i am a thirty something female with a linkedin, a great deal of baggage and absolutely no tolerance for pretense. write for all the emotional voyeurs out there
it all started on a fire escape in a newly gentrified apartment in bushwick... with a cigarette, a steady dose of mixed amphetamine salts, and a tumblr. the rest is history. well, a history. i have a criminal record that was so bland it was mythologized (one could even say "fabricated") by the local sheriffs and media.
after a year-long writing sabbatical i am trying to find the words that i can use to do the things that silence denies me. im writing words in memorialization of events and people you wouldn't otherwise know, but you will be better off to have known. i use these characters to type words to create sentences to try, fruitlessly, to express the acuity of pain that is losing your little brother to the drug that i'd given up so fucking much to already. i write for a catharsis that we all need.
fentanyl is the monster that we created to blame. fentanyl didn't kill my brother and it didn't land me homeless in a tent along the San Lorenzo.
fentanyl is a drug. its inanimate.
the "blame your childhood" narrative is tired. it's not irrelevant, but continually pushes the question off. Why were your parents fucked up?
[mid-day, in anywhere Appalachia, a place where none of the men who get photographed that day have ever set foot nor will again. It's a ribbon cutting, for something inside a nondescript office in a strip mall. The year 2001. The tanned men in tailored suits flash their toothy, unnaturally white smiles at the camera. They are in the foreground of the big reveal. Suddenly the background comes into focus; the words, "Pain Clinic" are perceptible behind them and they are speaking but no one can hear anything but the ringing in their ears as Big pharma shakes hands mightily with the prison industrial complex].
the fact of being told you should feel happy in a society that is overwhelming depressed, the handful of greedy mother fuckers who pretend their hoarded wealth is an entirely separate issue from the rampant despair of an entire generation, and the massive disparity it creates among us, our infighting, the cognitive dissidence of being told you live in a "meritocracy" when we watch nepobabies run the world. -- that is where my rage lies. in their lies. in this whole fucking apparatus.