But why would I want to return to what was never a home in the first place? Today I have a home. I live with a family, my wife Mary Esther and her mother, and they love and nurture me in ways I can depend on. My birth parents brought me into the world, took…
Addiction: The Illness That Talks
After more than three decades of heroin addiction, I was on my way to detox again. I had been to at least 40 detoxes, some of which I completed and some of which I bolted out the door before they wanted me to, or as they call it “A.M.A.” (Against Medical Advice). Addiction is like…
Rats In The Meadow: The Wilding
Alan and Phil caught the attention of the shop-keeper while Andrew and I stuffed our pockets full of candy bars. We wanted to be well-stocked for the trip into the Jersey meadows. Alan paid for the sodas and we walked out of the store. We had nine candy bars in all. It was a good…
The Disappearance of Heroin
Well, heroin isn’t exactly gone however, it’s not exactly true “junk” either. This Fentanyl thing has crept into the scene and seems to have overpowered life on the ‘nod’ side. As an old time junkie, who hasn’t used for over a decade, ,the kill rate of this new not-junk thing, is kind of terrifying. I…
Book Review: ‘Prey For Us’
I was introduced to Geoffrey Neil’s wonderful writing because his first book, Dire Means, was about homelessness in Santa Monica, California where some extremely devious people tried to end homelessness through evil means. In that book, I met a woman named Morana Mahker, who was very skilled at both eliminating people and tracking their movements…
Fiction: A Fly In The Ointment
He sat in the center and waited. A fly buzzed into the center and dropped to the floor. It lay still. Something in the air shifted. There was the smell of burning. Paul, sitting quietly in the center of circle and pentagram, turned in the direction of the movement in the corner of his eyes.…
Dead Man’s Blues by Ray Celestin: A Book Review
Dead Man’s Blues is a fantastic book that takes the reader back to the wild Chicago of 1928 where the booze and drugs flowed freely. The city is controlled by Alphonse Capone, a man in the grips of tertiary syphilis. The disease is in its third, incurable, stage. Capone had syphilis for over fifteen years,…
Fifteen-Year-Old Activist Tells Humanity to Step Up
The temperature is soaring. In the Northeast, water tables are going crazy from all the rain we’ve had. The sun, like a malevolent eye, glows hot in a hazy sky as the world’s thermometer climbs; mercury like spinal fluid rising, rising, then bursting through our heads, our brains exploding under pressure. Humans pack the city…
Global Turbulence: How Easy It Is To Become Homeless
One day you are in Paradise; the next day Paradise is aflame and everyone who lives there is either homeless or dead. There are many homeless people in California but now, a whole town named Paradise has been burnt to the ground and nothing remains. In the outlying areas, there are tent cities in Walmart…
The Teeth of a Fox
For Mary Esther: “The Fox” They meet for the first time at an AA meeting. He sat in the third row, end seat close to the wall. She sat in the middle of the room, tears spilled down her face; she had a tissue crumpled in her fist and her lips quivered. He watched her.…