t even wake up from because I couldn’t even get the chance to sleep so that I COULD wake up from it. I told myself, no more coke. Just get yourself some xanax and get to sleep at night.
Finding pure alprazolam pills, or xanax bars was not an easy feat at first. I asked my dealer multiple times and he always said he was working on it. Then I asked my other dealer who didnt even know where to get such a drug, and by the time my other dealer got back to me a week later he had nothing to offer me, except some promethazine which is basically just codeine disguised as cough syrup. They mix it with Sprite and drink it in parts of the country as an alternative or addition to alcohol. They call it lean and that’s about as much as I wanted to know, to know that I don’t want to fucking drink Robitussin until i pass out. I just wanted something for my anxiety and sleepless nights.
It seemed like I was all out of options. I didn’t know enough people to seek out any new drug dealers, and I wasn’t about to drive into downtown Seattle and ask random people where can I buy some xannys. You just don’t do that. Most people just go to the doctors and get a prescription and get it filled once a month and boom, they have their sleeping aid and life goes on. But, I didn’t have health insurance at the time, and also there is and was an overwhelming epidemic in this country of teenagers overdosing and abusing xanax to the tune of taking 4 or 5 bars (which is about 10mg, or 20 times the normal dose) and blacking out for a day or two or sitting in an office chair in Northgate Seattle, pretending that they are playing a video game inside their head. Needless to say, doctors are and have been scaling down or basically not writing prescriptions for alprazolam anymore because of such abuse. I wasn’t going to pay for health insurance to help pay for a prescription I may or may not even get. There was another way.
And no, that wasn’t a reference to me pretending to play Super Mario Brothers with my mind, but it did happen to a friend of mine in my apartment many months later, but we’ll get there eventually. First I have to explain to you how I came to be able to acquire the xanax I was seeking. Three years earlier I read an article on Gawker.com about this online underground drug bazaar called the Silk Road. Most people have heard of the story of Ross Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind behind the creation of Silk Road, but basicially, it was like an EBay for drugs. You could get anything you wanted and for a short time in 2013 I logged onto the website and browsed the options. I had no idea how it worked, didn’t now what the fuck bitcoin was, but I remember my ex and I thinking we should probably invest $500 in these bitcoins while they were around $90 a piece, but of course we didn’t and I never went back to the site again.
Now in 2016, the Silk Road site had been taken down years ago, Ross was in jail, but the legend of the darknet markets never died. In fact, like a hydra, when you cut off one limb, three grow back in its place, so even though Silk Road was defunct, there were many other markets that had replaced it’s predecessor. The new markets websites were posted all over the internet at the time on various sites like Reddit, deepdotweb.com and others but they were only able to be accessed through an anonymous web browser called the The Onion Router, aka Tor.
Tor was in itself created by the US government to communicate with other branches of the government privately as Tor uses encryption and relay nodes to create and mask it’s services. Basically it uses everyone’s internet connection on the network to create one big anonymous network where the connection constantly goes through multiple relay locations and helps to create a buffer between the servers and your IP address. An active Tor log would look something like this.
As you can see, the node passes through multiple computers in various countries and locations around the globe and eventually bounces back to your computer. There is nothing illegal about using Tor at all. It was released as an open source code in 2002 and is still widely used today by media outlets to send articles and stories that they do not want to get leaked before they are released. Most journalists use it, as well as anyone concerned with privacy, although Tor in itself is not anonymous. Your IP address and your uptime is logged somewhere on some server and even though it can’t tell them who you are, your IP address can very much guide them to that information.
But, if you’re just browsing, you have nothing to worry about. However, I wasn’t there to “just browse” anymore. I wanted drugs and I was adamant to find what I was looking for, but honestly I really just wanted to sleep and not wake up with these racing thoughts in my head, or not be able to get to sleep because my heart was pounding or I was crashing hard. The comedown from cocaine is the WORST ever if you don’t have benzos to help you sleep. Frankly, I hated my life and I was sick and tired of people giving me the runaround and not knowing where to get anything I wanted, so I decided to go down this rabbit hole and see just how easy getting drugs sent to me in the mail really was.
I had a lot to learn, but luckily I had a resource who I worked with who knew a lot about coding, encryption and all things computer related. One Wednesday afternoon I called up Adrian, my fellow bartender at work and we met at a coffee shop in Belltown which of course, had free Wifi access. He gave me a tutorial on how to create a PGP key which was necessary to encrypt and decrypt the messages and information I would be sending and getting from various vendors on these sites. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy. It is impossible to decrypt a message to someone without that person’s private key or access to the passcode and the private key. Right off the bat, I liked the idea of this. I had been becoming extremely concerned with all these personalized ads that were popping up in my social media feeds. I knew the government was listening to us through our phones and laptops back in 2008 but the idea of online privacy became much more of a concern when I decided to do something illegal while online. I paid attention to everything Adrian showed me.
First, you go to protonmail.com and create a free email account. You don’t want to give any real information about you when creating the account. Obviously ChristianMarc333@protonmail.com was never an option. I don’t remember what name we used but he made sure to show me how to download the public and private keys of that email address once that account was created. Regardless, with a few click of the mouse Adrian had created a new burner email account and then we used that email to register a new buyer account on a darknet marketplace called Dream Market. After a few security protocols, captchas and the advice he gave me about creating a new and indistinguishable email and password that again should not be one I ever used before and should contain multiple letters and numbers and symbols, we were ready to hit the site and peruse the market.
Within three minutes we were logged onto Dream Market, and there before me for sale was every single drug under the sun. You name it, it was there. Xanax, Cocaine, Marijuana, Crystal Meth, Ecstasy, MDMA crystals, Ketamine, LSD, Heroin… and that’s just the drugs. The website had drop down menus and categories I had never even heard of. You could literally purchase a virus for a computer over the computer and then take that virus and upload into another computer. It all seemed so futuristic and captivating and totally illegal and I think that was a big reason why I wanted to learn about.
Like I said in the first part of this series, half of the appeal for me of using illegal drugs is the physically feeling, but the other half is the thrill of getting away with something that you know you shouldn’t be getting away with. I had had a couple “almost got fucked” moments in my twenties when I still lived in NJ back in the day. One night, I was pulled over at 2am for driving unusually slow. Unfortunately I was also driving stoned, not in possession of my drivers license OR registration and while I had weed and a bong in the car’s console, two inches away from my elbow.
I had memorized my driver’s license number which I think helped the situation, and I hadn’t done anything that warranted a ticket but when the cop called for backup and then separated my friend and I to ask questions and corroborate our story, I knew what was going to happen. I was fucked, right? I was either going to get a ticket, going to jail, or my car was about to be impounded, and btw my friend at the time was 17 so I could have been charged with illegal influence of a minor if it got that far but the thing is…it didn’t. At least not that night.
Luckily, the cops believed our story which we did not rehearse, but apparently we gave similar answers and they didn’t search the car (nor could they have btw) and never found out or even knew that we were in possession of a controlled substance. This was back in 1997 or 98 when weed was still a Schedule I drug and illegal in every state. The cop gave me a written warning, and 48 hours to produce my license and registration to the police station. He logged my information and license plate info and then I drove off, free and clear of any infraction that night with no drivers license, no registration card, weed and drug paraphernalia in the car, and a minor in the passenger seat feeling euphoric as fuck.
It was almost better than any drug high I’ve ever experienced. It was better than most sex I’ve had. It was like having a weeks worth of feel good chemicals like serotonin released into your body all at once and flooding your brain with happiness, euphoria and relief all at the same time. There are certain moments in life that I remember vividly and sometimes reference so that I can explain or illustrate how something felt.
I assume, that most of you reading this have never done anything this illegal, or this level of illegality and that maybe it’s difficult for someone who has never done drugs to know what it’s like to do drugs without actually doing drugs. I get it. For example I’ve never been diagnosed with PTSD, but someone with PTSD explained it to me once, and used some creative wording and examples from his military background that I could really visualize, so I do know what it might feel like to have PTSD especially since I’ve had some traumatic things happen to me the last few years, but I don’t claim to have it. I just know how to empathize and I try every time to understand now.
And by the way, let’s be clear. Empathy is NOT pity for someone. It is not someone trying to get another person to say “oh, poor you,” It is merely the ability to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or situation, and what I’ve found out is it’s very hard for most people to do that.
A lack of empathy is one of the most off putting characteristics of people I meet and I notice whether you have it or not almost immediately. I can tell right off the bat if they don’t know or don’t care what it’s like to be me. Perhaps they never have been homeless or had to sleep on the street or in their car and that is totally ok. Thing is, I can’t blame anyone for NOT being able to understand what it was like going through the shit I went through, or the shit you’re currently going through. It’s not their fault they didn’t lose their cat, their Mom, and get put in jail like I did, so I can’t expect them to understand what I went through, but God damn it, I’m going to try to explain it in the hopes that it helps to heal me or that someone somewhere never has to go through what I went through.
Anyway, my point is, I have had a few experiences throughout my years on this planet when my life changed immediately and it will never go back to the way it was before because of this new knowledge or experience. I felt it back in 1998 when I got pulled over in the middle of the night in Medford NJ with no ID or information on me and drove off free and clear, and I felt it that day in the coffee shop in downtown Seattle while I was browsing the listings for fake IDS, and stolen Paypal and Netflix accounts. You could purchase someone’s identity which they called a “top fullz” account. It included a social security number, drivers license info, and that person’s name and address and maybe their banking information.
But I wasn’t interested in becoming someone else…. well not yet anyway. I was more interested in how cheap and easy it was to purchase drugs off the internet and I was curious as to how legitimate this really was. I didn’t know anybody who ever successfully purchased drugs off the internet, but from what I was looking at it seemed relatively easy, and so user friendly. The website had a rating system for each vendor and for each product they sold. There was a feedback page for every transaction which included a 1 to 5 star review and a comment section. It was like Amazon for drugs, although they didn’t require your credit card number or Paypal account. They used bitcoin, something I had heard of 4 years ago when it was $100 per coin, but now, it’s was $600 per coin.
Adrian showed me everything I needed to know to successfully create an anonymous email account with a PGP encryption key and how to upload it to the keyserver and how to encrypt and decrypt messages, something known as two factor authentication. It’s also something I would use every single time I logged onto the site for security.
When I left the coffee shop with my macbook and all this new information in my head, I realized a few things. First of all, I had a lot of work to do when I got home. Second, if I had any questions about it past this point, I had no one to ask, and I was pretty much on my own. Also I couldn’t tell about what I was planning on doing, and lastly, if this was legitimate, and I could successfully order quality drugs online to my apartment and get away with it, I didn’t need a fucking drug dealer anymore. I didn’t need their excuses and I didn’t need to go through all those sleepless nights anymore. All I needed at this point, was a place to buy bitcoin.
I’ll be honest. (As always) I don’t know how many parts this series will be, but my goal is to make it into a book and my process is to write a little bit at a time, get some gratification, then continue on. This is part two, and this is when I try to explain how something so basic like being unable to sleep at night in mid 2016 became the catalyst that ended with me getting arrested in April of 2018.
I moved to Seattle from L.A. in February of 2016 on a whim. I had no job, and no place to live, but I had plenty of credit and I had lived in Washington state when I was younger so it was familiar and it wasn’t New Jersey, which I knew I had to go back to in another years time, but I just needed a different background to figure out who I was.
The transition was quite smooth looking back on it now. My cat, Dapple and I drove north on the 5 all the way from southern California to the chilly, damp Pacific Northwest in about 14 hours split over two days. Dapple hated the car ride. In fact, when we first got on the freeway in L.A. she busted out of the hatchback enclosure I made for her out of plexiglass. I figured, if I put her food, litterbox and some water back there and she could see me, she’d be alright.
However, 10 minutes into the trip she is screaming and pounding her paws on the plexiglass and pretty soon she is sitting behind me on her carrier staring out the window like she was on some hardcore psychedelics. I snapped a picture while driving which of course is not safe, but totally captured the moment.
When we arrived in Seattle, we stayed in a Motel 6 north of the city for awhile while I searched for the perfect apartment for us. About two weeks later we’re all moved in, I have two good leads on bartending jobs, both of which I got and I feel as if I have set myself up for success, or at least given myself every opportunity to be successful there, and by successful I mean I just wanted to be able to pay my rent, smoke a little pot, drink a little wine and pay down the credit card debt I accrued by living off my 5 Visa and Mastercards the last year in L.A.
I started work in March, then I started dating a girl I worked with. It was fun for awhile. I was making good money working six days a week and having fun fucking around with a 25 year old Texas hottie who I of course fell in love with like a fool but, there is this thing called 0% introductory APR that I took advantage of about 11 months earlier, on two cards. So, my meager $85 a month payment for each card was about to balloon to $225, plus 17% interest on the balance. I knew this would eventually happen, but I guess I didn’t prepare for it as best I could. I had good intentions when I took those loans and racked up the $35,000 in debt I owed, but things didn’t work out for me the way I wanted them to in L.A., but at least I stayed as long as I could and tried.
June of 2016 was the month that killed me. Two things happened in the same week that triggered me and made any prior sad or depressing moment I had seem like a walk in the park compared to this.
The girl and I broke up, very awkwardly and of course now I had to continue to work with her which was a challenge and a shot to my ego, but that wasn’t as bad as what happened next. Dapple died two days later. She got really sick the week before and had been losing weight and just seemed really lethargic.
The vet told me there were two things wrong with her and if I chose to treat one, the other could get worse. I knew this day was going to come too at some point, but I didn’t want it to be now. She was my daemon. My companion animal that watched over me and greeted me at the door every time I came home and who gave me a reason to get up and be a responsible adult, even when I didn’t feel like it.
I had her put down on a Tuesday afternoon, and I tried so hard to stay in the room after they gave her the first sedative, but I just couldn’t watch it happen. I broke out into tears as I saw her slowly drift off into a permanent sleep and ran out of the vets office into my car and balled my eyes out for the next hour or so.
I didn’t know what to do next. If I remember correctly I think I met my friend downtown and got really drunk at two different bars and somehow found or possibly drove myself back home to an empty apartment, full of cat toys, treats, and other remnants of Dapple that I couldn’t bear to look at anymore.
I had her as my pet for 14 years and a week. A week where I knew she was going to die but I gave her the opportunity to let me know she was ready. I told her, I can’t fix what’s wrong with you, but I know you’ll tell me when you’re ready to go.
One morning, I put her food out as usual and she didn’t even eat it. That cat ate everything and anything I put in front of her, except that morning. That’s how I knew she was ready.
Even though I knew ahead of time that this was inevitable, there is really no way to prepare for the loss of a pet or a loved one. I guess I took it pretty hard. I would go to work every day and see my ex girlfriend ignoring me, while being hit on and flirting with other guys or coworkers and it made me a jealous little angry fuck.
Then I would come home from work a little sauced to a depressingly empty apartment with a gorgeous skylight in the kitchen but which also reminded me I was now basically alone in the world, Dapple was dead, and the depressed, jealous, angry little fuck inside of me who didn’t know how to deal with this turn of events was suddenly drinking a lot more alcohol than normal and was getting wasted AT work, WHILE working, and then again AFTER work.
I remember waking up one morning in my bed, bewildered not as to where I was, but more so wondering how I got there. How the fuck did I get home from the bar last night? I walked out onto my 3rd floor balcony and looked down and saw my car in it’s parking spot, but, I don’t remember how it got there. I immediately run down and check the car for any damage, or scratches, or god forbid, blood or whatever clues I can find as to what may or may not have happened the night before, but there is nothing. I may have parked it a little crooked, but I didn’t get into an accident and I didn’t hit anyone.
Well, I guess I could have hit someone and they just didn’t bleed out on my car, BUT the point I’m getting to is that I think I got away with one there. Then the scariest thing ever happens to me. I start to feel awful and I begin to crave a drink. I thought, I feel like shit and I’m hungover this morning, or afternoon so fuck it. I go upstairs and I make myself an Old Fashioned for breakfast.
You know what? I felt a lot better. Not mentally, mind you. I was still stressed and my nerves were fried and I was depressed as fuck but when I took a sip of that drink, my body felt normal again. It was as if the whiskey was an elixir of sorts. I never had an issue with alcohol other than it made me dance at weddings, puke if I drank too much of it or, what happened next, which was alcohol playing the role of gatekeeper, and just stepping out of the way to reveal to me my old pal, cocaine.
It didn’t always start out with me wanting to destroy, dismantle or otherwise blow up my life as I knew it, but that’s what would end up happening. I just didn’t know how or why yet.
I would like to be able to blame someone else for my problems, and if I was still a bullshitter I probably would say it was the events that took place that “made me” the way I am, but that isn’t entirely true.
In fact, it’s not the events, it’s how I chose to react to them.
Most of my life has been me searching for something that defines me or for someone who compliments me. You know, that illustrious fantasy they call love? No, I’m talking about loving someone else. I’m talking about myself. Loving myself is that one mindset I’ve never been able to embrace and it gnaws at the back of my hands when I’m not using them to my potential, and it scrapes the temples on my face when I’m not taking care of myself.
There’s this galaxy inside of my mind I made for myself, and in it I’m always living life as a struggle or going through the same motions that seem oddly familiar but still stuck on a loop, and I’m just goddamn tired of it. I don’t care how I got to this place at this point, I just want to know why can’t I live life without making it a struggle to live? Fuck the struggle. It doesn’t HAVE to be a burden to live.
I’ve been saying I’m lost and trying to find purpose and meaning, and I don’t know why, but I feel most alive when I’m searching for those signs of life, in the hopes that they lead somewhere or to someone I’m destined to be with.
But maybe I’m too late. Maybe they turned left when I turned right, or maybe it was waiting for me countless times and I was always just 15 minutes late. Late for the love of my life.
This whole time I’ve been unsure of who I am because I can’t recognize my life without the struggle of figuring out some part of it.
I have a much higher tolerance for bullshit and nothing really bothers me anymore but I can still blow stuff out of proportion to justify the way I have been feeling if I wanted to. Having a grip on that destructive path has definitely benefit me the last few weeks as even though I have been bored to tears, need to move out of this place ASAP, and haven’t gotten much sleep any night, I still found something to focus my energy on. Of all things, I’ve been getting really good at my job.
It’s not as easy as I am illustrating it. There are still so many things I feel disconnected from and I still have to bleed just to know I’m alive, but I don’t need to inflict anymore mental pain so I guess you can say I’ve made progress.
I’m sure people would blame the drugs. That’s the easy way out. I’d like to think that it wasn’t entirely their fault, but that they do play a key role in how I’ll turn out.
I just know that when I get there, I won’t be seeing my old friend pain. I think I outgrew that son of a bitch awhile ago and I have no room for him now.
I started writing this blog last night about breakfast cereal. I don’t remember where I was going with it, so when I re-read it this morning and three lines in I saw the sentence “I’ve thought about killing myself recently” You would imagine I was surprised and of course I continued to read on. I got to say, I have been wanting to write about this for awhile now, but I don’t want anyone to be overly concerned or think that I would actually go through with it, or jump t conclusions. I’m not suicidal, but, I would do myself a huge disservice if I didn’t at least try to explain.
When I was in my teens, I never thought I’d live to be 27. I figured, that would be the year I go because that number just suddenly popped into my head, and this is well before I knew about the 27 club. For those of you who are not aware, a good amount of artists died tragically at the age of 27, including Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse.
Now, I’m not comparing my troubles to theirs, but I could imagine that deep down inside perhaps we all have felt this way at some point. Suicide is selfish in some sense of the definition, but it’s also the only self gratifying act you could perform on your life, which, by the way, we never asked for in the first place.
I didn’t say to my Mother, please conceive me at some point in late March so I could be born in December and live this glorious life I had planned out. I never asked to be born. None of us did. And if you think about it in terms of who chose life in the first place, maybe you’d agree with me when I say having a child is just about the most selfish thing you can do in your life, other than end it.
Truth is, I don’t care either way. I’m not afraid of dying. I accept it as part of life. If I live longer or if I get hit by a car on my way to work later today and I die, I’d be totally fine with it either way. Really, I just don’t see the point is living a life like mine now where I am utterly alone 23 and half hours a day and where I don’t get to see my loved ones because they are all dead, and the two or three friends I have don’t even live in the same town as me, so what am I living for? For myself. Hmmmm, how selfish is that?
Actually, there is nothing selfish about living your life for you, that’s what we were meant to do, but somewhere along the lines, the idea of having a family in your life became more acceptable than living it without one, and doing the things you really wanted to do. I did those things. Pretty much my whole life I have done what I wanted to do and I’m sitting here on a Tuesday morning in March trying to figure out what to do next?
The thing about doing what you want your whole life is that nobody tells you that it doesn’t mean anything unless there is someone there to share it with. I don’t mean a significant other or a son or daughter. I just mean anyone.
The other night at work I was putting some wine glasses back on the shelf in the dining room. I had to get very close to a table that was looking over their menus and as I realized one of the glasses was unstable. I tried desperately not to make any noise, when all of a sudden, one of the glasses starts to fall out of my reach and onto the floor where I assume it would break into hundreds of pieces and do everything other than be unnoticeable.
Except, it was. Somehow in the last few milliseconds before the accident that didn’t happen, I was able to catch the glass, with my feet. I don’t know how to explain “how” it happened, and in every other universe in the word I’m sure it fell to the ground and shattered, but in this reality, I caught it centimeters before the marble had it’s way with it.
After I look up I see that not only did the table not even know I was there, a guest and an employee saw the whole thing happen and mentioned it to me immediately. “Dude, you should play the lotto tonight cause you are one lucky guy.” Having someone witness an amazing save like that made it memorable and worth it. It caused me to remember it so vividly that a week later when I’m trying to make a point about my life and whether or not “it’s worth it to live…I think about that glass and how it could have gone the other way.
I guess what I’m saying is, it’s not that big of a deal if I catch the glass or not, what matters is that someone else saw it happen and in that moment it gave me so much more meaning and clarity to something so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I really want my life to be worth living, like catching that glass with my John Maddens was. That’s probably the most exciting thing that has happened to me since I moved here and that’s kind of sad, but it’s true.
I’m probably not going to kill myself anytime soon, but slowly and with every drag I take from a cigarette or every drive I take without my seat belt on, I up the ante a little bit. I know it’s going to happen eventually but I don’t know when and I don’t know how but dying with dignity and in control of it is really the only thing left that I wish to have happen. But it won’t end like that.
I don’t think Jimi Hendrix or Brian Jones planned to die at 27, but the choices they made in life led them down that path and although their deaths were tragic, it wasn’t like suicide where you plan it out and everyone is surprised at the outcome when it happens. No one was really shocked to find out Janis Joplin overdosed. I’m sure a lot of people still wonder if Kurt really did pull the trigger on his shotgun suicide, but what I mean is, it’s pretty believable that he could have, even though I believe the opposite.
Those people had things to live for. They had careers and fans, and children and yet here I am trying to figure out how to keep going when all I have to look forward to is a moment where I almost ruin the evening, but at the last second I’m able to save that moment, and keep it quiet while simultaneously avoiding disaster.
Yeah, those are the moments I crave. My life has been nothing but boring routine and trying to keep quiet ever since I got here. I don’t really want to bartend in a private country club and live on the couch in the back of a trailer, and every day it lulls me into a state of mind where I feel better off dead, even though I’m sure it wouldn’t be that much fun getting there, unless it happened quickly and immediately, and most of all, painlessly.
I don’t know what I need to keep going. Drugs, sleep, money, sex, adventure, all of those things have brought me to where I am at, and now I barely get some of them and other I have too much of. I can’t blame anyone for how I turned out except myself, but I dont’ feel bad about who he is now. I’d rather feel stagnant and alone than play a role in life that I didn’t want to play which was the marriage/family aspect I easily avoided for the last 46 years.
I guess it’s kind of selfish to brag about not having the responsibilities of everyone else, but at the same time, we all had a choice. Not so much in choosing to be here, but in choosing how we make our way, so I don’t buy into the whole idea that being single is somehow more of a self centered thing than choosing to bring another life into this world who never asked to be born. I guess I’m still choosing how to make my way and in doing that, I just don’t know where to go at the moment.
I also suppose when I turned 28 I was a little disappointed that I was still alive. Not for any other reason than I just didn’t want to be wrong about my prediction. The years after 27 were honestly, some of my best years and it’s good to be wrong sometimes and I’m glad I was. But now, I feel like a life made up of effortless routine, saving glasses from shattering and converting my cash into digital gold is almost futile if there is no one there to share it with before I die.
That’s why I’m so glad I have you. The reader. The unknown element of my life is that someone somewhere is reading this and maybe it’s making them not want to do something they wanted to do, or maybe it’s concerning someone who knows me, but either way, I’m still grateful that I can share my derranged thoughts on life with someone else, even though we may never meet. If I didn’t have this, I might as well be dead.
Otherwise, the glass just falls to the floor and shatters and people shake their heads and move on without a thought.
Last night, one of the strangest things happened to me. I grabbed my laptop and sat on the makeshift bed some time after midnight. I opened my macbook air, late 2015 model, opened a text document and began to write, however, I wasn’t able to write anything without speaking it first. It felt as if I was dictating to myself but there was no way I was able to stop the tape and catch up with the rest of my thoughts to write them down. I literally had to speak the words to make my fingers type them.
It’s been quite the roller coaster of new and off balanced emotions this weekend, fueled by a lack of sleep and I guess a poorly timed hit from my glass pipe, but hear me out before you judge me. I plead guilty to the charge of doing my fair share of drugs in the past, but NEVER have I been so incapacitated that I have to speak the sentences before I type them. I usually do that part in my head, or if I’m too fucked up, then the whole blog end up reading like a bunch of mumbled jargon and the incorrect spelling of almost every word…like this sample here.
I don’t care how it happened, I just wanted it to end so I could get my thoughts together, but it’s been hard out here lately while I’m going through this endless cycle of a stressful routine and a tension at home that requires me to tip toe around everything as if it was 2 o’clock in the morning. I can’t really get comfortable enough to live, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I couldn’t get comfortable enough to write about it.
This life I’m living, I know I wanted it. I know I prayed for it, and I know I got what I wanted and I knew the day would come when I would realize that although I always get what I want, I don’t get to choose for how long it lasts, or any of the specific details that come along with it. I just have to know when they’re not working for me anymore. Welcome to yesterday.
I get it now. It’s a sad truth that I wish I could scrub from the internet, but I can’t. If you know me in real life then you know. No matter how courteous or thoughtful I am, no matter if I’m at the bar or in church, people will always look at me like an addict. Always.
They will never say that to my face, but they will think it, and they will base their actions and reactions to me on that fact, and I can’t fucking control what people think of me. I have tried many times to convince myself that I don’t care what they say, and I don’t. But, I care what they think and that is a whole different kind of sickness I’ve had my whole life.
Forget drugs, caring what people think about me is probably the most detrimental thing I could do as an artist. I have to remind myself of that. I never stopped to think maybe I put myself in these bizzare situtations because it gives me good material to write about. That’s why I moved to Hollywood at 27, and that’s why now I’m living in the butt end of a 27 foot trailer in Northern California with no bedroom door, door frame, or divider between me and the rest of the space. Maybe that’s why I work at a private club in the hills where every member spends three times what I make in a week at the bar in one night, and then adds an additional tip on top of the 18% gratuity. I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know how much longer I will.
I might have done a bunch of drugs in my life, but I’m not an addict at heart, I’m an artist. I need a struggle to battle with and I hate that fact, but it’s who I am. And what are the main struggles of an artist? Being misunderstood, and worrying about what people think of your art. Regardless if I were a painter or a sculpter, my life is an artform. What I do, and obviously what I say, or in this case, write. All of it becomes my art. The critics will always have thier opinion, and I guess I better either get used it, or don’t give them the opportunity to be right about what they think. Of course, I’ll never know what they really think.
But the truth is, they are right. And I can no longer act as if.
If you asked me what have I been doing for the last four years, the main answer would be simple. Drugs. Lots of them, and I don’t mean prescription pharma bullshit. Those aren’t real drugs. I mean, yeah they are considered “drugs,”but they weren’t developed with the intent of ever being snorted, or smoked or sprinkled on top of another drug to enhance the mellow and speedy high of both of the drugs. Hard drugs has always been my go to because they can make me feel fucking amazing. Plus they are illegal, so when you get high, you not only feel good, you feel like you’re getting away with something.
That is, until the day comes when you don’t get away with it. For me that day came in late April of 2018 inside of a Public Storage facility located about 15 miles from where I was born and raised. I shouldn’t really go into many details about it, but I’m going to anyway. If I didn’t acknowledge in writing or share this part of my life with the internet, then somehow it doesn’t feel like it really happened. Trust me, after what I’ve been through, I can never be embarrassed again, nor will my feelings ever get hurt and I don’t care what’s out there about me as long as it comes from the source.
But for the last four years I couldn’t access this blog because the day that I didn’t get away with it, they took everything from me. They took my laptop, my desktop, my external hard drives and every other memory and picture of my life up until that point. I couldn’t remember the goddamn password or the login info for anything related to Christian Marc because I felt like I suddenly wasn’t him anymore. I was this guy with a head full of good and bad memories but if anyone asked for a picture of me at the grand canyon I could tell you I had been there many times, but I certainly couldn’t prove it anymore.
When you’re high for as long as I was, it’s really irresponsible to blame the drugs at that point. And let’s be clear, I was messed up for the last four years on almost everything I could get my hands on (which was anything btw) but before that I was your classic Hollywood McCoke head, casually sniffing blow up my nose in the bathrooms in most of the bars and restaurants in L.A. I frequented, or ALL of the men’s and some women’s rooms in the bars and restaurants I worked at. I had my dance with the devil, and I successfully kicked that habit 5 New Years Eves ago. I’m proud of that, but let’s be real, it’s not like I didn’t just replace that with something stronger and cheaper and crystalized to color.
But if you google “How Ecstasy Brought Me Closer To God” you would find that is an article I wrote years ago that was grateful for my big drug experiences in my 20s and somehow in my 30s it didn’t feel right to be doing those anymore so I stopped. But apparently, in my life, 40 is the new 20 so I tried again to recreate those feelings. It was always supposed to be about finding a deeper meaning in life and experiencing things on a level that not only made me think twice, but enlightened me at the same time it was making me smile or laugh.
But then one day it became about something else entirely and I realized that THIS was the reason I became “addicted.” I was hooked on a feeling. The feeling of being happy. That’s what drugs are supposed to do. They make you feel better, but what happens when so much negative and depressing events unfold one after the other and you don’t even remember what the fuck being happy felt like because now, you’re suddenly at your Mom’s funeral mass and you have blue hair and weigh 155 pounds. Or even worse, having the same color hair but being locked in a county jail with 240 other dudes who have never seen the like of something like that before. Is he gay? Is he bi? I felt it all, but what I never felt was happy.
How did I find happiness over the last four years? I got high. I collected drugs like they were Air Jordans. Only I was also collecting Adidas, Puma and every single box of Converse or Vans I could get my hands on. I had a drug collection worth over five thousand dollars and I would factor that into my checking account and bitcoin balance and realize that I was worth somewhere in the high forties for the first time in a long time in my life and it made me feel good. But the day I got arrested outside that Public Storage unit in Delran, is the day I suddenly couldn’t remember what feeling good had ever felt like.
People talk about being happy as if it’s an expectation, but that’s not what I mean and that’s not what I’m talking about now. Feeling happiness is something so much more subtle that you don’t need to try to feel that way. It hits you for a few seconds when you see your pet, or maybe your kids. It’s those times when you’re on vacation and you see a landmark in person that you’ve only seen in pictures and you’re like, “Cool. This is my life right now.” You’re appreciative of the moment and you acknowledge it.
Even though I saw cute bunnies and hung out with people and drove cross country twice and bit into plenty of slices of bomb ass pizza, over the last four years I didn’t have a lot of those moments. It was almost like I couldn’t duplicate that feeling any longer. I would try, but it just wouldn’t work.
And if I’m being completely honest, I am still trying to this day.
I equated drugs with happiness, and for a long time that was definitely the case and I was definitely having a good time, but once 2018 hit, I stopped feeling everything else, and all I could feel then was pain. Of course, I tried to numb it, again and again and rub the shit out of it like it’s was a little ball of stress in the back of my neck, but try as I may, I’m 100% certain I just made it worse.
The story really begins almost six years ago when I had just moved to Seattle from Los Angeles, in a very bold attempt as to find out “who I really was” without the ups and downs and the spoils of working in the entertainment industry for 13 years. I found two things about me very quickly.
Number one, I was living my life alone from here on out. And number two, I was living this life, alone, with a criminal.
Today felt weird.Weird because I woke up at 9am to go to my new job, something I haven’t had for four months.Weird because it was September 11th, and weird because this is the second time I started a job on September 11th, and that other time I started a 9-11 job was actually ON 9-11.
My favorite number is 11, and it has been since the 1990s but today, if I can be honest, eleven is weirding me out.
I had a mini crisis in my mind before I started writing this.I was trying to put a metal shelving unit together without the instructions because the movers disassembled it to move it, and I fucking lost those directions back in 2014.I spent 30 to 45 minutes searching for how to put together a metal shelf, had the model number, etc. and even watched two videos on it but I gave up after fifteen minutes cause I just couldn’t focus on the shelves, cause I was focused on the 11 other things I have to do today.
I start all these little projects at home and I swear I’ve finished sixty-five percent of them, but the other thirty five percent are left undone, in the middle of, leaning up against the wall and lying on the floor of my guest room and it just jabs me in the annoyed and frustrated part of the brain when I remember that I have to get back to them.
But why the fuck am I stressing about decorating my apartment while making the most efficient use of my time?
That’s just how my brain works.It needs things to think of and tasks to do, and it needs to visualize how to do them, work on them, and then complete the task almost like a computer program.
I hate that today made me feel weird, and just like those unfinished projects, this new job is something that I don’t want to do, but I know I have to do it. Otherwise there will be shelf, no dresser, no chair to sit on or no money to afford this apartment that keeps challenging me each day.
I’m going to somehow get through this adjustment period, because I know that’s all it is. I wrote this to help me NOT feel weird anymore, however I might feel weird again along the way and starting and finishing this blog actually made me feel a hundred percent better about my life even though I’m weirded out about the other thirty five.
I thought about something really profound today. I want to tell you so bad, but I can’t really put it into words. It’s like being happy and sad, regretfully proud and believing in the most truth based conspiracy theory ever.
I’ve felt like that a lot the last few months, especially when I was living in four different parts of the United States since June. I drove 1100 miles in 21 hours, and I know that doesn’t sound very impressive, but almost six of those hours I spent waiting at Goodyear for my car to get four new tires. Then less than thirty days later, I drove another 3200 miles by myself cross country and paid for almost everything with cash.
Fact. I have not worked a real bonafide job since May 13th, and if I can be ultra candid, those last two weeks at my bar job I barely even “worked.” I went to smoke a cigarette during a shift around 8:30pm and I never came back. Who the fuck do I think I am?
Apparently, I’m someone who defies the rules of conventional thinking and bridges the gap between the brain cells and stars in my mind, and that reminds me of a song I’ve been listening to for a week. this galaxy in my mind
Sometimes it becomes even more difficult than normal for me to understand what I know and even more of a debacle to explain it to anyone. And I don’t know why, but I’m drifting away from you.
I’ve been kind of a baller lately, and by that I mean I cried like a bitch in May, June, and July. In some ways I was a baller cause I made enough money to finance this $5000 move back home but it other ways I teared up when I saw the sunrise while crossing the border from California to Arizona. Here’s the proof
I know what you’re thinking….he can’t possibly cry and drive a car while taking a picture of the sun coming up, but you’re wrong because as I found out, I am able to do a lot of different things at once, even though I recently lost my wallet in my apartment tonight for a few hours.
Twice.
I swear to God I don’t know what I’m going to do with 1150 square feet of space but the good news is the walls are starting to come alive with the memories I’ve made in the past and those are the things that will inspire me in the future.
I’m numb from blocking out the pain, drenched from the tears I’ve been holding in since somewhere outside of Phoenix. and I need money so bad that I took the first and only job that I was offered, even though a part of me loathes the fact that I have to.
My friends and family tell me it’s the logical choice, and that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, and whatever other euphemisms that apply to my situation that they can throw my way. I do appreciate it, and I am listening with one ear, but right now all I can hear is blah, blah, blah.
I know what you’re thinking….he can’t possibly cry and drive a car while taking a picture of the sun coming up, but you’re wrong because as I found out, I am able to do a lot of different things at once, even though I recently lost my wallet in my apartment tonight for a few hours.
Complaining Is An Art Form 