Thursday, January 12, 2006

Paper Sun

These were her present choices: Get clean, stay in a program so that a clean lifestyle could be documented, and then maybe with some luck and a lot of hard work she would get a new heart. Somebody else's.

Which she needs rather desperately. Ejection fraction of ten percent. Well, that depended on who you asked. Some people said it was only six percent. A tenth of normal.

Try driving to work in a tenth of your car. Try maybe this: Notre Dame takes the kickoff from USC, but with one-tenth the players.

She has one-tenth of a heart. Dobutamine does the rest.

Methamphetamine sucks. That's not the only thing, the heart weakness, because she still has that keen every-cell-in-her-body craving for crystal going again. Nothing else in her life, not her child's warmth, not the taste of Godiva chocolate, not her boyfriend's erotic caresses, will ever feel good at all. Only the draw of crystal will ever entice her to pleasure, of any kind, ever again for a very long time.

Yet her personality is not yet completely ruined. She's still herself.

Not a drug-seeking machine-whore, like the Washington talking heads we see nightly on Fox news and the other mainstream television channels. Talking heads that have somehow supplanted the humans; round speaking pixellated visages spouting off in two-dimensional propaganda festivals in between regular feedings. Hannity. Savage Wiener Dog. Man Coulter. Bat Boy Malkin. Scary bunch.

One can maintain a kind of hope for her yet, because it's not too late. She's still human and can maybe get over it someday.

Or, if she foregoes the program and lapses yet again, no new heart. No waiting up late for her daughter to return from her Senior Prom. Just that sour and frail connection, and an early death.

I am so looking forward to voting this year. Is it too early to send in my paper ballot?
Posted by at

2 comments:

Eli Blake said...

Some people claim that all drugs are the same.

They are not.

I personally support legalization of marijuana, including the growth, transport and sale of the same. It will kill you, the same way cigarettes will kill you, by filling your longs with crap until you get cancer or emphysema, but that isn't a reason to send people to prison for pot.

But meth is a monster. Quite a few years ago, I lived in the normally pretty quiet little town of Moriarty, New Mexico. Interstate 40 runs just across the north edge of town. One night, a man who was high on meth was driving along that highway with his two sons, a teenager and a younger son, about six or seven. Somehow, he decided that the older boy was the devil, stopped the van, got out a knife, cut his son's head off and tossed it out the window and drove on with the headless body in the van and his younger son who watched the whole thing (and is undoubtedly in need of a great deal of therapy, to this day.)

That's the kind of thing that meth can do. And yet we have legislators like Barbara Leff, R-Scottsdale, who led the charge to keep meth production effectively simple by not controlling the sale of pseudoephedrine.

I wish that everyone could read this post to understand what meth is.

12:22 AM
shrimplate said...

Leff is a whore for the drug companies, in my humble opinion. A few discreet limitations on precursor chemicals, and the meth industry would take quite a hit.

But No.

The drug companies make too much money from the meth-precursor trade to give it up, so they lobby against meth-lab-control legislation.

Feckin' A. Can you believe that? There's no other explanation for Leff's vote. She's a tool, and she can chew my carpet. Bitch.

5:10 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)