Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Everything I had ever stood for came crashing down beneath my bare feet as I pounded on her door and was finally let in. She was drunk and Mary poised over the entrance to the bathroom, fruitlessly blocking my view.

"Sniff."

I wasn't an idiot.

I knew what I was doing, I can't lie about that. I'd done it before, again and again, few more months off my life. I knew what I was doing and yet I didn't at the same time.
Everything became hazy after that.

"Five bucks for a gummer."
I wanted to laugh, and I did.

She fumbled through the drawer in drunken stupor, in her tight fitted dress that cut entirely too low in the front with her little tiara bobbing on her head. She knew and I knew it was always going to become more than that.

We'd been side-by-side since my dawning new life back in high school. She was the punker b***h that was half-a** dressed out for P.E., the red dye on her side-swept bangs, excessive eyeliner and red leopard print pants. My nitch was found in her.

We strut backless shirts around school thinking we led everything and nothing as freshmen who didn't take s**t. Crude and rude, we tore up the planks sophomore year, dressed extravagant for the attention of the teens; gothed out in buckle-up boots up to our knees, fishnet tops that showed dangerous cleavage, spiked collars and attitude to piss off the campus police.

...Or the raver days we had, of candy bracelets and a multitude of mini-buns I twisted up in her hair to look like nullified spikes (think Pinhead from Hellraiser), and me with my neon orange teddy bear backpack immaturely named Binky (a double-standard to the name; ravers would understand). We always turned heads, whether for good or bad. The world was ours.

We rolled into the party scene like something out of a Marilyn Manson video - it was there the journey really began. At 14, we were out 'til 2 AM (because her mother was too drunk), smoking and drinking and experiencing 'boys' for the first real time. Her girl Kelly was there too - that's when the drugs came in.

Six years of life dedicated to one fiesta after the next, playing with people far older than us because, some how, we managed to tag along with them. We stuck by each other through thick and thin, got each other into trouble and pulled each other back out, one late night after the next. We cried and laughed, passed out shitfaced in the same bed and ridiculed our new 'boytoy' of the month. We talked for hours about anything, sat in silence in contentment. It was bliss, this scene, even the worst of times.

She stood before me now with that mocking giggle and coy grin, a devious light in her eyes as if we were still 14, going to raves or going to see Kelly and Ron. Her finger dove into the bag and shot into my mouth. The first blow, it was on my gums. Here we go again.

Ron was a person no one would forget. Kelly and Ron, me and Chantal; for a long time, that's how it was. His heart was huge, with that charming gaze and lips to con anyone into anything. He spoke softly and yet there was an irresistable fire in his eyes that made you stand up for what you believed in. He was an anarchist gutter-punk to the core, yet he spoke and thought sensibly where the others did not. He told the story of life with his hands, his actions, with every word. While he was not handsome by most means, his charisma pulled people in like a moth to a flame.

Ron fell into drugs over the years, and Kelly ran into the night with him, living on the streets, hope in her heart. These weren't cute high-school flingtimes, either. No, this was the white widow, the candy, the stinger, the cooked pills in the back of someone's shed. This was their highlife, and everyone else's nightmare.
I was in 'my room' at Chantal's, drawing the same little things HE used to draw. I'd blazed a bowl of Purple chronic to myself with 'Ideoteque' by Radiohead on repeat in the background, then the world split in two.

"Ron is dying," she burst in the room. Incredulous - there are no words to describe what happened that night. I'd never seen a corpse until that moment, though. (To describe all the little horrors that happened during this phase of my life would take a novel to explain, really...)

Ron had O.D'd on heroin and left Kelly alone in the world, left her with coke and meth and no direction at 17 years old.

My mouth was numb.

She was cutting more over the mirror. Plastic in the nose; so went the rest of it. Only after that had I thought of Ron, of Dustin - my ex, the man I almost married, an ex-meth addict himself - of Marissa, who fell to meth too and lost everything she had and wound up with a crackbaby, of Ian, who spent part of his life as someone else under the hooks of the white snow, and now of Chantal, who stood corrupt and irresolute before me, slinging her bottle of Jager around.

Then I really knew what I had done, where I was going, what I could lose this time. I'd swallowed shots of Jager and multiple beers and a bowl of Purple just beofre this. My throat went dry and I started to sweat. Why did I just do that?

I tried to sleep, for work came at 7 AM and it was 3:30 AM. I tried, but HE wouldn't let me. The drunken fool in the house scared me more than I already was afraid of my own end. I thought my heart would burst in my chest. I said nothing audible to him, I just looked away. I'd asked for this, I determined, yet I was relieved when Mary and two others broke into the room and pulled him out. Thank God, I was safe.
Sort of...

That night never ended. Dawn came and to work I went with Chantal beside me, looking like a mutilated zombie. Inwardly I cried as I finally became sober... in the back I nearly broke down, but held on.

I had asked for this.
I did this to myself.
I couldn't look in a mirror - I wouldn't. I knew I looked hollow and forlorn, just like the other crack-addicts on the street. For the first time, I felt true shame.

I couldn't bottle it in, and I had to tell someone, someone I could trust; so I did when I got home.

I thought, after our conversation, that this was it, this was the next person I would lose, and it cut deeper than I ever thought it would. I deserved this.


I finally lost it on Ventrilo when there was no response, and yet through that endless dark someone else was there. I couldn't speak, I could only cry, and not in search of pity, I cried for myself.

Reality slapped me in a different way that night. I was blessed to be alive, and blessed that this time, I didn't lose someone, but enough is enough. That terror told me all I needed to know and feel.

I came to the conclusion that this way of life had to come to an end, before I lose myself as so many others have. I realize that those I surround myself with only wish to see me slip under the tide with them. They want to add another to the bottom of thisocean they call the drug world, for comfort of their own actions, for the feeling that they are not alone with their addictions.

Truth is, they are.

They will always be alone at heart, beneath the game of life and death.
While I intend to walk away from the sorrows of seeing so many fall short, I know I will look back and see her, the girl that, in some ways, had become my sister through all the suffering of the 'fast lane.' She will always be my girl, even if I watch her slip off the deep end.

We've been through so much together and yet I know that this will be one hurdle in life that I will not leap over with her. I'd fallen far enough down the well, it's a wonder that anyone was able to pull me back out...

So my greatest thanks to those who have, those who've watched me stumble time and again, who'd lie awake those painstaking nights wondering if I would see the next day, and those who saw through my flaws, never left my side, had the courage and patience to help me back to my feet.

I would give them the world if I could, but since I can't, I give them a soulful promise to never turn back, for the sake of myself and for my bonds to people I now realize mean more to me than any temporary high-relief in this place...

I sat there and watched her puke out what was left of her life.

I stood by and witnessed the horror that is growing up, and did nothing. A bystander... stood by... Redundant; damaging.

I thought I forgot myself again when I checked to see if my head was on the radio this morning. But no, I was still there, in tact, connected and whole. It brought a sigh of acid relief.

I devoured who I was with the obsession of no longer being alone. ******** up and laid out, I think I stripped every ounce of my skin off with that last relationship. Sucked the life right out of my brain.

I knew what it was to wake up to hope every day. Hope that things would be a little different, that the conversations would be a little different, that some how I would be comforted in one fashion or another. I found out what it was to go to bed with that morning rise crushed.

I still do it.

I still wonder if something intelligent will surface whenever there is conversation. No, never. It's the same s**t, every time. I keep crossing my little fingers, though.




I talk a lot of s**t... to the face and the back. I pretend I'm one of those honest folk; I tell it how it is, lay it all out, but in the end I realize I'm just as much of a liar as the Joe beside me. In reality, no one is truely honest right then and there, open and willing. Sometimes we become gutsy and say something harsh. We think that's honesty, but honestly, it's just rude words formulating on a silver tongue. You pat yourself on the back for saying what you think no one else would dare say and walk away to think about how much you hate the b***h for what she did, and you go tell your friend the next day what had happened. You know you exaggerated that story, too.

Some are lucky, though. Some really do tell it how it is, but only by another form of expression and not by mouth.

My father once told me that what you say can be carried away on a wind, but what you write down lasts forever and is there for everyone to see. I'd like to think I'm telling the greatest truth by writing.

Time and again I've been caught and proclaimed guilty for writing some atrocious things ever since I was in Junior High. Back then, I was suspended from school because of the bullshit I wrote. It happened in Elementary school, too. So here I am, writing again, telling it how it is, and 9/10 says, I'll get caught again.




Not too long ago I watched this program called Thin. It was based around a pitiful group of females with ******** up brains and emotional issues that they feigned being unable to fix. They cried over themselves and shoved a finger down their throat for the camera, because their mind is too weak to understand that... you can't exactly please everyone. Someone should teach them the meaning "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Their psychological tweak turned into a full-blown habitual addiction and now they spend the rest of their lives gagging over the soup bowl of piss and feces encased by porcelain. Good job.

To some, I know I'm ugly as sin. To others, I might be beautiful. Do I care? Depends on who's looking at me. There're some opinions that I do care about; if it were a significant other, of course I would want to "look pretty" for them. I sure as hell wouldn't starve over it, though.



Here I am, rambling again.
I'm watching this girl vomit her life away.
I'm bound to get caught standing around, writing down what I shouldn't and doing nothing when I should've done it a long time ago.

I guess that's how it goes. Senseless, hard to discern... stupid.

I woke up to the inevitable this morning.

Punnett Squares. I hate them. A college class deems it necessary to re-teach high school, yet it costs more money.

Good job, government.

Life is being sucked through a tailpipe and curbstomped on the nearest cement road. No surprise there.

That frigid laboratory wracks on my nerves. It drives me insane to sit there on that black-slab table with weighted metal chairs and thick wood frames, all constructed craftily to handle chemicals and other biological experiments. The room smells like a doctor's office; cold and uninviting. It's almost as though your sickness worsens there by the environment. Uncomfortable and trapped.

Hi-ho to work I go, and tonight is Thursday night. My wonderful partner stays out all night at the bars while I sit on my a** at my friend's house until midnight, or until I'm bored, and then I come home to nothing and sleep; wake up and repeat.

I need something new out of this, I'm growing cynical.

The clock seems to be ticking down to an absolute with every day passing by, every sunset and screaming horizon with the dawn.

The light erodes my head.

Every intricate number on the clock seems to slither away beyond the bounds, a symbolism as it pushes my life forward even when I try to resist. The clothing store Express keeps contacting me at the worst times. Money, money, money, now, give it. I don’t care if you’re poor, we just want you “out of collections.”

My credit is already ********, it doesn’t matter at this rate.

Overdue payments loom on my head and yet I won’t see a scrap of a check until the Tuesday after this one. I have 17 dollars in my account and I wonder how I am going to afford gas to get me by until next Tuesday. The meter ticks like the clock, going down, right to the empty gas mark. I’m so screwed, and there is nothing I can do about it.

My cigarettes ran out and now I slip a few from my father’s pack - even more putrid than what I smoke. The tar is excessive, in my teeth and on my tongue, down my throat, weighing on my lungs. It smells horrid. The chemicals burn the back of my head and give me this pulsing headache. Nicotine drives you to this extent.

Where I thought I never wanted to have a significant other, I’ve discovered that I am wrong. I’ve found that my anger resides in being alone and against the dating game, a game of heart charades that proves futile in the long run, after all the blood, sweat and tears. It was never truly against finding that right one. So here I sit and stare at him, the one that is sometimes at my side, and wonder how he sees me. Just another girlfriend, or does it mean more? Human emotion is the most complex work of art and I can’t seem to sort it out.

No one really can.

I think I’m asphyxiating at the world’s slowest rate. I keep coughing up chunks of ungodly things and I wonder if it’s from the smoking or if it’s from the ash that has clouded the air in this town for so long.

I suppose in either case it’s unhealthy and damaging, the only difference is that I have no choice over one. The question is, which one do I not have a choice over? My addiction or my standard of living?

Despite all the turmoil I find myself content, to some point anyway. Life works itself out.

When I woke up this morning, all I could think about was the night before as I tasseled at the nuclear fallout on the back of my head, also known as my hair. The curls were in just as much disarray as my mind, as my face, what was left of my make-up, and the black smudges under my eyes.


Chantal has a knack for timing on her personality. Generally she’s clustered up at that little table in its slack-off semi circle of chairs and people, all getting just as intoxicated as the next member of Beerfest, screaming about the importance of whatever conversation I couldn’t quite catch.

All I heard was the pounding on the door. Her tiny fist cracked into the shaken wood so hard it rattled the door knob and the frame. “Get the ******** out of there,” was the last thing I remember amidst the slurred yelling she produced from that little barrier between me and her, and him.

Busted.

Jack was livid. I was livid. It wasn’t the greatest situation. She had a right, and yet at the same time she didn’t, but to cover all points of that circumstance would take more than a book to explain.

We escorted ourselves to another room to face what all mankind does besides death, and when it was said and done I didn’t feel or think any differently than I did before.

I stood nose-to-nose with a form of entrapment.

I’ve known that I am bound to leave this town as many others do, but it seems to be just a story, an idea, something that will never occur. The difference is, I plan on making it occur despite any obstacle that might stand in my way.

I never really wanted to get involved. I suddenly felt like I was in another episode of Days of Our Lives. I wanted to bang my head against a desk. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

My thoughts ricocheted off the thin walls of my skull, landing in no particular order. Confusion, contentment, uncertainty, anger, nonchalance; it all seemed to fill my stomach in some pulsing cesspool of retardation that I sank into and bathed myself in weekly. Yet at the same time I was happy - in an ironic sort of way. I felt comfortable, the relationship hadn’t fallen into a serious pit of spikes and everything was taken lightly. But how long could that last?

The majority of relationships, dating or serious, fail at a high rate. Even marriages, especially here in California. The divorce rate was so high they quit recording the percentages at one point. Where marriage is a ceremonial part of human life, something expected just as children or death is expected of you, divorce is another typical in our culture now.

It’s disturbing.

During these failures each individual becomes enamored by the concept of perfection and a complete, comfortable marriage. They skip the part where you just date and have fun and go gun-ho into business. This leap from one extreme to the next frightens me, because it happens time and again. I haven’t had a relationship with someone that WASN’T serious before.

It seems that everyone is pressured to drop the L-bomb in to give the dating experience a new sense of importance, to feel that blood-boiling passion when such a symbolic word is mentioned for the first time. Partners claw for that heart-pounding intensity that, in most cases, becomes the very problem of the situation. The twining vines are stretched and pulled apart and all things once beautiful becomes a burden as actualization sets in. Passion in overdrive, prepare for meltdown. The mind isn’t ready to handle such a feat, it’s never a surety until age sets in. That’s the other half of the issue.

Teenagers believe they’re in love because their chemistry produces such overwhelming emotions that, undoubtedly it could be none other than love, right?

Perhaps it’s that inborn passion that drove humans to come together and have children at such young ages, because to live to your forties in the earlier centuries is equivalent to living in your hundreds in this era. Because we live longer now, there’s no need for such an early burst of emotion. So do we evolve?

It’s just an over-drawn theory. Most likely, none of that is the real case. Who knows why we fail so often? Every situation is circumstantial, and now I stare at my own.

I cross my fingers and hope that this game of dating remains a game and nothing further, but the ball resides in his court and that, of all things, makes me nervous. Another heartbreak is the last thing I could use right now, of all the problems whirling around my head.

Welcome back to planet Corporation.



Sex sells.

Every night was a repetition of the night before. There was a general sense of drone-like beings, idly chatting up conversations that they presumed to be intelligible. That was the calmest of nights. Most of the time, it was spent sitting at a stained wooden table within a house, covered in spilled beer and beer cans, bottles, cigarettes, ash trays and cigarette ashes, moistened and sticking to the furniture because of the spilled beer. Cards were slapped down loudly beside a pair of falling dice; seven, eleven, or doubles. The air reeked with a noxious smoke that stung the eyes until they watered, until your lungs felt seared simply by breathing; the alcohol took care of that. Soon the stench clogged your pores and stuck to your hair and you didn’t mind it anymore because you became attuned to it; did you smoke a pack of cigarettes in an hour? those outside would wonder.

This wasn’t just a Friday or Saturday night. This was every night. Any night. This was how we spent our time in Bakersfield, mindlessly, every day and every night drinking, smoking. The drugs are in the back room - the harder stuff. Never mind the marijuana being rolled up on the table. And the bringer of the “pain-reliever” would feebly sweep a puddle of beer off his section of the table so he could roll his joint and light it in a room already clotted with smoke. Crack open the back door, at least we could have a little fresh air. Fresh air didn’t come until you stepped outside, and there it was dark and cold, even in the summer, and there you felt alone with your beer and there you realized that you were going no where at this very moment, that the seconds of your life were ticking away behind these card games and this can and that drive to Taco Bell at 2 AM to satiate a hunger that wasn’t truly physical. It was a longing to do something other than this, other than sit around, waiting, because you felt trapped and so you wanted a hand out, but there was no hand.

When you woke up in the morning you felt stupid. You think over the things you did the night before and analyze which incidents could only now ring as an embarrassment to you and which incidents could slide. Then comes the big question, a typically shallow question, “What did I do?”

I answered it with “nothing.” I did nothing. Literally, there was nothing I aspired to, nothing influenced me, nothing brought me one step closer to a goal. It was “idle revolution,” as my friend’s band is so aptly named. But the sense of going no where and not even looking back to wonder became an addictive sense, because what else was there to do in Bakersfield?

We have the movies and the mall, the live theatres and the parks, the clubs and the bars, the humane and inhumane to entertain our shortened lives (and I say shortened because, even on a scientific record our air is so damn poisonous it causes allergies and/or asthma if you live here for a certain amount of years); but all these things cost money, and the price is soaring higher by the year. Some people say, “but beer costs money too.” Perhaps it’s that sick fascination of having no need to think for yourself for a couple hours. You feel good, you goof off and you don’t have to worry about someone remembering it in the morning because they’ll still be drunk from the night before or they’ll be wondering if they acted a fool too - so they won’t judge you. Perhaps it’s that multiple people pitch in, so you cough up a couple dollars and that is that, a whole night’s worth of “entertainment” found right in your home on a filthy table and a crinkled deck of cards.

For most, this is a way of life. For me, I woke up and found some sort of reason. I found myself loathing the idea that I could only find a bit of “fun” in these actions... or lack thereof. But the question still remains, “What is there to do in Bakersfield?”

Nothing that I have interest in - I’ve already done it all, and so have many other people. Perhaps that speaks for the increase of drugs and alcohol, of violence and the need to “belong,” whether it’s a rowdy crowd at Riley’s or it’s a gang, a house of drunken high school kids or sitting on your a**, at home, playing video games - which is no more stimulating than the scene I described before. The general sense of laziness has engulfed the citizens of this rotting town and everyone moves around in a haze. Maybe we’re stupefied by the air quality - it’s a no wonder no one wants to move back here after leaving town for a little while. But even after the self-reflection and actualization that this Dead End routine needs to have a detour before it’s too late, I still return to the same numb nights of nothingness. I think I’ve drank and smoked away so many brain cells that even my creativity is suffering.

My writing was flamboyant at one time. I had it all planned out and the stories I wrote were elaborate. Now I’m short and to the point, lacking the desire to push out stories en mass as I did before. And ******** drawing, my attention span is that of a gnat’s and I couldn’t sit down for hours on end like I did before. “I want my beer.”

Some people say the “addiction” to this livelihood (sort of an oxymoron to call it that) is a person’s escape. I’d like to think that, if it is an escape from myself and from the problems looming ahead, that I was damn well tricked into it and didn’t realize the path I walked until now - and sometimes now feels like it’s too late.

I’m sure others feel this same way, feel the oppression that Bakersfield walks on. I see it in their eyes and hear it in their voice, they suffer the same fate but in a different way. So now the question is how to “escape the escape,” and I’d decided it starts with a change of pace. Not just a common switch-up in the routine, because every night is different in a way but it always leads back to the same end, the pace had to be moved entirely from one block to the other, mentally speaking. With school dawning in the next couple weeks there is a small hope, but as long as I live here in this town, stuck in this limbo, I might as well be a rat on a wheel.