Reach For The Sky

I have been with my present employer almost two years now and of all of the places that I have worked in my life, I have to admit that this is one of the nicer places that I have worked at. They have pretty decent health benefits for us and they are nothing but accommodating and flexible regarding my schedule. The pay is slightly higher than the average for the type of work that I do and it is certainly enough of an income to survive on and then some. I know that I am over qualified for what I actually do but it is a trade-off. There have been months when my attendance has been kind of dicey and when many others may have lost patience and fired my ass, this company gives another chance with no questions asked. This fact alone has made me a pretty loyal employee and I suspect that I will be there as long as they will have me.

I have also been given two promotions since starting there and both of them were initiated by management. I was told each time that I was being reassigned and given new responsibilities and a pay raise with each move. This is something else that has obviously pleased me as it is nice to be recognized and rewarded by management. This week an internal posting was advertised in a position that I would be better suited in plus it is also a position that I have lots of work experience already. Of course, I applied for it. Me and thirteen other people! Ouch! I don’t think that the company even has forty employees right now. So…Competition is going to be kind of tough. I had my first interview today out of I believe two and I think that it went extremely well. Of the other applicants, there are no other females which may bode well for me. In fact, there are only a handful of females in this company at all as it is part of the tech industry, an area which seems to attract mostly males. The two interviewers today were female, something my husband thinks will be to my advantage.

I really hope so cause I very much want this job. I would have my very own office and would work more regular hours plus it is a substantial increase in pay - about $450 per pay before deductions - which is a significant enough amount that it would be noticed. Fingers crossed that my second interview goes as well. I guess that they want to have the position filled by Monday or Tuesday next week at the latest so at least I won’t have to stress too long about it.

Condemnation

Am about to jump in the shower - my first in over a week, ever since my “incident”. Haven’t felt like looking after myself. My own self-imposed sentence? Don’t know. Don’t care. Don’t really feel like analysing. Not going to change anything anyway. Really kind of hating myself right now I guess. Feel dirty so what’s the point of showering. Not going to be able to rid myself of how I feel. Wish I would or could. Just fooling myself. Don’t know if this is the bottom. If not then pretty darn close. Only one direction to go from here I suppose. Ball is now in my court. Better not fumble it. Too much at stake right now. Wish I could just spit this awful taste right out of my mouth. Be done with with it. Nothing is ever that easy. If only.

Time to shake off these cobwebs and pay the piper or something like that. Take a deep breath. You are your own worse enemy and if that cross gets too heavy to bare. Well don’t waste any time, looking at someone else to take the blame. Time to suck it up and accept your dues - will make everything go faster in the end. Your problem. Your ownership. Your responsibility. Only you wil be able to fix it so stop wasting any more any more of that precious time. Just deal.

And in the immortal words of Scarlett O’Hara “Tomorrow is another day.”

She Blinded Me With Science

It was a truly, spectacularly uneventful weekend. The only reason that I am up now is that I slept through the majority of Sunday. Spent the afternoon lounging in bed watching crappy science fiction - just downloaded the seventh season of Stargate SG-1. We are watching that series this year cause two regulars from Farscape, one of the best television series ever, are now in it. As we have never been regular viewers, we now have eight seasons of episodes to kind of catch up on. Pretty basic fodder though so it certainly is posing no real challenge. Am enjoying the second season of Battlestar Gallactica I have to admit. That show sure surprised me. If you are looking for something different to watch, you should give this one a shot. Toss out any prejudices that you might have remaining if you are old enough to remember the absolutely rotten original series. Oranges and apples, cats and dogs, no two shows could be so different.

Also a friend of ours called around 11pm to see if we could give him a lift to pick up an aquarium from another friend. The only reason that we bothered was the promise of payment. Kuching! He said that he had a couple of dilaudids that we could grab for doing this favour. As we are still nickle and diming our money, this came at the perfect time so for about 20 minutes of our time we are now sitting here quite calm and soothed after a kind of restless evening. Also got an extra for the late morning or just before I have to go into work. This too was fortunate as I had no idea what I was going to do for tomorrow. Can’t get any more credit from one of my dealers - the one that charges $20 a pill to boot. Turns out though that the guy I prefer to go to is back again holding and I am good for credit with him plus he is half her price. Kuching again!

We also learned tonight that the guy that stole all of Richey’s tools from our truck was found murdered on Thursday afternoon. I had read about our city’s ninth murder of the year the other day in the newspaper but they had not released the victim’s name at this point. Apparently he tried to rip some young fellow off in a drug deal gone bad. Colour me shocked. Not that I would wish this on anyone, he obviously had something like this coming to him. He was always trying to rip someone off in one way or another so it was really just a matter of time before he pushed the wrong person too far.

Methadone Pretty

This week is one that I wish I could escape. Knowing in advance that I don’t have enough money to feed this monkey on my back is beyond depressing. The earliest I can see us getting any money is Thursday, maybe Wednesday night if very lucky. I did my last hit a few minutes ago and am fully expecting not to be able to do another until Thursday morning which seems an eternity away right now. This will also be the longest I have gone without in over a year. I also am not in a position to call in sick so I will also have to drag my sorry ass into work each day. The horrors.My nerves are already shot just with this anticipation. Self fulfilling prophecy perhaps. Emotionally this can take its toll. Anything warm and fuzzy about my usage disappears instantly when I find myself in similar situations. Oh the love-hate, ying-yang that is heroin addiction. I am already depressed because of what happened on Friday so this is not what I need right now. But what to do? I wish someone could send me something but that too is not about to happen either. Boo hoo…Going to have a shower now while I still feel like it because I know in the morning I will be feeling far too sorry for myself that I will end up not taking one.

Johnny 99

On Friday I ended up losing what was a fairly important post to me - for a number of reasons. This on top of what turned out to be a stupendously awful day was the proverbial straw. I stayed away from my computer all weekend. I was angry and feeling spiteful. Hated that stupid inanimate object. I am now back at work and am now typing this post in notepad and will save it periodically so if I do end up losing some of it, it will hopefully be not much of a loss. God bless cut and paste.

What prompted me to get my own journal is quite beyond me but I am so glad that I did. Then for someone who has kept uncountable secrets over the last twenty years to suddenly write about them so publicly is again another mystery but one which I have found refreshingly liberating. In many ways I still feel that this journal is part of my private personna anyway but it is actually reaching the point where I don’t think that it would bother me to be “found out”. I mean I am certainly not going to go to any extremes to be “caught” but I don’t think that I would be as shattered as I used to think I would be if someone were to discover my “dirty little secret”. More than anything I think that I am tired of bowing to society’s whims.. Why is this such a “dirty little secret” anyway? I think that society as a whole would be quite surprised to discover that there are junkies out there that by no means are even close to the perceived stereotype. This place more than anything has convinced me of this. So many educated, well spoken, erudite individuals that for whatever reason are caught up in this lifestyle. I feel part of a charmed, if not somewhat battered and bruised, group of people.

Now all of the above being said and cutting right to the chase, I found my private personna staring my public personna right in the eyes on Friday evening. For a brief moment they became one and now, because of circumstance, will probably find it difficult existing seperate from one another ever again. I got arrested for possession of a controlled substance and had the pleasure of spending two and a half hours sitting in a jail cell. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that this could ever occur to me. Why? I am not really sure. Arrogance, I suppose but no other real rational reason. As the officer said to me “Just think of the number of times that you were never caught’” No truer words have ever been spoken. Me believing that my public personna overshadowed my private never considered the possibility of an arrest. How wrong was I?

I feel somewhat humbled and shamed by all of this to be honest but what better place than here to try to come to terms with everything that happened a few days ago. It was a normal Friday evening or so I thought. I had a quick errand to run around 10pm so I dashed out of the house and jumped in the truck. Richey had to strip the carpet out of one of our rental units because one of our elderly tenants had had a heart attack early this week. After he had finished stripping all of the carpet he threw it into the back of the bed of the truck. There was barely enough to even reach up to the sides of the bed of the truck but on Friday evening when I was pulled over that is the reason the officer used for stopping me. Hmmm? I figured that I was in trouble the moment I was stopped because my license is currently under suspension but I had no idea what turn this event was about to take. First of all, there was absolutely no question as to the safety of my load nor was there a remote suggestion of me speeding, driving improperly or anything actually. I think that I got pulled over because I loan my truck to one of my dealers and she has been pulled over a few times in it and this cop just happened to recognize my truck so…No doubt in my mind this young fellow was itching for a promotion too. I could practically taste it.

So anyway, he says why he is stopping me, asks for my ownership and insurance and returns to his vehicle. A few minutes later he asks me to step out of the truck and to empty all of my pockets. OK…kind of confused at this point but I will play along. Nothing in my pockets so he starts sifting through stuff on my front seat. I ask him if he is allowed to do this and he says that he is if I am arrested. I ask him if I was arrested cause he never mentioned anything to me. He then asks me what I know about guns in this city and I reply absolutely nothing. This is the truth. He asks if I do drugs and I responded that I had done drugs before. He asked if I had anything on me right now and I said no cause I didn’t think that I did but as further searching of my truck would discover there was a glasses case with a syringe and a baggie with what looked like speed in the glove box. Not mine but that does not matter apparently. Now he had me with possession. I wanted to scream that this wasn’t really me, that my public personna would never get arrested…no, not the PTA Mom character…I couldn’t do it cause I did deserve to get nailed. I do use drugs and have used continually for the last 20 years and by shear luck have managed to escape the longarm of the law so to speak.

Anyway this cop continued to search but didn’t find anything else but what he found was enough to earn me a visit downtown. Now he was awfully nice and said that I wouldn’t have to stay the night, just the length of time that it took to process my paperwork. OK, fine I suppose. On our drive to the station, he pulls over into a parking lot and turns to me and says that there could be a way that these charges could just disappear if I kniew what he meant. I said that I did but as I was in enough trouble tonight, I didn’t feel like getting anyone else in any additional trouble. He kept asking me about my dealer that borrows my truck like how much product would she normally keep in the house, etc. He asked me about a few other people whose names I recognized but really couldn’t be of any help and why? Because I worked so hard at separating my private and public personna!!!

Anyway after what seemed liked an eternity I was released. I think in total the whole experience took about three hours. I was pretty shattered after all was said and done and I now have an appointment with the judge at the end of September plus I am not to be in possession of any drugs or paraphernalia. Surprisingly enough I didn’t get charged with driving under suspension which is such a big relief actually but I am no longer tempting my fate and have not driven all weekend and in fact until I go and get my license back and not going to drive. You have no idea how tough this is actually - almost worse than kicking dope I think. Obviously I can no longer be so carefree with the contents of my purse. The nice officers were effective in scaring me believe you me. I think that the whole thing still seems really kind of fishy but maybe that is just paranoia. I don’t know.

OK so here I be. Feeling very embarrassed and somewhat ashamed but also confident that I am among (new) friends who will not judge but who will be there with an encouraging word or thought. Thanks to all who took the time to read this.