After many adventures, my radio friend nicknamed Buns has got a place to live in a famous seaside town. There were endless difficulties … and now he has unwanted company. He and others have discovered they share territory with a drug supplier and his front steps are where customers wait and leave behind all their mess.
The local police are busier with problems they can solve – this isn’t one of them. A local town councillor has taken the disruption on board. But there is no “problem?/resolution” miracle. Modern life is untidy. Buns will fight and it may be good that he has something more tangible than what he has to overcome in the long awaited apartment, but who needs it ?
In one of the supplements of the delivered newspaper (thank you to all concerned), there is a cover story about the son of a famously addicted father who has driven himself nearly to death by drug addiction, aided and abetted by excessive drink. And a phrase Buns used on the telephone came back to me. “I know they have their problems” he said” I just don’t want to be part of them.”
There is something missing in me about all this, there always has been. There were no deep conversations about addictions that I can remember before being in my twenties. The nearest phrase was “heavy drinking” but I had no picture of that ever being more than unpleasant.
When I read (and I do) about young people spending 16 hours a day at the screen, or see a tiny thing of two with his first computer, I recoil. I find it unsettling that in order to criticize this abuse, you have to follow the same exposure to the same media but – like snakes – not let them bite.
Stuck with the perception that the snake can always bite
and will be poisonous, I have never been involved with drugs beyond taking a prescription appropriately, disliked myself drinking too much for two or three periods in my life, so stopped – and loathe with passion the idea of something meaning more to me than life itself. However difficult, frightening and bloody.
I recall being struck breathless when somebody else said of an acquaintance “ Oh he’s more himself with smack than without it.” That was an insight.
Somewhere in me was the conviction that escape was through not round. And cornered
is where most adults are from time to time .
You see the relationship on which you have depended for years for what it is. It doesn’t so much falter as explode. You run out of money. The person you thought you could turn to – for advice, for love (doctor, solicitor, therapist) – turns out to be every kind of disappointment up to and including villainy. You don’t know anybody including yourself.
You are stuck with yourself and you don’t like him or her very much
which is why you looked for somebody or something else in the first place. It sounds so neat. Dealing with it is every kind of untidy, expensive and exhausting beyond anything you have ever imagined. If losing yourself is bad, finding yourself a person you don’t like very much is worse.
But this is all what you are stuck with – you.
No answer in a bottle or a twist or a pack – you are you and you will have to come down to that when the escape wears off. It took me years to realise that most of us (I say this because I so dislike and distrust writing “everybody” – you don’t know everybody and you never will) are part of and contribute to the things that hurt us most. Me too.
There is no “fix” beyond a series of accommodations, some really joyful. I remember being in my early 20s, sitting on the floor by the bed, going through my address book with a rock in my chest facing a weekend when I might be stuck with “Her”. This weekend was warm and clear, I had some lovely phone calls, I reread a historical novel I particularly like. I watered the garden and dozed and watched something I like on tv. The world was outside and I can face myself.
Annalog 