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.…
Did ‘Old School Justice’ Catch Up to Whitey Bulger?
When I heard the news about James “Whitey” Bulger being savagely killed in his new prison in West Virginia, it came as no surprise. For years he ratted on the New England Mafia to increase his own crime organization’s control of the Boston area. I grew up in New Jersey and started using cough syrup…
How I Learned To Be A Racist
I grew up in a white factory town until I was 10-years-old. My father had a small grocery store in Newark, New Jersey and his customers were all black people. My parents had a term that they referred to Black people while they were in the house: Schvartzes, pronounced Schvat-Suh. They claimed not to be…
Clean and Sober: Recovery After Suboxone
The opioid trail is a long difficult road. I appreciated Felice Freyer’s article in the Aug. 19 edition of the Boston Globe, which was about getting help for opioid addiction in Massachusetts. I am a person with a Substance Use Disorder in “remission.” It took me a long time to get where I am. I’m 72…