http://xxxafterglowxxx.livejournal.com

It's really painful to go back and read some of that shit. I can't believe I was 15 in the earliest posts. There's no way. But, I probably was. It's amusing to go back and read my thoughts on some of the people I've grown to love, like Mandy, Cara, Josh, and especially Cody (I miss you).

I'm going to attempt to get back into my Xanga and go through that. I wish I still had my old MySpace. I love doing stuff like this.

Last February, I named this journal the "Transfiguration Of..." because it was catchy and a pretty amazing album by one of my favorite artists (M. Ward), but over the course of something like 22 months, it's kind of defined who I am. Last year when I made this, I was miserable, regretting every decision I made or never had the courage to make, and I shut myself off from the world, scared to make the same mistakes of the previous year. I got off probation 2 months after my last entry, and promptly fell back into the life I never wanted to live again. Granted, I've cleaned up alittle and tried to repair some burned, bombed bridges, but I really couldn't imagine what the next year would hold for me. I think that's when I actually woke up and found that people aren't just objects I can play with and manipulate to do my every bidding. I can rattle off a list of people I've hurt since my freshman year in high school up until about a month ago, and only a handful of them have given me a 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th, etc.) chance. There are two girls that I'm really glad let me back into their lives. I'm sure one of them will think I'm just saying that, and the other will never see this most likely. But, I really do love you both. I'm not a disgusting, perverted pig all of the time.

I don't really feel like tearing up at my keyboard, again, so I'm going to skip the details of my father and i's relationship... the demise, slight return, demise (again) and finally redemption from July through October 2009. Things are so much better between us that I cannot imagine him being any other way. This is how this family was meant to be. We were broken and divided for so long.

anyway. maybe my next entry won't be so melodramatic and emotional. maybe i'll take a superhero quiz or something.

I'm paranoid.

It's not my opinion. It's not some observation that someone has made of my behavior. I'm legitimately, 100% paranoid. I get offered a position at work that requires the managers trusting me, and I'm thinking it's a way to ease me out the door slowly. Why am I paranoid? I don't like to blame my internal mechanics on my past drug usage, but I think my experiences and my slow slide down the addiction spiral with cocaine helped alot make me who i am today.

I still remember the first night vividly. I was in Murfreesboro with Cody & DJ. We met Brianne at her cousin's house, and ALL of them left to go get two eight-balls. They left me in an apartment in a town I barely knew at that point, and to make it worse, I just met these people and I was essentially house-sitting. DJ left me his pack of cigarettes since I didn't have any. They were gone for 2 or 3 hours. I smoked that whole pack. In addition, I was also on 7 or 8 somas, and I was drinking an entire 6 pack of beer by myself. Needless to say, when they returned, I was lit like a fucking firecracker. I can remember Brianne having to help me back inside when I rushed to greet them at the door, and almost tumbled down the stairs that were outside the apartment's door. I should have known, in my pill and drunk haze stupor, to not do any of that coke. But, the chesire cat inside of me was grinning widely, and it wanted me to pull a Tony Montana and just bury my face in the stuff.

They didn't think I could handle it, what with being my first time and all. So, they gave me little bumps at first, then really short lines every 30 minutes or so. DJ, Cody & I ended up on the balcony, talking about random, inane shit until the sun came up, quite literally. Little did Brianne, DJ, Cody, et all. know that while they didn't think I could handle cocaine, in a few months, I would be a blossoming coke head, buying the stuff more than I did weed when I had enough money. I wouldn't save the stuff to do in another hour. I would get it, chop it up, lay down 6 lines and wipe that baggy clean of the stuff.

If I wouldn't have been arrested last October for possession and DUI, I probably would be worse off now then I could ever imagine. But, now I'm just foreshadowing the events to come. The story isn't even half-way complete, dear non-existent reader.

to whom it may concern

my first experience with drugs was marijuana, in the 9th grade. I can remember having welding class with a black kid named Eddie, and we would always talk about making different kinds of drugs by mixing things like coke or heroin together. At this point, I was just talking out my ass about things. I'd never even taken a puff of a cigarette. Well, apparently Eddie had, and more. One day he convinced me and my best friend (at the time) Josh to skip our respective 4th period class and meet him on the green-way path outside our school, near the parking lot. This path is about 2 miles long, and leads to a little bench next to the kiddie baseball field. This is where I first smoked weed, and ate it, because I was so high. Normally, people don't get high their first time apparently. I think I was born for this, because I got high as the sky is blue.

From then on, I was as hooked on weed as one could be to a drug that it's physically impossible to be addicted to. Living in a small town, there's nothing to do except get fucked up on SOMETHING, and go to a public place and act a fool. Or do the first part, and just got to someone's house and chill out. Or, be a daredevil like my friends & I always were, and ride around in the car and smoke out in the country. Eventually this elevated to smoking in town, on the main roads and at red lights. A combination of this would lead to me getting arrested probably 5 minutes away from my house out in the bumfuck woods of Normandy.

Weed was hardly a problem for my life. I always had the money, whether it was $10 for a dimebag, or $30 for a quarter (that literally makes no sense, but I digress). In the early days, my gay friend Cody used to always buy it for us. Why, I don't know. I guess he liked our company? Maybe it was because he was infatuated with my current gay bestfriend, DJ. Time hasn't been kind to the secrets we all wondered about in high school. This is only relevant and interesting, because my obsession and somewhat small addiction to cocaine can be traced back to hanging out with DJ, and how he introduced me to Cody. From there, we would travel to the land of the 'Buro (Murfreesboro, TN) where my nostrils would get their first taste of cocaine, and where I was already on too many muscle relaxers and on my 5th beer.


return to sender

i haven't been able to write in a long time. i used to write what seemed like every night on myspace, only to later delete said blog entries. i don't like people reading my work. sometimes, i go back over my old entries on myspace and read them. i'm embarrassed. they're horribly amateur, and lack the creative process that i like to think i have, and that alot of other people seem to think i have. i look at the comments, and everyone is praising them, but it's leaving me to wonder... why can't anyone tell me my writing is shit? i know it, you know it, why keep up the facade? no one is interested in my drug hazed comas of a lament about my suicidal fantasies tightly wrapped into something that barely resembles a creative, imaginative, thought-provoking "short story". why does anyone like my kunta kente-like lashings of a girl that i was with for maybe 3 weeks, and only fooled around with? why?

that said, i know why i can't write anymore. i know why i don't leave my house anymore except to go to work. i know why i hate the people i call my friends now. i'm ashamed of what i did.

and...

this journal, rather it's read by anyone or not, will be the place where i tell the events that lead up to me finally being arrested. because i can't tell this to anyone's face. because i can't tell my parents how much of a bad person their son is. and lastly, because i don't think life is worth it's weight in drugs.



-c