Playing In The Snow

I don't want to give the impression here that everything in my life here had suddenly become entirely about the drugs. But the steady slide in that direction was, without a doubt, underway. What I didn't realize until many years later was, that the spiral into addiction almost seemed necessary. When I wasn't high, I was in real pain. When I was high, I still was in pain... I just didn't seem to notice it as much, and so I was able to function on many levels. And music and business seemed to be the areas I functioned in best. But now, instead of a joint every half hour as I played or wrote music, I had one foot planted firmly in music, and the other firmly planted in the world of drugs. And it wasn't just pot anymore. I was using cocaine regularly. I was able to maintain that balancing act very well, for a very long time. But not without increasingly destructive consequenses beginning to appear with greater frequency in my life. In less than a year, things would get even worse, because a drug that I had always felt I'd never do, and which had never had any appeal for me, and I had always scorned, along with anyone who used it...would become the most important thing in my reality and virtually control my life for the next two decades. My slide into heroin addiction was coming, and it was all in the name of relief. As I look back at this period today, with the clarity that comes with time and perspective, I really believe I was having a breakdown, a complete sensory overload, a total inability to cope with the emotional onslaught of feelings and pain that resulted from the trauma of my Mom's murder, it's aftermath, and from the guilt I felt because I secretly feared my involvement in drugs might have possibly been the indirect cause of her murder. And I was also very angry. I was angry at what the police had done to me and my life. I was angry with my Dad, and his unwillingness to help the police get to the truth. And what about my Dad's girlfriend and her failed polygraph? What about her motives? And why wouldn't she or my Dad cooperate with the investigation? And I was angry at the total apathy of my family. Didn't anybody but me care about justice for my Mom? It seemed to me that nobody did. I was seething in anger. I was in real trouble, but nobody was paying attention. Somebody should have seen it. Somebody should have known something was wrong with me. But I had begun withdrawing from family members who didn't use, and partied with the ones who did, and never let anyone else get close enough to me to know me well enough to see it. I should have been in a hospital. I should have been seeking grief counseling. But nobody seemed to notice what was happening with me, not even me...and what I ended up doing was self-medicating. Narcotics vs.Thorazine. What a choice. Addiction or an institution. I guess I liked being the one making the decision on where I was...and what I'd use...and when...and how much. And at the time, I guess I thought I was handling things very well...