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NakedInfrontOfTheCpu
Guest
Id prefer this to be moved somewhere around Drug culture. please just dont put it in Other drugs or TDS. thats all thanks 
Me and this friend.
A short tale of addiction to everything.
My cell phone rings as I lay on my newly borrowed oxblood-red leather sofa watching some DivX movie. It’s Magnus, and he sounds wide awake. At least compared to when I talked to him the last time, a few days ago. He had called me and instantly started dragging words up his throat and into the light, words I at first couldn´t make out. That time my cell had died and I got to call him up. He was stoned enough for me to doubt he would even notice I had been away. During the first minute he rambled about what pills he was on or ”probably” was on, since he no longer had any idea. I got bored and knew he wouldn´t remember any of that discussion the next day anyway.
And sure enough when I ask him about it he vaguely mumbles something about him not being "..that fucked up" that night. "That’s what it seemed like to me" I reply and laugh as to tell him it’s totally ok, just that the dialogue had become somewhat one-sided.
We get into a talk about the caps of morphine 100mgs that is in town. The ones I´m waiting for right now. How you eat them or snort them or smoke em and play with em. You can get quite spun away.
”The town”, meaning the town we both grew up in. And where he still lives. I moved out some years ago and have been whirling about the country with the girl witch I teamed up with a few months after I moved.
I tell him I had booked myself one of the 100s since it was all I could afford at the time and he laughingly tells me he´s been on them for a couple of days and that he has gotta be able to sleep tonight. He´s been placed on a day care center where he gets to do a bunch of creative stuff like acting and painting. Still been able to keep driving his drug thing alongside.
Its like 4pm and I tell him if he doesn’t do a refill he wont have any problems sleeping, just have a puff and get down to it. "Yeah well I´m gonna have a refill soon I think" he tells me without any humour in his voice.
I cant help but laugh, not at him, not towards him in any way but with him, towards the fucked up situation.
And he laughs too, and says "yeah, well it’s been sort of druggy the last few months, or, well, no not that druggy but. Ah well, or maybe it has. Shit". I interrupt him with involuntary laughter and he joins me before I hear him do the friggin 20mg line as we speak.
"The last few months", that is in plain english every day since he got out of a year in rehab and into his own new flat.
Yea, lets rewind this shit why don’t we.
Part 1.
From toothpaste to morphine. Evolution I call it.
I was seven when I first met him. We both stood outside school, both dressed in white shirts, probably a pair of light blue/green manchester jeans and for the day (by our respectively mother) neatly fixed light blond haircut. Listening to some speech from our new principal, directed towards our -with hope of bright future to the brim filled- parents.
I didn´t knew him at the time but we went from becoming palls to the worst of enemies to palls to worker colleagues to doper friends to best of friends.
During the first 3 years in school all we did was hang out from time to time, since we both lived a block away. We rode our BMXs through the bushes and small green areas available in our lower middleclass hood, put the bikes away and sat in front of the new Nintendo Entertainment System, the 8 bit console. Rad shit I tell ya. Got ourselves skateboards. Plastic ones, today described as "the slalom skateboard". You probably havn´t seen em but fuck it. At that time that was the only kind available to us and it kicked mad ass riding down from your block at the 45 degree asphalt turn leading you down to the road. One night during summer we snuck up to the House area, stole their plumes, eat them and threw the pips back at their windows. Mad.
Got caught and got returned crying to our parents.
But as we entered the fourth school year we parted. He had been playing loads of hockey and football depending on the season and was slowly becoming very good at all sports involving a ball of some sort.
I found someone else whom I could call friend and that would have enough similar interests to be able to stick with me for a few months or a year. I had put away my slalom skateboard and bought a "pro-board" from a guy five years older than me for 350 kronor. I don’t remember where I got it but id guess it was a present. I went to the guys house and got my Powell Peralta board and looked at it, so fucking big, what the hell was I supposed to do with this, I thought.
Still, I learned to handle it somewhat ok and spent the days down by the end of my 45 degree sidewalk turn with the others who endlessly were trying to make these things jump into the air.
I got up to fifth grade, I still had no problems following what the teachers at class was talking about, I wasn´t overweight hence did ok in Gymnastics, I even did ok in Math, but my overall favourite was Swedish where you got to sit by yourself and a pen and paper, creating these incredible worlds and intrigues and people, all doin whatever you told them to. I wrote this 50-60 page thing about a ship with people travelling the seas looking for unfound continents, heavily inspired from a manga series that were on the newly introduced ”cable-tv”.
Then came sixth grade. And I remember talking to one of the boys in the punkrock crowd, the one the others sarcastically came to call The leader after one of their regular telling-offs by some teacher who had unknowingly done the fatal verbal mistake of pointing him out as that. He was thou. For the time being.
Anyway we stood by the benches talking for the first time in 2 years. Suddenly the hatred who had been between us for some longforgotten reason was swepped away and we took small and careful steps towards new friendship.
And so I got a crew to kick my leftover-from-undone-homework-time with. They played in bands and wore the clothes people wore at pictures from the first swedish punkwave in the late 70s and 80s. Rad enough, I thought and followed them to forest areas far away from prying eyes and downed my first beers we had convinced someones brother or dad or guy outside the store to get for us. To the smell of stolen cigarette smoke and steamy northern evening forests I passed out for the first time. And learned to love every bit of the art of it.
As Magnus got chosen to Player of the year time and again in his Hockey team id learn how to handle (notice; not play) the bassguittar. And along with the other 2 members of The Concrete Cave we had a few shows at the music festival arranged by the After school Center where we rehearsed our homemade songs. Or more accurate, the lyrics witch The leader wrote and the music witch his best mate, the slightly asperger-syndrome suffering guy in hood and short hair had written on guitar. But we rocked. Unfortunately that’s not what the local wannabe national socialist skins thought about us, and more than once we had to run separate ways home at night from rehearsing our cocky tunes.
We got to know a few older fellas who were into skateboarding and graffiti and soon we were out shoplifting cans and filling the local viaducts with colour, drinking wine made in the depths of our drawers, stealing our mothers herbs and spices, rolling them into joints we smoked together behind the church. One guy had a dad who got these small blue pills witch he seemed to get a bit whacky off of. Steal. Eat. Nick booze off of some other dad’s liquor cabinet. And spend the weekends camping in the forest just to be away from the city and the parents and teachers and the wannabe nazis. Getting neatly mashed on 3-4 beers. Times were beautiful.
And during semester in ninth grade my mom told me about this summer course in basic nursing. A few weeks in class and a few weeks as trainee at either the hospital or a med centre, but more importantly, you got paid. 600 kronors a week. About $50. A lot for a kid my age.
And there I met Magnus again. At first we didn´t talk much, during the time before id gotten in with the punkrock boys we were mad enemies. Why, I don’t know, but the first weeks we took every opportunity to fight or yell, eventually we stopped looking at each other.
But now we got to hang again.
We teamed on the way to class and walked together the way back in the sun. I lent him my big black marker with witch I drew my evil tag all across town and he thought up one of his own. And during these 6 or something, weeks, we got down again and I hooked him up with my new friends. Including The leader. And that’s pretty much were his sporting careers ends and he got to walk in his fathers tracks and becoming a "socially accepted among the lower middleclass, still hardcore, drunk". He came to miss out on the ”socially accepted” part thou.
Still we both did graduate Gymnasium three respectively four years later, while growing our interest in mindbenders.
But chill thou, we´re still just in ninth grade.
During that time I had gone from smoking unknown spices, to stealing lame painkillers from my grandmother to huffing gasoline, glue, butane and the old black marker. We stole beer and drinking-essence after school that we sold from our lockers the next day. Silly people thou, we thought, while we drank more or less any day aslong as we had someplace to sleep and a good excuse, these dorks always waited till weekends.. Then, finally I got my hands on something illegal. Hasch it was. We met this 6 year older guy whom a friend had met through a BBS where he spent most his days. Me and a few from the punkcrowd shared our sweetly fucked-over 5er. Yea, we were told 5 grams but since I still have a perfect picturememory of the stuff id guess rather somewhere around 0.2-0.3 gram. But what is cool thou, is that we paid the exact amount I still pay to this day for a fiver of ok hasch. Around here, prices on drugs will remain.
Anyway, we split it on the six of us and got maaadly whacked. Yup, this was the shit we thought. From what we had been told in school, there pretty much wasn´t anything that beat hasch. You got hooked immediately and you lost total control of reality. Rad!
I was fuckin 14 and every book I had read was schoolbooks. At home I read cartoon magazines and watched Dj Cat show on cable. Those were my sources of input. Please have patience with my naive and slightly lacking, but desperately soilseeking, knowledge of drugs.
Me and Magnus parted for Gymnasium. With the exeption of The leader and the Asperger dude, most of us parted and met new friends.
Magnus did what he was supposed to, studying Kids and Care at the school in the south part of town, I became a lame pusharound at one of the Norhthen schools, leading me to having so much abscence it was impossible to go on.
With a lot of pushing from my brother and sister, both highly educated, I changed school and did another try at Social Science. My goal was to graduate and hence I did. Barely. I didn´t learn much of what they tought us. What I did learn thou was in the computer hall, and across the very rapidly spreading "new" invention called the internet. This was 97 and the swedish internetboom.
Finally I could work on my knowledge of drugs and the human mind, along with stuff on funny computer activities. I got my hands on mad elite hackertools such as the Netbus, Back Orifice, Subseven and Winnuke. I dwelled in the archives of ”almost illegal” information. Well since not many others knew of these stuff I felt sorta mad. I slowly gained power over the schoolcomputers and together with other net-hooligans in sweden and the states, I started to build up my -at the time non-existent- selfconfidence that I had been ripped off of, due to lacking roughness and the lacking James Frey attitude needed to get through at some schools. I had merely been a Lately developed boy in the outskirts of the corridor, looking for highs through toothpaste and an occasional joint with friends who also skipped class to drink free beer.
...That would probably be my all time lowest kickseeking memory, when on advice from a friend id rub the bottom of my skull full of stolen toothpaste. The alcohol where supposed to give your brain a cold and nice rush I was told. Geeez.
Magnus graduated and got himself a flat. I entered the final year. Got the computerhall shut down for three days for installing keyloggers, was asked about it but since I no longer had use of my own account they never could prove nothing. Got myself free internet at home and hooked up with a few likeminded guys in all ages across town. By now I could tell a 0.2 ”gram” from a real one. Still I had not felt what I feel today when I smoke a spliff.
The day would come thou, a few days after graduating I sat with a fella some years younger than me, but way bigger and way more involved in the drug/underground computerscene, cause by this time it wasn´t just the BBS and Demo freaks who knew computers. And much of what respect you did get, was from your knowledge, not from how loud you yelled or how hard you could hit something with your fist. And computers had become way more available to common asocials such as me and this guy sitting next to me. ”What, you have managed to install Slackware? you got Xwin running too? Mad.”
We sat in the town park by a smalltype concretewall sharing a puff in a pipe he had managed to get shipped to him from a stolen Visa. We were just leaving and I remember standing up and feeling weightless, a slight shiver from my feets and up, and I almost fell back on my ass. I told him "shit I got woozy". And he answered friendly something like "yup, thats the point".
It didn´t take long before I got to meet some of his friends, got steady connections for cannabis supply. Off and on a blue valium or a nose of speed. Psilosybin was still legal and someone bought a few of those and I got to talk to god at the back of the bus as my friends dragged me across town after introducing me to the first grams. Things started to get a move on.
We didn´t shut anything out. And all the cash we needed we got from selling knifes and cds and scanners and cameras we bought off your Visas we traded on the IRC. I didn´t keep much of what we stole. Some 20 records and a few dvds was all. I just took pictures of the FedEx, DHL and UPS trucks pulling up to the house while my mom was at work and basked in awe from my friends on IRC. It was summer, we were almost rich, knew shitloads of stuff others didn´t, and got all the smoke we wanted. Yes. Beautiful times. At night we sat at our mothers apartments hanging out by the puter trying out fresh webexploits at a million computers trying to get passwd files and creditcards, painting some viaduct or at some pub we had just gotten legal rights to enter.
The fights with my mother, as with everyone and their mothers come 18-19 and still living at home, became intolerable and I remember picking up a sleepingbag and a backpack with records and left my screaming mother on the 2nd floor and got to move in with Magnus in his 2 roomer across the river. He had gotten a job and was among the first in town to get broadband.
He had had an occasional puff now and then but still his major weakness was booze. Every weekend he got out of the pub, puked, laughed, and got back in.
One day I talked with him in the same park I had gotten my first real cannabis high. I had just tried ecstasy for the first time, told him how it fucking revolutionised my thinking and the way I saw the world, "this is the greatest thing, ill tell you, you will love everything, everyone, can you fucking imagine?"
We had gotten caught by the police that night, at the technoparty we were at, all five of us. (How bad this must look for the scene, but fuckit. Thats what happened). But the high will forever be priceless and the 3500 kronor fine didn´t matter much to me. Besides I was able to pay it all off in a matter of weeks.
Magnus laughed a bit nervously and kept sipping his beer.
I kept pushing him for some time before he did his first 2 blue Superman. And of course he loved it.
Part 2.
”Not all drugs are good, some are great!”
The carding business was good but not very stable, also I couldn´t ship stuff to our flat and besides, a guy not living far away and whom I knew on the net, had gotten a visit from police all the way from the states. They found him sick and alone in an apartment filled with microwaves and digital cameras.
Magnus put in a good word for me at his workplace and together we took very good care of old or crippled people, wiping asses and flipping bacon. No steady job, they called us at mornings when we were needed, but we got around.
I moved out when I was called in for the military service, this time the Non-combatant type. A 4hour busdrive from home. It lasted 3 months and the first day I teamed up with a guy having a joint atop one of swedens highest bridges. We had both dropped out of the more wartype minded service right after graduation, the one including big guns and lots of yelling back and forth. Now, with an incredible view over the mountains we mecked and smoked one together.
This guy thou, had an older brother that was pushing speed and E. And for a bunch of stolen credit cards I was able to get my hands on loads of pills. I still was very much into ecstasy, sitting up late at night in my newfound computerhall, writing diaries and poems and stories about that stuff, surfing the web for more and more knowledge, contributed to ecstasy.org with trip tips, anything, concerning ecstasy and every type of shit one might get ones hands on one of these days. I had totally found home. I had sort of gotten used to being my own boss by now. But through such activities I survived having people telling me what to do and when.
At fridays I smoked one and got on the 4 hour busride back to town for weekends of rolling and messing around with our computers.
I got my first stolen laptop delivered to the place where I did my service, they called me from the warehouse and I got to pick it up when the whole class was watching. And I knew noone knew anything. They just couldn´t figure out why I hadn´t had it delivered to where I lived. Shit I felt elite. That summer I sold it for mad overprice and me, Magnus and five or six other guys went to the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Had a kickass time for 5 days at a slowly vapourising group of three tents.
We ended up the day after everyone had left, and met this tiny fella from Gothenburg with his pockes filled to the brim with Es, acid and shrooms. We had brought a few Mitsubichis but those were far gone. So I bought a few Scorpions and the others bought either Acid or shrooms. And together we burned and mashed all what was left of the camping area of the year 2000 Roskilde Festival.
I remember the sun right above us, me having geared up with a Supersoaker 5000 in one hand and a stick in the other, sweat flooding down, barefeet and with just a pair of shorts on. Shit I can still feel the smell as I think of it. Suddenly some stranger shows up behind me, I turn around, and I can only imagine the eyes I gave this man as I shoved my Supersoaker in his face telling him this camp weren´t big enough for both of us or something along those lines. We all laughed like Etards and he walked on. Man, id trade alot for those times.
Then came 2001 and I moved out of that city for real. Went to a school studying creative writing at a no-tests level. I met Lana. The first girl I had ever had a relationship that lasted more than a week. She didn´t smoke hasch, very rarely drunk and couldn´t tell an E from aspirin. Still our personalitys were scaringly much alike. We thought about the same stuff, talked the same and both being youngest out of three kids; in many ways had experienced sort of the same things growing up. And soon enough we where the only ones we hung out with at school. At spring we took 4 days off and went with a truckdriver she knew to Kopenhagen. I showed her Christiania and we wrote an article on it for the school paper. Still, it took a few more weeks until we kissed first time. Wtf, I thought, could this be that’s happening to me. Couldn’t focus, think straight nor give a flying fuck about anything, or anyone, but her. Not even myself, prio one during my whole life, mattered.
Every weekend though, I took the train back home and met up with Magnus and his boys. He had gotten a new flat at an if-possible cheaper part of town and that space had become a wide-open collective sort of living for all of them. The door always open, and always someone around for an allnight discussion. On whathaveyou, rollercoasters, timetraveling, psychosis, or some book by Will Burroughs, James Redfield, Tim Leary. Yes, I had found the books by now. Better late than never right? Everyone able to give creative output and get creative response all the time. Constantly high or drunk and had teamed up with such people that rather talked than yelled when under the influence. It was incredible how far we actually took it when compared to other dopereaking flats, sure the empty pizzaboxes and piles of broken, dirty plates were around but the lying and deceiving and stealing and fighting and fucking around was not present as we noticed were the case at pretty much any other hangout we ended up in from time to time. We became known and dissed by many as The hippies on the East side, as we strolled town at nights talking drunken strangers off of punching us since "that’s not what you really wanna do, now is it?". But then again, we hadn´t gotten the real taste of benso yet.
By now I had gotten enough of the Es and after goin through a 5 month depression had exchanged rolling for tweaking, "much more stable high" I told people. And sure it was, but at the same time I know it was leaving one burned out way of realitybending for another.
After one weekend at home I got picked up by the narcotic policers again, since they recognised the guy I was with. I pissed positive on cannabis and they threatened to snatch my drivers license since they ”suspected possible abuse”. The thing that would have saved my butt was me taking 2 urinetests during a period of 6 months. Today it seems in-fukkn-credible what luck I must have had. Still this did not make me do as I was told. I just exchanged the longhalflifed softdrug for more speed, more pills and more booze witch would leave my system pretty much when I wanted it to.
School ended and I left for 10 days in Europe with my girlfriend. We passed through Amsterdam (2 joints.. 2!) Paris, Cassis, London and Edinburgh before I got very sick and we took a flight home.
Last month of the license test came and I pissed what I knew was pure. But.. The day after the test, and the day after I had celebrated by packing the bong I had pictured in my mind the whole time, they called me. "ehm, the bus witch was supposed to carry your urine to the test lab got a flat tire.. And.. Got stuck in the sun.. And uhm.. Well you´ve gotta come down here and do it again. But that wont be a problem right?".
And it wouldn´t have been, if I hadn´t just lost all ambitions of playing their little game any longer. At the time it just wasn´t worth it, I put my freedom higher than that little piece of plastic bullshit they were using to ”root” my body, push me around and letting them sniff my insides. Fuck it, I thought and lost the licence.
Lana got us a flat outside of Gothenburg, I hooked up with a relatively high-end hasch pusher and got to ship and bring bigger quantities back to Magnus and the fellas back home. This way I could pay rent and support my habit wich now included a few valiums aside from the puff and an occasional speedbinge.
I went on regular meetings with a psychiatrist to try and convince her I should get an early retirement. ”Or at least some scripts”, because of depression or some vague social phobia I told her I suffered from. But all I got was lousy prozac copies and suspicious eyes.
After 6 month in southern sweden we got enough of the cold streets and unknown people and looked for new places to hang. But by now I had started having more and more problem blending, I relied on valiums or roofies, xanax or at least and most often just a sixpack, to get me out of the house, in bed, and for meeting people outside of my circle. Back home the situation had gotten pretty much the same. Speed had gotten hold of a few who still wasn´t smoking a fiver a day. Friends eat crappy sleepingpills and still took Es just to get away the days they couldn´t dig out anything of worth. Now and then a few Tradolan or other painkillers showed up, getting folks in a truly good mood.
Still, and this is feels very significant, it was very few of us that actually had what would be called a habit. Maybe one or two of my close friends did speed 5 out of 7 days a week. (And excluding the daily cannabis use), the rest of them just eat what was around that day. The important thing was to do something, anything. Gasoline showed up from time to time. We stated that (again aside from hasch) we were not addicts to anything but leaving this place for some time. I mean some days we took turnes spinning eachother around at these office type chairs or punching eachothers arms till we couldn´t stand up.
As you notice, although I move around, I spend a lot of time in ”our town”.
Its hard to make new friends if you´re not studying or working when moving to a new city. My girlfriend had secured her income by taking internet based classes in social anthropology and some other stuff and taking student loans, but I couldn´t get my mind together enough to sit down for a day reading. Hence, eventhough I met and hung out with loads of people I didn´t get to make very much new friends.
And so I got into detox. It was 1 part desperation and 1 part speed abuse that finally made me take the step and call this doctor. And finally, he wrote me 40mg/day diazepam script. No earthshattering amounts but still. I felt bigtime not having to roam the streets for quality pills. Then he asked me if id like to go for detox right away. Like the same day. Fuck no, I though, lets ride this one for a while, and went to get beers to flush down my legally acquired superdrug with. Almost a bit proud, I achingly took the bus back to where we now had ended up, in Lanas old hometown.
I have no memory of moving out of the old place and into the new one. Lana told me later on I slept through the whole thing while she got help from her mother and sister packing our shit. What a lousy fucker I must have looked like by then. When one day I woke up and we had rented a cute but a bit rundown cottage where you kept the snow out of the bedroom by chopping wood and burning em in the fireplace.
I had to go to rehabgroups 8 hours every day, then got home and messed around in our little garden, chopped wood or earned a few bucks helping Lanas dad out with shit at his farm. Days rolled on quite well.
Magnus came by train one day and visited. I had been at daycare for 6 weeks and he had gone into his alltime highest speed consumption. Making a living or whatever you call it, selling every type of drug available.
He emptied his bag on our kitchen table. I had never seen so many pills. But since I could end up with a pisstest under my nose any morning when I showed up at groups I had had to exchange cannabis and benzo for the one thing I appreciated most then, Stilnocts. I used to take a few witch I had gotten legally and go rampage in the forest. Had a great time. Nice friendly hallucinations on those I tell you. But I couldn´t start messing with benso yet.
Never belive for a second I ever wanted to become Clean. Well there were a few hours when I had landed at the detox when I contemplated it. But the next day a guy offered me a fistful of Imovane he had just stoled from the office.. I went to the rehab cus I felt like shit, I felt like the scum of the earth, no money and no place of my own since I couldn´t handle a job, couldn´t handle school, and was too lazy to push. Some nights after moving from Gothenburg I slept in the bush or under staircases. And you don’t wanna do that.
Anyway Magnus came by, we cut his hair, took a few photos of the three of us and when we went to bed I gave him 2 of my Stilnocts. The next day he told me he´d been up painting his hallucinations on the stones, and tagging up the forest.
"For shitss sake" I told him. "This shit is Lanas dads forest, why the fuck would you wanna spraypaint a stone for?". He was in bad shape, weighted like nothing and had a hard time keeping a straight dialogue. We gave him food but he hardly looked at it. He spent 3 days at our place, the last night he slept for a few hours. Then back home again to earn cash. He had gotten chance to IV the speed. Some junkynurse who hadn´t picked up the chips of doper ethics layin around telling you not to give anyone the first shot, had helped him. But I wont blame the guy, I asked him myself after that, but he adviced me not to.
At that point I very much did not long to get back to our town. I had begun talking of it as The shithole. And in some sence it was, a shithole. Where the white dirt flushed my mates down the friggin sewers. I didn´t want that, but I didn´t want those clever as fuck 12step Wisefolks telling me what to do and what not either. And that aint a good start; around those parts, having a free will is The sin.
I spent 2 months in daytime rehab. And in combination with my growing wellbeing, the unability to acquire an income since this was taking up 40 hours/week, that I didn´t get any welfare, and me getting madly tired of the same old discussions in group, I took a decision and got back on track. Still I had learned quite a bit. About myself mostly. And through just listening to the others, I had learned even more about my no. 1 favourite subject; the use and abuse of stimulatia in all its forms. A few months later it was Magnus time to go into detox.
And so I moved again. Me and Lana had to part for a while and I ended up at a collective where an old friend had moved 2 years ago. He had escaped the booze and speed by moving out in the forest filling his mind with repairwork, computers and books. I arrived a hot summerday. Lana drove me there with all my stuff, pretty much the same cds id brought with me when I moved in with Magnus 5 years earlier. And my computer, of course. But by now my knowledge about computer networks was equal to my mothers. The exploits I knew of would actually make a nice laugh at a museum amongst oldschool nerds. ”The Phf bug, lol”.
I got like 4 or 5 rooms to choose from. Again, the place was a bit run down, but it was run by those living there, they cooked together and had a few beers together. Having devided the huge old pensionate so each got an own cleaning area, and made some money renting out rooms for hostelguests. Growing their own vegetables and careing for their own chickens. DIY all the way through this place. Fuckin aye.
And I kept my speed/benso use down. Still smoked intensively in periods but couldn´t do it constantly. Mostly because I was stuck here.
And when the Urge for chems came I couldn´t just call somebody and then get down to it. If so I had to walk for 15 min, take the buss for 30 min, wait for a train and go for another hour back to town. Then back again.
Over the months this distance slowly worked back the urges with capital U. Or maybe it had worked back the destructiveness of doin something just too much. I belive thats the case with everything. Blend well and you can go on that mixture forever. And I hope you understand I’m not talking about drugs exclusively now.
Sure I made sure I had hasch whenever I wanted but if I felt like having a weekly break I bought myself 2 big bottles of Coke and rode out the sweats with cartoons or a computergame. Big deal.
Magnus dropped the detox thing thou, run his nose right down the gutter asap and had to start up a new try, 6 months later. I talked to him on the cell when I was with my mom at the store and he had just arrived for the 2 nd time. He had found 2 xanax 3mgs hidden in his jacket and he had gone out for a walk in the middle of nowhere munching them. I laughed and asked him what he wanted out of this try. He told me he was gonna give it a serious shot but just had to finish what had to be finished.
And that was the round that would keep him clean off of everything except nicotine for a little over a year. And during witch, he and I had hourly long talks on the phone, dragging up the dirt from the past, turning it over and again. He came into a halfway home and finally got his own flat. But by then the city had already shut its walls around him. Didn´t matter how many meetings he went to or anything. Just knowing his former life stood watching him around the corner made it very easy to slip back to basic I guess. Goin the exact same route had he done 10 years before. A few beers, a few bottles of liquor, a joint, a cap of MDMA, a nose and a spike. And there he stood in all his beauty. Same species as myself. Eating pretty much whatever came around.
My girlfriend for example, Lana, aint like that. We are similar enough to stick together as best of friends and lovers for 4 years (and goin), but still, even through panic attacks, depression or just hardcore asocial behaviour, she wouldn´t look to drugs for aid. She´s got something else inside her. During this time she had perhaps done speed with me 2 or 3 times. Taken perhaps 5 sipps of a joint out of politeness and gotten drunk once or twice. We are the same, but totally different.
When I have a good day, or even a good week, I feel like I can do a drug because I want to do a drug. But when things get back to what they were, there is a higher purpose, and that is just leaving this planet for a while.
And in this house, by the computer we brought, is where im sitting now. Waiting for my cap of morphine 100. Just about 2 years now since I moved in. The last month’s ive contemplated leaving, for personal reasons. I miss the flats, I miss living alone, I miss what I experience when I get up in the forests around here just watching nature. Nobody’s prying eyes around. Leaving me to myfucking self.
I’m beginning an assistant nurse class downtown this autumn. Ill be mean ass. nurse if I finish. If I don’t, shit knows what´ll happen.
Anywho. So far, So good.
Me and this friend.
A short tale of addiction to everything.
My cell phone rings as I lay on my newly borrowed oxblood-red leather sofa watching some DivX movie. It’s Magnus, and he sounds wide awake. At least compared to when I talked to him the last time, a few days ago. He had called me and instantly started dragging words up his throat and into the light, words I at first couldn´t make out. That time my cell had died and I got to call him up. He was stoned enough for me to doubt he would even notice I had been away. During the first minute he rambled about what pills he was on or ”probably” was on, since he no longer had any idea. I got bored and knew he wouldn´t remember any of that discussion the next day anyway.
And sure enough when I ask him about it he vaguely mumbles something about him not being "..that fucked up" that night. "That’s what it seemed like to me" I reply and laugh as to tell him it’s totally ok, just that the dialogue had become somewhat one-sided.
We get into a talk about the caps of morphine 100mgs that is in town. The ones I´m waiting for right now. How you eat them or snort them or smoke em and play with em. You can get quite spun away.
”The town”, meaning the town we both grew up in. And where he still lives. I moved out some years ago and have been whirling about the country with the girl witch I teamed up with a few months after I moved.
I tell him I had booked myself one of the 100s since it was all I could afford at the time and he laughingly tells me he´s been on them for a couple of days and that he has gotta be able to sleep tonight. He´s been placed on a day care center where he gets to do a bunch of creative stuff like acting and painting. Still been able to keep driving his drug thing alongside.
Its like 4pm and I tell him if he doesn’t do a refill he wont have any problems sleeping, just have a puff and get down to it. "Yeah well I´m gonna have a refill soon I think" he tells me without any humour in his voice.
I cant help but laugh, not at him, not towards him in any way but with him, towards the fucked up situation.
And he laughs too, and says "yeah, well it’s been sort of druggy the last few months, or, well, no not that druggy but. Ah well, or maybe it has. Shit". I interrupt him with involuntary laughter and he joins me before I hear him do the friggin 20mg line as we speak.
"The last few months", that is in plain english every day since he got out of a year in rehab and into his own new flat.
Yea, lets rewind this shit why don’t we.
Part 1.
From toothpaste to morphine. Evolution I call it.
I was seven when I first met him. We both stood outside school, both dressed in white shirts, probably a pair of light blue/green manchester jeans and for the day (by our respectively mother) neatly fixed light blond haircut. Listening to some speech from our new principal, directed towards our -with hope of bright future to the brim filled- parents.
I didn´t knew him at the time but we went from becoming palls to the worst of enemies to palls to worker colleagues to doper friends to best of friends.
During the first 3 years in school all we did was hang out from time to time, since we both lived a block away. We rode our BMXs through the bushes and small green areas available in our lower middleclass hood, put the bikes away and sat in front of the new Nintendo Entertainment System, the 8 bit console. Rad shit I tell ya. Got ourselves skateboards. Plastic ones, today described as "the slalom skateboard". You probably havn´t seen em but fuck it. At that time that was the only kind available to us and it kicked mad ass riding down from your block at the 45 degree asphalt turn leading you down to the road. One night during summer we snuck up to the House area, stole their plumes, eat them and threw the pips back at their windows. Mad.
Got caught and got returned crying to our parents.
But as we entered the fourth school year we parted. He had been playing loads of hockey and football depending on the season and was slowly becoming very good at all sports involving a ball of some sort.
I found someone else whom I could call friend and that would have enough similar interests to be able to stick with me for a few months or a year. I had put away my slalom skateboard and bought a "pro-board" from a guy five years older than me for 350 kronor. I don’t remember where I got it but id guess it was a present. I went to the guys house and got my Powell Peralta board and looked at it, so fucking big, what the hell was I supposed to do with this, I thought.
Still, I learned to handle it somewhat ok and spent the days down by the end of my 45 degree sidewalk turn with the others who endlessly were trying to make these things jump into the air.
I got up to fifth grade, I still had no problems following what the teachers at class was talking about, I wasn´t overweight hence did ok in Gymnastics, I even did ok in Math, but my overall favourite was Swedish where you got to sit by yourself and a pen and paper, creating these incredible worlds and intrigues and people, all doin whatever you told them to. I wrote this 50-60 page thing about a ship with people travelling the seas looking for unfound continents, heavily inspired from a manga series that were on the newly introduced ”cable-tv”.
Then came sixth grade. And I remember talking to one of the boys in the punkrock crowd, the one the others sarcastically came to call The leader after one of their regular telling-offs by some teacher who had unknowingly done the fatal verbal mistake of pointing him out as that. He was thou. For the time being.
Anyway we stood by the benches talking for the first time in 2 years. Suddenly the hatred who had been between us for some longforgotten reason was swepped away and we took small and careful steps towards new friendship.
And so I got a crew to kick my leftover-from-undone-homework-time with. They played in bands and wore the clothes people wore at pictures from the first swedish punkwave in the late 70s and 80s. Rad enough, I thought and followed them to forest areas far away from prying eyes and downed my first beers we had convinced someones brother or dad or guy outside the store to get for us. To the smell of stolen cigarette smoke and steamy northern evening forests I passed out for the first time. And learned to love every bit of the art of it.
As Magnus got chosen to Player of the year time and again in his Hockey team id learn how to handle (notice; not play) the bassguittar. And along with the other 2 members of The Concrete Cave we had a few shows at the music festival arranged by the After school Center where we rehearsed our homemade songs. Or more accurate, the lyrics witch The leader wrote and the music witch his best mate, the slightly asperger-syndrome suffering guy in hood and short hair had written on guitar. But we rocked. Unfortunately that’s not what the local wannabe national socialist skins thought about us, and more than once we had to run separate ways home at night from rehearsing our cocky tunes.
We got to know a few older fellas who were into skateboarding and graffiti and soon we were out shoplifting cans and filling the local viaducts with colour, drinking wine made in the depths of our drawers, stealing our mothers herbs and spices, rolling them into joints we smoked together behind the church. One guy had a dad who got these small blue pills witch he seemed to get a bit whacky off of. Steal. Eat. Nick booze off of some other dad’s liquor cabinet. And spend the weekends camping in the forest just to be away from the city and the parents and teachers and the wannabe nazis. Getting neatly mashed on 3-4 beers. Times were beautiful.
And during semester in ninth grade my mom told me about this summer course in basic nursing. A few weeks in class and a few weeks as trainee at either the hospital or a med centre, but more importantly, you got paid. 600 kronors a week. About $50. A lot for a kid my age.
And there I met Magnus again. At first we didn´t talk much, during the time before id gotten in with the punkrock boys we were mad enemies. Why, I don’t know, but the first weeks we took every opportunity to fight or yell, eventually we stopped looking at each other.
But now we got to hang again.
We teamed on the way to class and walked together the way back in the sun. I lent him my big black marker with witch I drew my evil tag all across town and he thought up one of his own. And during these 6 or something, weeks, we got down again and I hooked him up with my new friends. Including The leader. And that’s pretty much were his sporting careers ends and he got to walk in his fathers tracks and becoming a "socially accepted among the lower middleclass, still hardcore, drunk". He came to miss out on the ”socially accepted” part thou.
Still we both did graduate Gymnasium three respectively four years later, while growing our interest in mindbenders.
But chill thou, we´re still just in ninth grade.
During that time I had gone from smoking unknown spices, to stealing lame painkillers from my grandmother to huffing gasoline, glue, butane and the old black marker. We stole beer and drinking-essence after school that we sold from our lockers the next day. Silly people thou, we thought, while we drank more or less any day aslong as we had someplace to sleep and a good excuse, these dorks always waited till weekends.. Then, finally I got my hands on something illegal. Hasch it was. We met this 6 year older guy whom a friend had met through a BBS where he spent most his days. Me and a few from the punkcrowd shared our sweetly fucked-over 5er. Yea, we were told 5 grams but since I still have a perfect picturememory of the stuff id guess rather somewhere around 0.2-0.3 gram. But what is cool thou, is that we paid the exact amount I still pay to this day for a fiver of ok hasch. Around here, prices on drugs will remain.
Anyway, we split it on the six of us and got maaadly whacked. Yup, this was the shit we thought. From what we had been told in school, there pretty much wasn´t anything that beat hasch. You got hooked immediately and you lost total control of reality. Rad!
I was fuckin 14 and every book I had read was schoolbooks. At home I read cartoon magazines and watched Dj Cat show on cable. Those were my sources of input. Please have patience with my naive and slightly lacking, but desperately soilseeking, knowledge of drugs.
Me and Magnus parted for Gymnasium. With the exeption of The leader and the Asperger dude, most of us parted and met new friends.
Magnus did what he was supposed to, studying Kids and Care at the school in the south part of town, I became a lame pusharound at one of the Norhthen schools, leading me to having so much abscence it was impossible to go on.
With a lot of pushing from my brother and sister, both highly educated, I changed school and did another try at Social Science. My goal was to graduate and hence I did. Barely. I didn´t learn much of what they tought us. What I did learn thou was in the computer hall, and across the very rapidly spreading "new" invention called the internet. This was 97 and the swedish internetboom.
Finally I could work on my knowledge of drugs and the human mind, along with stuff on funny computer activities. I got my hands on mad elite hackertools such as the Netbus, Back Orifice, Subseven and Winnuke. I dwelled in the archives of ”almost illegal” information. Well since not many others knew of these stuff I felt sorta mad. I slowly gained power over the schoolcomputers and together with other net-hooligans in sweden and the states, I started to build up my -at the time non-existent- selfconfidence that I had been ripped off of, due to lacking roughness and the lacking James Frey attitude needed to get through at some schools. I had merely been a Lately developed boy in the outskirts of the corridor, looking for highs through toothpaste and an occasional joint with friends who also skipped class to drink free beer.
...That would probably be my all time lowest kickseeking memory, when on advice from a friend id rub the bottom of my skull full of stolen toothpaste. The alcohol where supposed to give your brain a cold and nice rush I was told. Geeez.
Magnus graduated and got himself a flat. I entered the final year. Got the computerhall shut down for three days for installing keyloggers, was asked about it but since I no longer had use of my own account they never could prove nothing. Got myself free internet at home and hooked up with a few likeminded guys in all ages across town. By now I could tell a 0.2 ”gram” from a real one. Still I had not felt what I feel today when I smoke a spliff.
The day would come thou, a few days after graduating I sat with a fella some years younger than me, but way bigger and way more involved in the drug/underground computerscene, cause by this time it wasn´t just the BBS and Demo freaks who knew computers. And much of what respect you did get, was from your knowledge, not from how loud you yelled or how hard you could hit something with your fist. And computers had become way more available to common asocials such as me and this guy sitting next to me. ”What, you have managed to install Slackware? you got Xwin running too? Mad.”
We sat in the town park by a smalltype concretewall sharing a puff in a pipe he had managed to get shipped to him from a stolen Visa. We were just leaving and I remember standing up and feeling weightless, a slight shiver from my feets and up, and I almost fell back on my ass. I told him "shit I got woozy". And he answered friendly something like "yup, thats the point".
It didn´t take long before I got to meet some of his friends, got steady connections for cannabis supply. Off and on a blue valium or a nose of speed. Psilosybin was still legal and someone bought a few of those and I got to talk to god at the back of the bus as my friends dragged me across town after introducing me to the first grams. Things started to get a move on.
We didn´t shut anything out. And all the cash we needed we got from selling knifes and cds and scanners and cameras we bought off your Visas we traded on the IRC. I didn´t keep much of what we stole. Some 20 records and a few dvds was all. I just took pictures of the FedEx, DHL and UPS trucks pulling up to the house while my mom was at work and basked in awe from my friends on IRC. It was summer, we were almost rich, knew shitloads of stuff others didn´t, and got all the smoke we wanted. Yes. Beautiful times. At night we sat at our mothers apartments hanging out by the puter trying out fresh webexploits at a million computers trying to get passwd files and creditcards, painting some viaduct or at some pub we had just gotten legal rights to enter.
The fights with my mother, as with everyone and their mothers come 18-19 and still living at home, became intolerable and I remember picking up a sleepingbag and a backpack with records and left my screaming mother on the 2nd floor and got to move in with Magnus in his 2 roomer across the river. He had gotten a job and was among the first in town to get broadband.
He had had an occasional puff now and then but still his major weakness was booze. Every weekend he got out of the pub, puked, laughed, and got back in.
One day I talked with him in the same park I had gotten my first real cannabis high. I had just tried ecstasy for the first time, told him how it fucking revolutionised my thinking and the way I saw the world, "this is the greatest thing, ill tell you, you will love everything, everyone, can you fucking imagine?"
We had gotten caught by the police that night, at the technoparty we were at, all five of us. (How bad this must look for the scene, but fuckit. Thats what happened). But the high will forever be priceless and the 3500 kronor fine didn´t matter much to me. Besides I was able to pay it all off in a matter of weeks.
Magnus laughed a bit nervously and kept sipping his beer.
I kept pushing him for some time before he did his first 2 blue Superman. And of course he loved it.
Part 2.
”Not all drugs are good, some are great!”
The carding business was good but not very stable, also I couldn´t ship stuff to our flat and besides, a guy not living far away and whom I knew on the net, had gotten a visit from police all the way from the states. They found him sick and alone in an apartment filled with microwaves and digital cameras.
Magnus put in a good word for me at his workplace and together we took very good care of old or crippled people, wiping asses and flipping bacon. No steady job, they called us at mornings when we were needed, but we got around.
I moved out when I was called in for the military service, this time the Non-combatant type. A 4hour busdrive from home. It lasted 3 months and the first day I teamed up with a guy having a joint atop one of swedens highest bridges. We had both dropped out of the more wartype minded service right after graduation, the one including big guns and lots of yelling back and forth. Now, with an incredible view over the mountains we mecked and smoked one together.
This guy thou, had an older brother that was pushing speed and E. And for a bunch of stolen credit cards I was able to get my hands on loads of pills. I still was very much into ecstasy, sitting up late at night in my newfound computerhall, writing diaries and poems and stories about that stuff, surfing the web for more and more knowledge, contributed to ecstasy.org with trip tips, anything, concerning ecstasy and every type of shit one might get ones hands on one of these days. I had totally found home. I had sort of gotten used to being my own boss by now. But through such activities I survived having people telling me what to do and when.
At fridays I smoked one and got on the 4 hour busride back to town for weekends of rolling and messing around with our computers.
I got my first stolen laptop delivered to the place where I did my service, they called me from the warehouse and I got to pick it up when the whole class was watching. And I knew noone knew anything. They just couldn´t figure out why I hadn´t had it delivered to where I lived. Shit I felt elite. That summer I sold it for mad overprice and me, Magnus and five or six other guys went to the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Had a kickass time for 5 days at a slowly vapourising group of three tents.
We ended up the day after everyone had left, and met this tiny fella from Gothenburg with his pockes filled to the brim with Es, acid and shrooms. We had brought a few Mitsubichis but those were far gone. So I bought a few Scorpions and the others bought either Acid or shrooms. And together we burned and mashed all what was left of the camping area of the year 2000 Roskilde Festival.
I remember the sun right above us, me having geared up with a Supersoaker 5000 in one hand and a stick in the other, sweat flooding down, barefeet and with just a pair of shorts on. Shit I can still feel the smell as I think of it. Suddenly some stranger shows up behind me, I turn around, and I can only imagine the eyes I gave this man as I shoved my Supersoaker in his face telling him this camp weren´t big enough for both of us or something along those lines. We all laughed like Etards and he walked on. Man, id trade alot for those times.
Then came 2001 and I moved out of that city for real. Went to a school studying creative writing at a no-tests level. I met Lana. The first girl I had ever had a relationship that lasted more than a week. She didn´t smoke hasch, very rarely drunk and couldn´t tell an E from aspirin. Still our personalitys were scaringly much alike. We thought about the same stuff, talked the same and both being youngest out of three kids; in many ways had experienced sort of the same things growing up. And soon enough we where the only ones we hung out with at school. At spring we took 4 days off and went with a truckdriver she knew to Kopenhagen. I showed her Christiania and we wrote an article on it for the school paper. Still, it took a few more weeks until we kissed first time. Wtf, I thought, could this be that’s happening to me. Couldn’t focus, think straight nor give a flying fuck about anything, or anyone, but her. Not even myself, prio one during my whole life, mattered.
Every weekend though, I took the train back home and met up with Magnus and his boys. He had gotten a new flat at an if-possible cheaper part of town and that space had become a wide-open collective sort of living for all of them. The door always open, and always someone around for an allnight discussion. On whathaveyou, rollercoasters, timetraveling, psychosis, or some book by Will Burroughs, James Redfield, Tim Leary. Yes, I had found the books by now. Better late than never right? Everyone able to give creative output and get creative response all the time. Constantly high or drunk and had teamed up with such people that rather talked than yelled when under the influence. It was incredible how far we actually took it when compared to other dopereaking flats, sure the empty pizzaboxes and piles of broken, dirty plates were around but the lying and deceiving and stealing and fighting and fucking around was not present as we noticed were the case at pretty much any other hangout we ended up in from time to time. We became known and dissed by many as The hippies on the East side, as we strolled town at nights talking drunken strangers off of punching us since "that’s not what you really wanna do, now is it?". But then again, we hadn´t gotten the real taste of benso yet.
By now I had gotten enough of the Es and after goin through a 5 month depression had exchanged rolling for tweaking, "much more stable high" I told people. And sure it was, but at the same time I know it was leaving one burned out way of realitybending for another.
After one weekend at home I got picked up by the narcotic policers again, since they recognised the guy I was with. I pissed positive on cannabis and they threatened to snatch my drivers license since they ”suspected possible abuse”. The thing that would have saved my butt was me taking 2 urinetests during a period of 6 months. Today it seems in-fukkn-credible what luck I must have had. Still this did not make me do as I was told. I just exchanged the longhalflifed softdrug for more speed, more pills and more booze witch would leave my system pretty much when I wanted it to.
School ended and I left for 10 days in Europe with my girlfriend. We passed through Amsterdam (2 joints.. 2!) Paris, Cassis, London and Edinburgh before I got very sick and we took a flight home.
Last month of the license test came and I pissed what I knew was pure. But.. The day after the test, and the day after I had celebrated by packing the bong I had pictured in my mind the whole time, they called me. "ehm, the bus witch was supposed to carry your urine to the test lab got a flat tire.. And.. Got stuck in the sun.. And uhm.. Well you´ve gotta come down here and do it again. But that wont be a problem right?".
And it wouldn´t have been, if I hadn´t just lost all ambitions of playing their little game any longer. At the time it just wasn´t worth it, I put my freedom higher than that little piece of plastic bullshit they were using to ”root” my body, push me around and letting them sniff my insides. Fuck it, I thought and lost the licence.
Lana got us a flat outside of Gothenburg, I hooked up with a relatively high-end hasch pusher and got to ship and bring bigger quantities back to Magnus and the fellas back home. This way I could pay rent and support my habit wich now included a few valiums aside from the puff and an occasional speedbinge.
I went on regular meetings with a psychiatrist to try and convince her I should get an early retirement. ”Or at least some scripts”, because of depression or some vague social phobia I told her I suffered from. But all I got was lousy prozac copies and suspicious eyes.
After 6 month in southern sweden we got enough of the cold streets and unknown people and looked for new places to hang. But by now I had started having more and more problem blending, I relied on valiums or roofies, xanax or at least and most often just a sixpack, to get me out of the house, in bed, and for meeting people outside of my circle. Back home the situation had gotten pretty much the same. Speed had gotten hold of a few who still wasn´t smoking a fiver a day. Friends eat crappy sleepingpills and still took Es just to get away the days they couldn´t dig out anything of worth. Now and then a few Tradolan or other painkillers showed up, getting folks in a truly good mood.
Still, and this is feels very significant, it was very few of us that actually had what would be called a habit. Maybe one or two of my close friends did speed 5 out of 7 days a week. (And excluding the daily cannabis use), the rest of them just eat what was around that day. The important thing was to do something, anything. Gasoline showed up from time to time. We stated that (again aside from hasch) we were not addicts to anything but leaving this place for some time. I mean some days we took turnes spinning eachother around at these office type chairs or punching eachothers arms till we couldn´t stand up.
As you notice, although I move around, I spend a lot of time in ”our town”.
Its hard to make new friends if you´re not studying or working when moving to a new city. My girlfriend had secured her income by taking internet based classes in social anthropology and some other stuff and taking student loans, but I couldn´t get my mind together enough to sit down for a day reading. Hence, eventhough I met and hung out with loads of people I didn´t get to make very much new friends.
And so I got into detox. It was 1 part desperation and 1 part speed abuse that finally made me take the step and call this doctor. And finally, he wrote me 40mg/day diazepam script. No earthshattering amounts but still. I felt bigtime not having to roam the streets for quality pills. Then he asked me if id like to go for detox right away. Like the same day. Fuck no, I though, lets ride this one for a while, and went to get beers to flush down my legally acquired superdrug with. Almost a bit proud, I achingly took the bus back to where we now had ended up, in Lanas old hometown.
I have no memory of moving out of the old place and into the new one. Lana told me later on I slept through the whole thing while she got help from her mother and sister packing our shit. What a lousy fucker I must have looked like by then. When one day I woke up and we had rented a cute but a bit rundown cottage where you kept the snow out of the bedroom by chopping wood and burning em in the fireplace.
I had to go to rehabgroups 8 hours every day, then got home and messed around in our little garden, chopped wood or earned a few bucks helping Lanas dad out with shit at his farm. Days rolled on quite well.
Magnus came by train one day and visited. I had been at daycare for 6 weeks and he had gone into his alltime highest speed consumption. Making a living or whatever you call it, selling every type of drug available.
He emptied his bag on our kitchen table. I had never seen so many pills. But since I could end up with a pisstest under my nose any morning when I showed up at groups I had had to exchange cannabis and benzo for the one thing I appreciated most then, Stilnocts. I used to take a few witch I had gotten legally and go rampage in the forest. Had a great time. Nice friendly hallucinations on those I tell you. But I couldn´t start messing with benso yet.
Never belive for a second I ever wanted to become Clean. Well there were a few hours when I had landed at the detox when I contemplated it. But the next day a guy offered me a fistful of Imovane he had just stoled from the office.. I went to the rehab cus I felt like shit, I felt like the scum of the earth, no money and no place of my own since I couldn´t handle a job, couldn´t handle school, and was too lazy to push. Some nights after moving from Gothenburg I slept in the bush or under staircases. And you don’t wanna do that.
Anyway Magnus came by, we cut his hair, took a few photos of the three of us and when we went to bed I gave him 2 of my Stilnocts. The next day he told me he´d been up painting his hallucinations on the stones, and tagging up the forest.
"For shitss sake" I told him. "This shit is Lanas dads forest, why the fuck would you wanna spraypaint a stone for?". He was in bad shape, weighted like nothing and had a hard time keeping a straight dialogue. We gave him food but he hardly looked at it. He spent 3 days at our place, the last night he slept for a few hours. Then back home again to earn cash. He had gotten chance to IV the speed. Some junkynurse who hadn´t picked up the chips of doper ethics layin around telling you not to give anyone the first shot, had helped him. But I wont blame the guy, I asked him myself after that, but he adviced me not to.
At that point I very much did not long to get back to our town. I had begun talking of it as The shithole. And in some sence it was, a shithole. Where the white dirt flushed my mates down the friggin sewers. I didn´t want that, but I didn´t want those clever as fuck 12step Wisefolks telling me what to do and what not either. And that aint a good start; around those parts, having a free will is The sin.
I spent 2 months in daytime rehab. And in combination with my growing wellbeing, the unability to acquire an income since this was taking up 40 hours/week, that I didn´t get any welfare, and me getting madly tired of the same old discussions in group, I took a decision and got back on track. Still I had learned quite a bit. About myself mostly. And through just listening to the others, I had learned even more about my no. 1 favourite subject; the use and abuse of stimulatia in all its forms. A few months later it was Magnus time to go into detox.
And so I moved again. Me and Lana had to part for a while and I ended up at a collective where an old friend had moved 2 years ago. He had escaped the booze and speed by moving out in the forest filling his mind with repairwork, computers and books. I arrived a hot summerday. Lana drove me there with all my stuff, pretty much the same cds id brought with me when I moved in with Magnus 5 years earlier. And my computer, of course. But by now my knowledge about computer networks was equal to my mothers. The exploits I knew of would actually make a nice laugh at a museum amongst oldschool nerds. ”The Phf bug, lol”.
I got like 4 or 5 rooms to choose from. Again, the place was a bit run down, but it was run by those living there, they cooked together and had a few beers together. Having devided the huge old pensionate so each got an own cleaning area, and made some money renting out rooms for hostelguests. Growing their own vegetables and careing for their own chickens. DIY all the way through this place. Fuckin aye.
And I kept my speed/benso use down. Still smoked intensively in periods but couldn´t do it constantly. Mostly because I was stuck here.
And when the Urge for chems came I couldn´t just call somebody and then get down to it. If so I had to walk for 15 min, take the buss for 30 min, wait for a train and go for another hour back to town. Then back again.
Over the months this distance slowly worked back the urges with capital U. Or maybe it had worked back the destructiveness of doin something just too much. I belive thats the case with everything. Blend well and you can go on that mixture forever. And I hope you understand I’m not talking about drugs exclusively now.
Sure I made sure I had hasch whenever I wanted but if I felt like having a weekly break I bought myself 2 big bottles of Coke and rode out the sweats with cartoons or a computergame. Big deal.
Magnus dropped the detox thing thou, run his nose right down the gutter asap and had to start up a new try, 6 months later. I talked to him on the cell when I was with my mom at the store and he had just arrived for the 2 nd time. He had found 2 xanax 3mgs hidden in his jacket and he had gone out for a walk in the middle of nowhere munching them. I laughed and asked him what he wanted out of this try. He told me he was gonna give it a serious shot but just had to finish what had to be finished.
And that was the round that would keep him clean off of everything except nicotine for a little over a year. And during witch, he and I had hourly long talks on the phone, dragging up the dirt from the past, turning it over and again. He came into a halfway home and finally got his own flat. But by then the city had already shut its walls around him. Didn´t matter how many meetings he went to or anything. Just knowing his former life stood watching him around the corner made it very easy to slip back to basic I guess. Goin the exact same route had he done 10 years before. A few beers, a few bottles of liquor, a joint, a cap of MDMA, a nose and a spike. And there he stood in all his beauty. Same species as myself. Eating pretty much whatever came around.
My girlfriend for example, Lana, aint like that. We are similar enough to stick together as best of friends and lovers for 4 years (and goin), but still, even through panic attacks, depression or just hardcore asocial behaviour, she wouldn´t look to drugs for aid. She´s got something else inside her. During this time she had perhaps done speed with me 2 or 3 times. Taken perhaps 5 sipps of a joint out of politeness and gotten drunk once or twice. We are the same, but totally different.
When I have a good day, or even a good week, I feel like I can do a drug because I want to do a drug. But when things get back to what they were, there is a higher purpose, and that is just leaving this planet for a while.
And in this house, by the computer we brought, is where im sitting now. Waiting for my cap of morphine 100. Just about 2 years now since I moved in. The last month’s ive contemplated leaving, for personal reasons. I miss the flats, I miss living alone, I miss what I experience when I get up in the forests around here just watching nature. Nobody’s prying eyes around. Leaving me to myfucking self.
I’m beginning an assistant nurse class downtown this autumn. Ill be mean ass. nurse if I finish. If I don’t, shit knows what´ll happen.
Anywho. So far, So good.
