There Will Always Be Spring (PT. 2)

II.


--S. Wallace - Personal Journal--

Week of: Sept 14th 2015


MONDAY Sept 14/2015:

Chopped much wood. Always chopping. The weather has been agreeable, but in a way...eerie. Saw some strange grey mammatus clouds, flying over at quite a clip like a massive rotten foam mattress pad caught on a wind, or some endless egg carton shipped out of a factory farm full of caged birds as big as the moon.

Tomatoes coming in everywhere now. Tomato salad 3 times a day. The little ones are like candy and they mix well with so much of the rest of the garden. There’s so many of them that I’ve been giving the chickens their fill and barely putting a dent in the harvests.

Still eating squashes and zucchini, ratatouille now with the tomatoes and onions. More lettuce than i care to look at, although some got nabbed by the rabbits.

I’m not bothered. I have too much lettuce.

This morning a hawk came dive bombing out of nowhere and snatched up one of the culprits I was watching while considering setting up a trap near where he got into the garden. I guess I wasn’t the first one out here to think of that.

The hawk startled me at first but I couldn’t help but smile and rattle off a quick prayer to The Laws of the Forest. Although I suppose I’m at least partly responsible, I am not an outside influence. This part of the forest is mine as much as it is theirs, and for the most part, we all get along like a fucking cartoon. I don’t love the taste of rabbit so much anyways. You’re welcome, bird.

Another week or two and i’ll camp out with my bow and hopefully bring in a deer, which will keep me occupied for a few days and fed for a few months. Got really tired of ‘venison stew’ by the end of last winter, but have been seriously craving it for some time.

Starting to hate zucchini but the tomatoes are still exciting.

Looking forward to going fishing soon, as I’ve always had success this time of year, and a
nice fresh fillet would be better than this smoked stuff I still have laying around.

Tuesday Sept 15/2015:

Thought about her today. It's been years. Becoming consumed by the flashes of memory. Unmotivated.


Thursday Sept 17/2015:

I haven't gotten up out of bed for two days. I haven't even drank any water today, because I can't muster up the motivation to walk 30 meters to the spring out back.

The other day I was knocked on my ass by memories of her, and how I'd let it all crash down around me. I can see her face and hear her voice, filled with contempt and disappointment while she screamed in my face: "How long has this been going on? How could you do this to us? I bet you're fucking high right now, you piece of shit! Let me see your arms!".

Why now? I haven't thought of her or any of that ugliness other than when some insignificant thing reminds me of some other insignificant thing that is related to the situation in my head. But even then, it always went away with a quick shake of the neck like a dog fresh out of the tub and a slightly elevated effort put forth into whatever I happened to be doing at the time. Usually it was chopping wood, because I chopped wood more than I did anything else, and well, numbers don't lie.

I have no explanation for why this is playing over in my head like a broken VHS tape on a loop, all of a sudden. It's very disturbing and frustrating, and I can feel those old fears and insecurities creeping up my spine like an indestructible sub-dermal spider hellbent on reaching the savory sustenance of my human brain. I also feel a burning desire to put the spine-spider to sleep with a massive dose of my old friends Dr. Henry and Nurse Prick the Needle.

I have gone nearly a decade without so much as a fleeting thought about the devastation I both caused for us and barely survived back at home in Toronto. Nor have I really spent a significant amount of time remembering my heroin odysseys.

Why was it all flooding back to me? It's been over 10 years for fuck's sake, and retrospectively I hold nothing but a slight disdain for her, but it took me quite some time to get over the massive self-hatred I held onto when considering all the time and energy I wasted loving someone who, despite being a ragingly angry alcoholic who more often than not started drinking before breakfast, just couldn't understand my tendencies toward my own personal brand of escapism.

Hypocrisy seems to be a running theme surrounding the major parts of my old life, which admittedly consisted of little more than love and drugs.

Despite the fresh anxiety, I'm still ever-grateful for the fact that if I was back in the city, I would right now be running around Parkdale or Kensington Market, knocking on doors and lurking in parks and various hot spots looking to score. While having absolutely no regard for the fact that i was single-handedly performing the world's biggest relapse gamble. I would need something to get out of my own mind. Something to calm me down and give me an altered and more positive perspective on that which I could not change.

Here, in my forest, It's been 14 years of keeping myself occupied. Building the cabin and the furnishings, constantly chopping wood and fetching water. Tending the gardens and hunting and butchering wildlife, expending every bit of energy on improving my situation, all the while keeping myself totally distracted from vague and blurry memories of my old life, including the drugs.

I still can't help but wonder why this is happening. The dead don't remember, and for all intents and purposes, that Stockton Wallace is as dead as the Dodo, but this Stockton Wallace wants to try heroin for the first time all over again right now.

After everything fell apart, but before the old Stockton had died and skipped town for good, I was often, much like today, haunted by brief glimpses of memories of things gone wrong in the recent past. Particularly, the two horrific days I spent watching from outside my own body as my relationship with the woman I had loved for nearly a decade went up in a puff of acrid smoke. When this would happen, I would do what I had always done, go find a place to score, and shield myself under the warm and indestructible blanket known as heroin. It was an admittedly unhealthy way of solving every single one of my problems, but as long as there was access to the drugs, it tended to work about 100% of the time.

This is the nature of heroin.

It is the worlds greatest medicine, for anything that may ail you. Physical or psychological or emotional, I could guarantee a single dose (sometimes double depending on quality of product and severity of my issues) of this wonder medicine would not only completely eliminate all suffering, but open your mind and all three of your eyes to the simplicity of the complex beauty in everything and everyone. Of course, this was only a temporary solution, and when the drugs ran out, the ailments always returned, more often than not, with a greater ferocity than before.

I fell down this hole with heroin quite fast, but I didn't care that it would almost certainly be the end and downfall of everything I ever cared about, because the less I cared about 'important' things, the more important the junk became, until it was all that mattered. It was a very smooth transition into a beautiful darkness.

At the same time, it quelled all my other non-related anxieties, and made me feel like it had stripped away everything about me that wasn't 'me'. I had wonderful creative breakthroughs and spent countless hours chasing a varied array of philosophical and intellectual pursuits, with anyone who would give me the time of day for the discourse. I could finally be and act and talk like the person I knew I had the potential to be, but had trouble conjuring up the confidence to let out.

Despite the fact that, by this point, I was hopelessly addicted to smack, and most of my life had been destroyed because of it, these are some of the fondest memories I have of my life in the city.

Maybe it's time for a visit back. It's been over seven years and the last time I went to see some friends I was slightly startled to learn that most of them we're as dead as I was, only in a more permanent fashion, having given into the needle, the chase, the rush. The rest, who managed to come out the other side, were dead in a different sort of way. They became veritable poster-children for methadone therapy.

Methadone. What a charade. Using a German pharm-lab created opiate drug to aid in the cessation of another opiate drug created by another German pharmaceutical giant, Bayer. The company that makes your aspirin invented heroin as a treatment for the relief of morphine withdrawal as well as recommending its administration for a child's cough suppressant. As an anecdote, it doesn't take a junkie to figure out that is the most ass-backwards reasoning in the history of medicine, yet methadone treatment is no different, other than the fact that methadone is an absolutely horrific drug.

Sure, it relieves the physical pain and sickness of withdrawal symptoms, but it features none of the euphoria, or the feeling that you could be your true self and take on the world under any circumstances. It doesn't reveal any of the all-encompassing beauty of the mundane world like heroin does. So what's the point? One is a scourge on society used by low-life junkies, and the other is a medicine to try and turn these low-lifers into functioning members of our infinitely dull and grey society.

I know no one will read this, it's a personal journal for fuck's sake, but It makes me so mad that methadone is the go-to option for kicking smack, and judging by the way I'm feeling right this very minute, if i don't sit here by this wood-stove and candle and spend a few hours scribbling this down, before I know it i'll be half way to Toronto, having bought a cellular phone from some gas station, dialing decades-outdated dealer's numbers I still remember by heart with the intention of going on a massive junk bender, with no regard or care of returning.

Even the rituals of heroin and methadone are almost identical. Go to a pre-agreed upon location first thing in the morning and queue up with a rag-tag group of other junkies in various states of dope sickness or junkie-dom. Wait impatiently in line, until its your turn to see the doctor/dealer. You exchange some cash, and they hand you a drink of methadone/a tiny package of junk.

The only difference between the doctors and dealers is the dealers won't refuse to give you anything more you may need to function past the morning or over the next few days, and they certainly won't make you administer the heroin to yourself while they stand witness, like a kindergarten teacher at milk-time.

My brief stint with methadone was short lived, and I found it much more reasonable to suffer through the week of absolute hell via a cold-turkey cessation method. If I really wanted to get off drugs, which at the time, I was forced to, why would i just replace it with a shittier, less fun, less insightful drug that i had to jump through a number of hoops that were non-existent in the world of heroin to get? I wasn't subject to daily drug tests on heroin. Smoking a joint or taking a Percocet wouldn't force my dealer to cut off my supply. Methadone is fucking bullshit.

Also heroin use has quadrupled in North America since I've been here in the woods. That's because, like their predecessor before them: Queen Victoria, who famously got the entire population of China hooked on opium so they could get a good price on their tea crops, the US, British, and Canadian forces are in the quagmire known as the war-on-terror in Afghanistan, using it as a red herring while actively protecting the opium fields and farmers from the notoriously anti-drug Taliban, and subsequently helping the farmers make a living while getting in on the action themselves by making sure that heroin gets to the streets of our precious little first-world cities.

All wars are about money. Afghanistan produces 95% of the world's heroin. It doesn't take a genius with altered perspectives on the world due to using high quality smack for the first time to figure it out. And that's just the good stuff. Don't get me started on the meteoric rise of pharmaceutical opiates like oxycodone and such.

I've never been able to help myself from chuckling at the ridiculous irony of the fact that the exact same event, the massive tragedy and ensuing farce that was Sept 11, 2001 is the definitive reason that I quit drugs and left the city, as well as the definitive reason why heroin is so much more popular today. Maybe I was doing so much that I just left a massive over-stock lying around, and it started moving at bargain-basement prices. I doubt it.

I remember the day I quit, not that I had a choice. It was exactly 14 years ago today, Sept 17, 2001. I was walking home after scoring, and feeling highly irritable, as the day before my usual dealer was unavailable and I had to use up my tiny reserve supply of smack i had stashed for just such an unforrtunate occasion. Feeling hopeful, as I had already copped, but still in a little worse of a mood than usual, I noticed a group of three or four touristy families staring slack-jawed at a cluster of televisions in a Best Buy window, all tuned to CNN.

They were, of course, silently accepting the ever-flowing river of 'infotainment' into their precious little brains. Hook. Line. Sinker. You couldn't reason with these people. Anderson Cooper could've come on the screen and stressed the importance of randomly murdering Muslim-Americans for retribution, and every single one of them would've taken up arms right there in the street.

I started out with some benign comments about not trusting the corporate-owned news, especially when those corporations stand to gain much from a shadowy military conflict. Tricks as old as time were being used here, history repeats itself, but suddenly everyone was blind. Tragedies happen all over the world every day, at the hands of various people or groups or governments. Since this one hit so close to home, it seemed to strip away all powers of reasoning. Hell it seemed to strip away just about everything other than a burning desire to stare empty-headedly at the televisions, while newsmen parroted the same phrases and fear-mongering bullshit, making every effort to incite a blind and misdirected rage toward a certain group of people (who happen to live in an oil rich country with a central bank that's not controlled by the Rothschild banking cartel).

Of course, upon mentioning these and other facts, it started with severe and dirty looks, and then cries of 'lunatic' and 'conspiracy nut' and 'tin-foil-hat' started flying my way. Not one to back down from important political or philosophical discourse with strangers, sober or not, I started to get a little more fast and loose with my comments. Until one of them, an impossibly obese American tourist in his late 40s, wearing camouflage pants and an american flag tshirt, decided he wasn't gonna let this damned 'Commie Canadian' tell him his country was ailing!

He started raising his voice as I remained composed but continued to make pertinent point after pertinent point about the subtleties of everything from globalist banking cartels, the risks of military conflict in the modern post-cold-war world, nuclear weapons, and a shadowy 'enemy' who not only likely didn't mastermind this attack, but for all intents and purposes likely couldn't even exist without being propped up by the very country he was sworn to protect.

That last one was a well known fact. The Mujahideen fighters, led by Osama Bin Laden, were trained and funded by American Intelligence agencies to fight against the Soviets who were trying to bring democracy to Afghanistan in the 70s. When the conflict was over, they were all left in the desert to their own devices, feeling slighted by the disappeared promises to take care of them the Americans had made until the missions were complete, and they were left to fight for scraps amongst themselves as the American Intel people just up and left to move on to bigger and better things. Namely, running cocaine from Central and South America and trading arms for hostages in the Iran Contra Crisis.

This is getting long winded, and I'm merely writing as a distraction from my heroin cravings, but you (no one will ever read this) can see where this ultimately went. Things really came to a head when the fat man began spouting off some severe Anti-Islamic rhetoric, clearly just repeating something he had heard one of the more right-leaning talking heads on the TV ranting about sometime earlier in the week. I followed this up by telling a lie and informing the man I was a Muslim. I knew it was easily believable not only because of the climate of Islamophobia currently sweeping the continent, but also because my mixed-race heritage left me looking brown and ethnic enough to be believable as this man's caricature-esque visions of what a Muslim is.

The final straw came when the man physically assaulted me. Well, he tried. He advanced toward me briskly, or at least as briskly as a 500lb American tourist could, and took a flailing and comical half-hearted swing at my head, immediately falling to the ground and smashing open his forehead on the pavement before he could lift his massive arms up to protect himself from the deadly ground.

As the nasty dent on his head began pouring blood all over his face, the sidewalk, his family, and the rest of the slack-jawed gawkers' shoes, he still managed to get out a few choice racial epithets, of which even I found offensive, despite the fact that they weren't insulting any race I happened to be born a part of. Although it certainly wasn't much of a stretch to imagine this guy hysterically screaming the word 'NIGGER' at me rather than 'FUCKING TOWEL-HEAD FUCK'.

That was it for old Stock. I don't really know what came over me. Perhaps it was the irritability of the ever worsening dope-sickness, or possibly the elation of the fact that I had finally scored and was about to go home and get well, but without hesitation, and in one fluid motion, I took three steps back and three large leaps toward the sprawled and injured-under-his-own weight elephant of a man. On the last leap, I connected square where he was already bleeding with my size 10.5 8-hole Dr. Martin boot. Stopping briefly to internally smile at the irony of how many people have been kicked with the same kind of boot on the other side of the racist coin.

After I had connected, and saw that the man was bleeding SIGNIFICANTLY more than earlier, I snapped out of the haze of my mildly indifferent rage, to the shocked faces of those who were standing around the window of the Best Buy, watching the news. Or in this case, the olds, because they were still reporting on the events of the week before. I was immediately struck with a pang of remorse. This guy was a fucking asshole, and wasn't healthy enough to survive the next decade. Yes he was racist, and yes he physically tried to assault me, but I felt terrible for what I had done to this patriarch in front of his family, who very likely already held on to little respect for him as a man. His wife, uncomfortable with his ranting, immediately after the kick, gave him a stern look that said 'Oh god, not again, see this is what happens when you are racist to strangers', she had clearly gone through this sort of thing before. Less than a second later, that look dissipated and transformed into sheer fear and panic, once she realized just how unconscious her inadequate husband was, and how much he was bleeding.

The rest of the people fled. I couldn't help but notice that many of them remained fixated on the television while a serious violent altercation was happening right in their midst. This is what REALLY sent me over the edge. I can tolerate ignorance, and take a little pleasure in handing out just desserts to these types of bigot tourist types, but I could've just as easily walked away silently home to do my smack, where I likely would've forgiven the man under the watchful eye of any gods that may exist, for with the rush of the heroin, I would have reached a new, higher level of understanding and compassion. But i wasn't high, and i was getting more sick by the minute. Looking over at these few people STILL watching the television, i grabbed the biggest man out of the five or six of them by the shoulders from behind and violently shook and turned him to face me while yelling about his stupidity and blind ignorance to the world around him. Honestly, I was in such a rage that I barely remember any of the words I used, let alone the point I actually made.

Don't get it twisted though, (honestly who am I talking to? This is a journal) the point was made, and the large second man didn't take too kindly to his shaking awake from the clutches of the TV, but upon seeing the fat one knocked-out and losing blood at quite a clip on the ground beneath him, his tune quickly changed to that of an apologetic one. While all this was going on, people on the street kept wandering into our space, to stare at the television news showing the towers being struck by airplanes over and over again. I couldn't believe it. Is this what the world is coming to? Is TV like heroin for the rest of the world? It certainly doesn't make them smarter or more confident. Maybe it just satiates their desire to avoid forming their own opinions out of fear, and easily hands over their own, agenda intact.

Now, maybe it was the heroin getting mad at me for not being inside my bloodstream when it thought it was going to be, or maybe the events of that week affected me and made me more angry than I originally believed, but the next thing i knew plate glass was shattering about the sidewalk, as I drove this man's head through the window, and then grabbed him by the hair and repeatedly smashed his face into the flat-screen floor-model TV while screaming: "YOU WANT THE FUCKING NEWS!? HERES THE NEWS! YOU'RE A FUCKING PATHETIC FIRST-WORLD MORON WITH NO COMMON DECENCY OR SENSE OF HISTORY. THOSE WHO DON'T LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!" Honestly I don't know what the fuck I was talking about but I was consumed with rage. As the tv shattered in a flurry of sparks, blood from this man's face, and glass, those remaining from the group quickly scattered.

I soon after that came back to my senses and released the man's hair, where he collapsed on the plate-glass window and received some rather severe cuts to his neck from the broken plate-glass. One of the pieces actually lodged quite near his artery, and had he moved a couple more inches we all would have been sprayed in blood like a Tarantino movie, where he would've died helplessly, the last image in his brain being an extreme close-up of Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper or whoever was on the TV at the time. Luckily for him, paramedics were on the way to tend to the fat man with the head wound, so the window gawker would end up being okay with some looking-after.

Hopefully the paramedics weren't non-white, or worse yet, Muslim.

Anyways, being a junkie, I had a pretty good radar to know when a situation was getting a little out of control, and police intervention was imminent, so I quickly hopped in an unsuspecting taxi, with a Muslim driver no less, and went home to get lost in my regrets of violence and redemption of heroin.

When I got home, my friend Steve was waiting on my porch half asleep, looking seriously worse for wear and obviously dope-sick and destitute. Lately Steve hadn't even had a place to live, after spending his life savings on drugs over the past 4 years, he lost everything he owned, one by one. The car, the house, the wife and kids, the guitars, the art collection...everything. It was all good for Steve though, because us junkies kept to a code. We always helped each other out, like a Socialist Utopian society or a Communist country who's effectiveness went further than just 'on paper'. I just copped, so Steve was going to get just as high as I was going to. There was no 'you owe me this or that' just a mutual love for our one true god, Scag. When I showed Steve the bindle, his eyes lit up as he stammered about something or other and some money that he had coming to him. I told him to be quiet, and that he can just 'get me next time'. I didn't know then that there wouldn't be a next time, but I never expected anything from him anyways, it was enough to have someone to share with and talk about life to.

Oftentimes, and once we got into it, today was no different, when hanging out with whomever happened to be my junkie sidekick for the day, or week, depending on how much money we could come up with, conversation would take a turn for the grandiose and we'd end up asking each other things like: 'what do you want out of life'? I got a similar question from Steve today, and my answer was the same as it always had been: I want to be out of my mind.

Of course, back then, that phrase took on a dual meaning. I wanted to be out of my mind in the sense that I wanted to completely throw myself at the mercy of my personal lord and savior, heroin, and let it envelop me with its warmth, opening my eyes to all the simple beauty in the world, giving me new perspectives on intellectual and creative pursuits that I couldn't have possibly achieved in any other manner, and reveal to me the unique importance of every single individual on the planet, despite what they were showing on the outside, which was often times piles of insecurities and anxieties that would melt away like an ice cube in a summertime cocktail, if only they had the wherewithal to just give themselves a tiny little prick with a needle. Also I wanted it to put me to sleep, no matter how hard i fought it.

Out of my mind.

The second, and perhaps more persistent and important meaning to this phrase I was so fond of using was more literal. I NEEDED to be out of my mind. With all the flashes and scenes of peril and destruction constantly flashing through my head, while I meticulously and neurotically worked out infinite multiple-universes worth of various scenarios and outcomes, I was a slave to my anxieties, socially, personally, professionally. After everything came to a grinding halt because of a few split-second choices I had made, I was perpetually consumed with the worst anxiety and panic attacks, not unlike a frightened little child.

I mostly opined on the fact that if i could just find a way to get out of my mind in the literal sense, without the need for the state-of-the-art prosthetic tool that I found heroin to be, that I would be OK and free to walk a new and unmarked trail leading me in the direction of some sort of impossibly productive and still-blissful path to self-actualization and enlightenment. Of course, all the talk about quitting drugs and cleaning up ONLY ever came inside the cocoon of infinite wisdom and warmth that was a borderline-overdose junk trip. These are just natural things amongst all junkies. All of us talk about quitting when we're high. When we're low, all we talk about - or think about, it gets real quiet at these times - is absolutely doing anything in our power to never have to feel like this again. It's a strange and contradictory circle, but no one, not even junkies, have any real desire to understand junkies (except maybe the mental health professionals down at the old methadone clinic, and they tend to fail miserably, due to the constant barrage of lies they are fed in the name of drug-seeking-behaviour.

Of course, by then I was already using heroin on the regular, but not quite every day as I often took Sunday off to sleep for 24hrs. As i pressed down on the plunger of my syringe, I could feel, and just almost see all the bad fading away, like the liquid in the needle was bright white light, and my withdrawal symptoms were a filthy black sludge pouring out of the bottom of my feet as I was hit in the back of the neck, then the spine, then the extremities with the rush that one can only get from a large dose of IV junk.

The next thing I remember is waking up to a knock on the door. Steve was immovable, nodded out to la la land, and was so dead to the world that i had to check his breathing and flip him on his stomach to stop him from potentially choking on his own opiate induced vomit that was sure to arrive for the both of us, at any minute.

I slowly glided across the old hardwood floor to the door, not able to discern the individual steps I must have taken to get there.

Just before I could open it, there was another knock, this time much more urgent, and louder. It was followed by "THIS IS THE TORONTO POLICE. OPEN UP RIGHT NOW. WE HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR MISTER WALLACE REGARDING AN INCIDENT DOWN AT THE BEST BUY TODAY".

Anyways, enough old stories, I think I've scribbled this dreck long enough that my desperate heroin craving has passed. It was weird when that happened. Extremely rare, but when it did, I was often hit with a flood of all the same symptoms I had when I finally stopped using for good. Cold clammy sweats, irritability, pain everywhere and a burning desire to kick my legs. I guess thats why they call it 'kicking' when one quits such a drug.

Saturday Sept 19/2015:

Spent yesterday relaxing and reading an old favourite, Junkie by William Burroughs. How fitting. I remember loving this book and most of Burroughs' work as a wayward punk-rock teenager in the late 90s, long before I ever even set eyes on heroin for the first time, but I haven't picked it up in probably 20 years. It's not as great as I remember. I suspect thats what heroin would be like, we're I ever to do it again. Not bloody likely.

The weather has been strange again. The wind has been different lately. Sometimes strong, sometimes gentle, but never relentless, like it suffered a series of traumas and just can’t collect the motivation to do its job in more than tiny spurts of half-assed gustery. The leaves try to translate it’s cries of hopelessness but seem to me to sound only embarrassed for it’s anguish.

-STOCK.