It was brutlly cold, the wiknds cut through you and the cheap jacket ou had on didn't repel any of it. People take drugs because they can't handle harshnessand they didn't get nrtured enough as a child. They got thrown out in the world without adequate reassurances, their mother never made it sothey could take for granted they'd always be safe, that they were special, they were blessed and allthe horrible things in the world were either out of sight or could be urned off by a T> V> changer or called weird or rejected, those things didn't exist, they weren't real, you were, you and all the things like security blankets you could clutch ontoand feelsafe under, they were the things that existed. The closest thing ugly shit ever came to you was seeing something like commercialsd of starving people in Africa, and your capacity for suffering was so stunted, your entryinto the world, your progression from expulsion from the womb was so incomplete there was no way you could understand any of that, there has to be a place where you got hurt where your mom dropped you that irrationally acts upwhen you see sich pictures for them tobe anything but opaqu, the equivelant of an ordinaryperson looking say at an abstract expresionist painting,”it don't mean nothing,its just scribbling, a child could do it.”None of the patterns of logic dictated by pain desire, none of them have been developed in you so you can't unravelit,its in a languuage you can't translate, its a cipher, its not even interesting, it doesn't even engage your attention, the only things that engage your attention is the feeling of arms around you that are omnsciently guaranteed never to drop you, they are the whole world, or if they aren't what of the world you can see beyond themyou see throufh the filter of their all encompassing selfless security YOU are the reasonthey exist. People get born this way and they never start to feeklthe slightest pull of responsibility on them by life til they start aging and even the demandsof this coveted position can start to present a burdenon them, everyone ages. Then they get cranky and they expect mother, a world that's always blessed them to hold their burden even tihter so the little bit of weight they had to exert to exist evenin this condition can be lessened. That's whyold people get so unendurable sometimes, their simply isn't anyone or anything that can remove the burden of their condition to the extent they need, ther's only so much entitlement, so much codependence anyone can give another person, and as they get older and their need exceeds the maximum codependence they can get they become chronically bitchy. Addicts aren't born with any nurturing and then they are thrust into war zones, torture chambers places of constant helplessness and the constant violation of primal terror. This is what the world is to them anongoing barrage of artillery of anxiety that overdoses the mind into nonfunctiong and screaming for what=something they never had and have no reason to believe even exists in the world, they believe there's a God or a mother but in their world view, it isn't somethinfg that protects or was put there to protct them, its a dark double that follows them everywhere and its only purpose is to undermine them, constantly violatwe them, particularly at moments when they have to feel that their next act is most guaranteed. At the moment their sure their next act has to be most Guaranteed,that';s the moment that black doubled that is alwayds encompassing then swallowing them consuming themin flames,thsat's the moment it will strike with the most merciless vengeance, the most pitiless assauslt, and the addict knows one thing, he has no defense whatsoever against the full measure of pain and anguish that's gonna envelope him to the point whrere the pain is so grat he just wishes to God he could never have been born he could fade to extinction where the dark being can't follow him, he wishes he never had existed. Thjat's where the drugs come in and man the more of them the better and youlove them like nothing else cause even if they are killing you and all they areis the mother who cradled people in nutring safety you never had in your abandonment, they areis the closest thing to the mrciful god, of course their not merciful, your walking around looking like a corpse from their ravagement, but they are the closest thing to the merciful God that nurtures others that you never experienced or can't even conceive of ot ever. He walked through the cold and he was running away from his kids on Christmas to score and allhe felt was pirranha bites slicing into him and along with it a sense of anxiety lifting, he'd be there,he'd have it, the money was ready, he'd cop, this hell would go away soon.
Bad time christmas time blues

Sending Out

They got Christmas Carols playing out of hiddenspeakers ,Ican't see where the speakers are, probably the same place the cameras are that watch the street through staticy eyes, then beam it back to the tiny little abandoned buildings the cops use as substations, there ain't no tax base for patrolling cops,sothey got fat womenand shit sitting around eating donuts and drinking dunkin donuts cofee from the 24 hour dunkin donut's stand that sits on the edge of the Ghetto. Somebody is buying, destroyed abandoned houses where people have long been evicted from and allt hey use them for, not the city of courdse, the drug dealers use it to to store caches of weapons they buy legally at gunshows,steet sweepers,semi automatics and a pump, and the drugs that come down the 222 south channel interstate from the harbors of New York tosupply this little factory town located in the centerof Pa,. A region James Carville called Alabama, but then maybe he just ain't never been in the innercities of the towns that dot Alabama, cause they look suspiciously like every otheer inner city in America with60,000 or more people stuck in them, They look like Houston 5thward or New Orleans 9th ward before God Bush let the infidels that lived there drown, it looks like really anyother splotchof rot that's been abandoned by jobs , a tax base and left tojunkies living in abandoned houses. It looks like a war went through here and the rich people whohave been frittering away their tax cuts on increasing our defecit to black hole in space proportions, don't likely have no Mashall Plan waiting in the works to fix it up. Cept maybe they do,look at some of these formally decrepit houses with shingles dangling off the side clinging to the paintpeeling mortar walls by a twisted and rusted nail, the roof caved in from on top and fell intothe bathroom it was above, somebody is buying these places up levelling them and trying to put in these phonylooking colonial row homes with window gardens hanging from the sills and that shit they do to bricks to get the grime off them and make them look rough and pristine, they spray all that high volume of water straight on them til the surface of the bricks chip into dust and covers the sidewalks below. Then they're putting in the master touch, them phony ass glass lantern looking things that look like the thing Paul Revere carried yelling one if by day two if by night, only these fuckers light up from a switch inside and are electric. Its called revitalizing the city, upgrading the truly disastrous parts in the hopes of making them attractive enough to entice upscale buyers to buy into one,move in, regentrification, is that the word, then as they all get filled ,upyuppie and professional culture, business establishments that cater to the tastes of suchpeople will move in and a tax base will be created that can pay for decent public schools, the city will be salvaged from the oblivion it has been long lost to. You walk by these houses and chiming soothing christmas music is playing from some source you cannot locate , but it joins the nip in the December air and brings back into you all the poignant yearnings of a time gone by and a time when things were simpler and more sentimental. Noone has moved into these houses yet, the kitchens aren't even done, but from the outsides the edifices look like a defiant statement by the city against all the forces of chaosis and crime and despair and swooning ugliness that have made the city an eyesore for so long{a nose sore too if you can down by the creek and smell what that paper company did doit before it moved to Mexico without warning, leaving a 1000 employees standing outside locked gates on a Monday morning while their place of employment was literally slipped ut of town while they rested and watched Penn State football}. The church up the street from this neighborhood of reclamation and hope ripping the city away from the hands of hordes of barbarians that have possessed itt so long as cops cowered in front of screens, not daring to patrol, there aren't many cops and there's lots of guns and more shootings and at least 30 street gangs as young as 15 , some thoroughly packing, and shooting at anything in sight,including passing vehicles which seldom venture in here after dark, they do not want to be the object of some youth's target practice as his bullet creases right through an oncoming windshield as a quaking driver dives to the passenger side laying down and glass explodes all over him and hordes of kids laugh and open fire til the inert vehicle looks like that bus Clint Eastwood drove in the Gauntlet, the one with about 10,000 bullet holes in the makeshift armor he wrapped it in ,only cars that make the mistake of driving through here at night when the street sweepers are out and gunning sounding a little like the sound of amplified grit teeth, they don't have all that armor like Clint did, hell, we don't even supply our troops in Iraq with that stuff and our president visits the men who have had their legs blown off because they don't have it all the time in the hospital. Ah yes, the church up from the regentrified area of town.A piece of spiritual inspiration written on one of those glass covered signs that are mounted on bricks, the glass comes out, theres this corrugated white shit in there you can fit black letters on, change the message as you please. It says “Courage is fear with Prayer.” I think courage is when you've lost absolutely everything , which is when you die, so I don't have the ultimate courage, but having almost died quite a few times , I'd say for fear to enter me Death would probably have to buggar me next time, what am I talking about, it did that a long time ago, its why I'm a fucking addict, I can't get enough buggering, there we got that straight. A block away, now here really is a landmark, the strip bar the founding fathers of town stopped trying to zone away along time ago, I mean wouldn't you. Now there's aplace for the truly lonely and desperate souls in there.No needle junkies may dance, Christ they shoot upbetween their thighs, only crack whores, and they look like aids victims. Those shriveled bodies, those shrunken heads, and those pedophile tits. You go in there , copa feelof boney thigh, in your trench coat, get blown along side the place where the Honerywell plant stone alley is, plant ain't open, just a big ominous thing, silhouette in the night, get a ghastly blow job, give the money to a fiend with more of an appetite for drugs than Dracula got for blood and so little flesh left on her its stretched over her like a Nazi concentration camp commandant's lampshade and she runs off into the night, that blow job made you lonelier than Christmas in an abandoned house with the wind whistling through it like through two rotten teeth that throb every time it passes throughthe gap between them, lonely, Mr. Blow Job, man he can't find human companionship anywhere,like a junkie looking at an OD needle,helooks down the barrel of many of the registered handguns floating around the city and takes it right in the eye and falls back over his legs thrashing around til he's still, and then a wild rottweiller comes up and licks his dead unshaven face.I walk through here all the time wandering when in the hell are the yuppies, the upscales that made their pile on Wall street gonna come through here and move in and save us all, but then I see in the newspaper DowJones down 700 points, Wall Street in line asking for a bailout from a government that's bankrupt. The jokes on somebody, sure as hell ain't on me.I didn't believe in anyof you motherfuckers ever, right from the beginning and like I said Death gotta get pretty close to me to make me scared.Me and Death are down with each other.
Dear Editor,
I am an unpublished writer, I got a blogger space called YorkNoir. Basically,I write stories about the underside of a factory town where there are no factories left and most of the people who live here are three generations from any idea of middle class stability. I write about stuff no one else is likely to see from a perspectivethat no one is likely to have.It takes a long time to get my perspective, you aren't born with it. I write in a startling, disturbing, original language that's suitable for the kind of gritty stories and sardonic social commentary I specialize in. I love to be ironic in a brass knuckles way. This is the underground I'm doing, from ground zero, so its raw and I'm sure its fresh.
Thank You for reading this,