hurt

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that's real

The needle tears a hole

The old familiar sting

Try to kill it all away

But I remember everything

What have I become?

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

You could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt

i have encountered a young man who is plagued with pain and crazy. he is 19 and he has been smoking meth anywhere from 2 to 5 years. he has lost sight of sanity- if at all he ever had any. i am convinced he at minimum has adhd and ptsd, mostly because his inability to be still is prominent. he is painful to be around really, kind of like being with someone who has rolled in poison ivy. his mother has been smoking twack for most of his life. she doesn't see it as a real problem i guess, she just sees it as something that just is. i think this perspective got translated to him as just something that is. everybody just smokes. it is just something people do.

i continue to engage with him with uncertainty as i am curious about what has happened to him. he certainly needs a helping hand and i am not at all sure if that can be mine. it always feels shaky to be with him- kinda like walking with sea legs or petting a porcupine. there have been tales of terror - manslaughter and suicide that should only present as ghost stories meant to scare. yet here they roll with the ease and familiarity of stories of baseball and camping trips.

i don't know if sanity or recovery or sobriety are part of his path. he is a whirling dervish with no end in sight. i hope he can find calm, but can't swear he would recognize it. one minute he runs from being centered and the next he laments the peace he can't have. i guess this post is meant to be a searchlight  and a prayer. i want to witness that he is real and that he matters.

i remember reading "the sluts" by dennis cooper and being gobsmacked by the general sleaze and realness of his characters in that book. young male hustlers who were starting out their lives with fewer possibilities than most of us. they were selling themselves to drown out their own hell.  for some reason i recall these characters as i consider this young man.

i find it fitting to quote from dc here...

Experience:Call me a caretaker if you want, but after reading Brad’s reviews, I couldn’t help but feel concerned about this troubled young man, and angered by the callousness with which the previous reviewers have treated him. I work in the mental heath industry in Orange County, not far from Long Beach. I made an appointment with Brad in order to encourage him to seek treatment, although he didn’t know my intentions until we met.

Regular visitors to this site know that I’m not against hiring escorts. I will even admit that Brad is my type and that meeting him involved a high degree of self-control on my part. Something the previous reviewers are right about is that he’s extraordinarily cute. Brad is one of the cutest twinks I’ve ever seen in fact. I don’t know how a boy as cute and young as Brad ended up in the low end of his profession, but it’s wrong to exploit him. He deserves better.

I had a long talk with Brad. It took him a while to open up to me, but he did. My knee-jerk diagnosis is that Brad is probably schizophrenic with an untreated chemical imbalance. He might also be suffering from a mild neurological disorder, as evidenced by the physical tics that the first reviewer mentioned. He allowed me to drive him to the facility where I work and enroll him in an outpatient program. I set him up to live at the home of a female acquaintance of mine. He is no longer at the phone number posted here and with any luck, you have heard the last of him. Shame on you.

You: Hispanic male in my late 30s.

Brad responds: Don’t believe this guy. He’s a prick. I have a new number. It’s 310-555-9876. Call me if you’re a generous man. I’m up for anything. I need a place to live too. This guy’s a fucking prick. I don’t need help. He’s a liar. I’m writing this on his computer. What does that tell you? Guys like him are the worst. They promise you shit and they don’t mean it. Don’t call me if you’re like him.

Webmaster’s message: My repeated attempts to contact JoseR72 and have him confirm this review have been unsuccessful. Until further notice, I strongly advise all of you to stay clear of Brad.

indeed there continue to be tales about the tenderness of the wolves. “Clearly the secret of happiness...is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping.”
― Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves