For whatever reason I’ve been thinking about this memory often over the past few days and I thought that if I’m thinking about it, than maybe someone else was too. The people. The everyday citizens that I would pass throughout my using, whether it was early on, when I still had a vehicle and would pass them in traffic. Or if it was into the latter, darker days of my battle. The everyday, going-about-my-business-people. I distinctly remember driving north on Calumet Ave. one day, I don’t remember when though, and feeling this overwhelming feeling of resentment. I resented these people. I mocked them. I could not stand them. I imagined in my mind that they were all cookie cutter suburban Americans, heading home from their perfect jobs, to their perfect lives, with their perfect wives, and kids who were at the top of their respected classes no doubt. Champions at all they attempted. Surely they were all fortune 500 CEO’s with the topics of their dinner conversations being their next well calculated chess moves into global domination. Not a care in the world. These perfect fucking people. Look at ’em! They don’t know shit about struggle, they have no idea what pain is. My mind was so full of self loathing and shame that I could not or would not even consider the fact that the lady in the Maxima next to me just buried her mother. The man in the Chevy Pickup ahead of me just lost his job and had been driving around aimlessly trying to come up with the way to tell his pregnant wife. Or the police man parked at the light three cars ahead of me was losing his marriage, and his children, with thoughts of suicide swirling in his mind. No, none of these thoughts even so much as flashed into my mind. I was so stuck in my own head and obsession to feed the beast that I wouldn’t even call my own Mother for weeks at a time, boy, do I wish I could do something about that.  And, I think that is one of the evil powers of this thing called addiction, well, active addiction anyways. It strips me. It takes away every single positive human trait and turns it inside out. There is no morality. There is only get, use, find more. And once I had crossed that line into addiction, then it perpetuates itself. I hate that I use drugs, I hate that I’ve become an addict, I hate that I CANNOT stop on my own, I hate these feelings, I’m such a piece of crap, so I’ll use more to cover up those feelings. And for a while, the drugs work at covering it up. For a while. The addictive cycle, in my experience, has been one, so far, that has turned me into the opposite person of who I really wanted to be- When I’m using, I run on all of my defects, all my deceptive abilities, all the lying and manipulation, the mindless self indulgence. I become the picture perfect poster child of everything that I hate about the world. And it shows in my own mind, and is reflected by how I view the world and it’s people. I hope I’m getting this out right. My hatred and resentment of these “perfect” people was actually just self loathing and self pity being deflected outward toward common, everyday, hard working people. And really, it was a cry for help, to myself. But the first person I ever learned how to manipulate was ME, so my poisoned and addicted mind used these feelings as fuel to play the victim. “Don’t they see me?” “Doesn’t anyone know how bad I’m suffering from this thing?” “Won’t anyone help me?” “Does anybody care?” And, as quickly as these thoughts would bubble up in my mind, they would be snuffed and trumped by the victim role that my mind was so honed to play. “Fuck these people.” It is really quite strange how my addict mind can work sometimes. I remember moving about in my day to day affairs feeling like an alien on a foreign planet. Isolated amongst thousands of people, who, in most part, if I were to honestly ask for help in dealing with this thing, I would like to think they would actually try. My own family. God how many sleepless nights? Hoping the phone would ring. Hoping it wouldn’t. Hoping it would ring, and not be the coroner. Praying me into jail. Praying me out. Begging me to just come home. But my mind was so poisoned by this disease that it told me that no one wanted me around. That I was better off like this. And that fact in and of itself was just more fuel, to keep it burning to the ground.