The winter of 2012 took a toll on my soul. It really did. My girlfriend and I were renting an apartment located in a small town in East Tennessee. It wasn't the greatest of neighborhood, there was lots of drugs in and out for sure, but the entire town was pretty bad off as far as that is concerned so there wasn't much to do for it. I was deep into my studies at the time and was struggling to find work due to an injury I had sustained the year before, so basically I had way to much time on my hands for thinking.
A pattern has emerged every time in life that I have found myself with days upon days of alone time or time to quietly ponder things to myself. I have found that I can not relate to many of modern societies, values, morals, and beliefs. I have found time and time again that I can not settle for the material comfort and trimmings of entertainment offered from a cozy home and video games, films, television shows, or professional sports broadcasting. I always come to the same sort of conclusion: I seems like I don't really fit in. I am not dogging anyone for playing games, I used to play games for 5 and 10 hours at a time 10 and 15 years ago. I am not downing anyone for going out to the movie theater or renting something from redbox from time to time, I do the same thing. I am not belittling anyone who enjoys watching basket ball or is a football fanatic, I used to play soccer when I was a kid and still enjoy shooting hoops now and then. What I am however saying is this: I look around and people seem to be so distracted with trying to stay entertained that it makes my head spin. Reality is happening, but most people seem to distracted to even realize or tell the difference between real life and the fantasies and dreams they are living. It is true, our mind shapes our own reality, I would have to agree. I am going to skip going off on a tangent here, I really could rant and rave about how people misuse this ability in the worst sort of ways. I am going to bounce right over that subject and get back to the point: the winter of 2012 had taken a toll on me and my peace of mind. Everywhere I looked I saw drugs, and not just pot and the occasional line of coke or ball of hash, but heroin and oxycontin, roxies and opanas. The little town of Tazewell was a cess pool of needles and melted down high grade opiates. Out of the 20 something apartments in a one block radious from my own apartment, well over a dozen of them were heavy drug users, thieves, liars, cheats, cons, and low or mid level dealers. In the year that I lived there at that apartment there were 3 deaths by overdose. Needles were involved each time. It was a thick and sickly atmosphere to live in. I don't believe that I was every comfortable for more than a few minutes, and I don't think I was ever really happy there in that apartment. I associated with a few of the neighbors that were "clean" as well as a few of the ones deep down the drug induced rabbit hole. I met one gentlemen a few years older than me, a local baseball and football hero who had started a meth addiction when his father passed away 10 years previous to our meeting. His father had died of prescription drug abuse. Now his son was smoking meth on binders and abusing pain medicine every day. He was a good man and I tried my hardest to help him see the light, to see his potential and strength every chance I had. After practically a year of this it became painfully clear that no matter how hard I tried he could only ever change if he wanted to... and he didn't want to. I hate it to this day that Dave could not save himself or seem to let anyone else give him a hand. I will forever feel as if I left a man behind. After a point I began to become bitter and cold about the neighborhood and those who inhabited it with me, and then I started to see the whole world in the same light. It was nothing new, it was simply that it could not be escaped. It fed on itself and the cycle was eternal. Nothing good, everything bad. No hope for anyone other than the mega rich and powerful. No love. No mercy. Only pain. Only darkness. I truly do believe that place tainted my very soul. I know that it made my heart sick, I still have residuals sometimes when I think about what it was like there. It was like watching death walk about mascaradeing as life... and doing a horribly shitty job at it. I never want to be back in a place like that again and at the time It was becoming way too intense for me. I had to get out of there. I should back up for a minute and mention here that when I had first arrived in the area I began to form a very small and tight knit coven. My girlfriend and I were both pagan practitioners, as was everyone else who became involved. We were all different sorts of pagans; Wiccans, Witches, and Heathens for the most part. I believe that continuing my studies and earning my third degree in Wicca was a saving grace for me at the time. If I had not been preoccupied to a certain point by my studies and my teaching.. I couldn't imagine how much more miserable I would have been. I can not describe the feelings of despair and misery and of just being lost souls that the place had on everyone. Eventually spring would roll around and the freshness of the earth would began to lift my spirits and dust off my dirt covered soul. Working in the little 25x6 or so garden space beside our apartment did magick for me. I can not even begin to paint an accurate picture in words that would come close to doing justice to the goodness that being outside in that dirt did for me that spring. Even then though it was still an extremely sad place to be. Turning the soil in the garden and smelling the earth was wonderful... and then you would find a burnt spoon, a gaterade bottle or discarded lithium batteries. Signs of meth manufacturing by fiends and of needle bangers melting pills to be plunged into their veins. Even the rebirth of the precious earth was not enough to break the heavy disenchanting spell cast by the neighborhood. I had a disturbing dream one spring day. It was early spring I remember because my other half and I had both been managing for a little pizza place down the road. I had left the job a couple of weeks before I had the dream. Sometimes things in life happen that you can't really describe the importance of to others who didn't experience it or who weren't involved. This is one of those times. In my dream I woke up in my apartment. It looked exactly as it did in real life at the time. I was in my bed. I sat up and looked around and there was a man nearby and he was looking directly at me. I could tell he was in great pain from his facial expression. "I should have went to the hospital," he practically wailed "I should have went to the hospital!" At first I didn't understand what he meant, other than he obviously felt like he should have went to the hospital for some reason. That is when I took a better look at him, just trying to understand. He was very thin, too thin as a mater of fact, very boney. Long dark and greasy hair that looked like it hadn't been washed in ages fell a bit past his shoulders. Eyes sunk into his skull with dark rings around them. He was a very sad sight. I was reminded of the fiends around the way, constantly strung out, constantly losing weight and looking like shit altogether. Bless their souls. The man said it again, "I should have went to the hospital," and then with palms up he stretched his arms out to me. Almost immediately I understood. A large black abscess on each arm where the arm bends, on the opposite side of the elbow, where people tend to stick themselves with their needles. He had overdosed. He had shot up some drug into his veins, probably missed a few times because of being so messed up, and caused an abscess on each arm. He had most likely died from the untreated wounds and that is why he kept repeating the bit about how he should have went to the hospital. It all made too much sense to me, especially given the area. When I woke up from my dream I felt sort of sick. I felt sad, very very sad. It had felt so real, as if I had just been sitting there in my room chatting with this dead man. I could not shake the dream from my mind, the look of the man, the sound of his voice, the sadness in him and... the regret. I couldn't erase the image of his pleading eye, arms stretched out towards me, gigantic sores larger than .50 cent pieces on each arm black as night. It left me with a very ghostly feeling. I was so affected by the dream of the dead man that later that day when I was visiting with one of the residents who had been living in the area for going on two decades I couldn't help but mention it. Barb and I were good friends, in fact she had become like a mother to me. If I ever needed anything and she had it, it was mine, and that went both ways. Anyhow, I am sitting on the couch telling her about the dream when halfway through it her demeanor changed slightly and I saw her sort of go stiff. By the end of me explaining the dream her face had gone white and a few beads of sweat had popped up on her forehead. I told her that it had felt so real that I couldn't get past the feeling of it actually having being real. As if it had really happened, as if I had actually held a conversation with this man. Taking a long draw on her cigarette, eyes a bit larger than normal behind her glasses lenses, she looked me straight in the face and commenced to tell me that It more than likely was real. That it was more than likely a man named Marty of who had lived in more than one of the apartments on the block before he had passed away not long before I moved into the area. She told me that I had described the way that he looked during his final months perfectly minus the black sores. Marty had laid in the apartment for 3 days before his body was found. He had indeed o.d.ed. The needle was found beside him. I was stunned and couldn't believe it. Barb let me know that he had not been a bad man, that he had only lost his way to the drugs. That his daughter Katie and most of his friends had abandon him to his drug fueled downward spiral months before he perished. That is when I realized I actually knew Katie, a chipper 18 year old girl I had worked with only weeks ago at an establishment in town. She had even mentioned being distanced from her drug using father shortly before his death I recalled after making the connection. I was sort of shocked at the "coincidence"... and then I began to think that it was perhaps no coincidence after all. I think Marty needed to be set free.
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So.. It's been a few months since I started this blog and its been a couple of months since I've posted. I really hit it hard and heavy in the beginning but like it happens so often with me I put a little too much energy into the project and temporarily burnt myself out, which is o.k. because here I am with the follow up :) Thanks for reading, I hope that you continue to do so!
Now I'm going to get back to writing. :D |
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December 2018
AuthorWriter, nature lover, poet, pagan, occultist and blogger. Categories
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