Methamphetamine Abuse

Simon Says: Alright, so I went from living in a hotel in St.Paul, isolated, drinking heavy, smoking crack to a sober house and now at this point in my story I just rented a room in a house way up in Blaine. I thought I found the ideal substitute for alcohol, methamphetamine, and I was hitting that pretty hard right from the start. I still had that warrant out for my arrest and transportation was a big problem, especially out in Blaine where the bus only runs back and forth from the cities twice a day during the work week and not at all on weekends. I was satisfied though, had a place to live and what seemed like an unlimited supply of meth. My new roommate Rick used meth too, only he's what I call a banger. He would smoke it but his preference was to mix it with a little water and inject it directly into his veins. Rick seemed alright early on but gradually his psychosis became more and more apparent. I ended up meeting a lot of people at Ricks and all of them were meth addicts. It wasn't long before Mark left the halfway house and rented a room at Ricks too. Mark started dealing meth again and I was able to get it anytime. I started hanging out with Mark all the time and I would go with him when he would make his deals. Rick didn't want Mark dealing meth out of the house so we had to do a lot of driving around. Eventually Mark just said fuck Rick and he started selling the shit right out of the house. There was a steady flow of people coming through the house and I was high all the time. I kind of justified my use because I wasn't drinking and alcohol was my real problem. In fact I felt pretty good that I was able to not drink for so long. Alcohol always had me feeling sick and at times my stomach wouldn't allow me to drink easily. I would get so sick I couldn't drink anymore and then I had a problem. Meth didn't seem to make me sick at all and for some reason I never got what they call dope sick, but then again there were very few times when I couldn't get more meth. Rick had some definite mental problems probably from banging so much meth. I didn't notice it right away but he gradually became more comfortable around me and started acting like a goofy retard. The first couple months I lived there he wasn't around very much and when he was he would be sleeping. This guy could sleep for days at a time and on the flip side he could stay up for several days without sleeping. The last few weeks I lived there I don't think I ever saw him sleep. He was manic and banging away, the longer he wouldn't sleep the goofier he would get. There were many times when I stayed up for days at a time but eventually I would crash out. Seemed like I only needed to sleep for a few hours and then I could stay up for a few days. I would get enthused about doing some of the weirdest things and do it for hours on end. I guess my biggest thing was taking apart and playing with old electronic junk. I would sit in my room for days playing with old computers and anything electronic I could find. I liked taking apart old cell phones and collecting the parts. It was like meditating, my mind would get focused on something and I wouldn't even give a thought to any of my problems, I didn't care. Eating was something I wasn't interested in either and I lost a lot of weight. I would eat only because I knew I should, I never felt hungry and sometimes it was a real effort to eat, I would do it just to get it done. In the back of my mind I knew I couldn't just keep living like this forever but I didn't seem to care, it just went on and on. Then things did start to happen. Meth addicts are the most paranoid people I ever met. The legal consequences of getting busted with meth or the paraphernalia are serious, but the chance of getting busted are slim unless your selling the shit or hanging around with known meth addicts (known to the police). I guess I was guilty of all the risk factors for getting busted. The cops knew the house I was living in was a drug house and everyone that went there was an addict. I was just stupid and didn't really care. No one trusts anyone but yet activity continues to go on. A few months before I moved in, the house had been raided by the police and they found paraphernalia and a small amount of methamphetamine. So everyone was paranoid when they would leave the house because the cops were always watching the place and pulling people over to search them. If someone did get busted with methamphetamine, the cops would make deals with them to turn in other users. Anytime someone got busted they were out of the loop because you just couldn't be sure if they made any deals with the cops to save themselves. The only problem was knowing when someone got busted, you just never knew. The cops have task forces out there whose only function is to find and bust methamphetamine users and dealers. So it's no wonder where the paranoia comes from. No one dealt with people they weren't sure about and if they did they were very careful. I just didn't care about much anymore and I wasn't afraid of much. I fit in and all I cared about was my little electronic projects and I kinda got into making glass pipes, they could dub as incense burners and they're perfectly legal as long as they haven't been used for smoking meth. The residue left in them can get you in big trouble so everyone was paranoid about carrying around used meth pipes, they were always getting smashed and thrown out. I would sit in my room for hours making new glass bubble pipes with the idea that if I got good at it I could sell them. You can buy them at tobacco shops and they're sold as incense burners. Five or six bucks for a piece of glass that ain't even worth a buck. Anyway I was going to sell them for half price if I ever got good at it but I never did. I guess everything started changing when Rick's sister showed up one day. By this time I wasn't thinking right anymore and Rick's sister was a real bitch. She and her boyfriend got busted and her boyfriend was in jail and she got out somehow. They got kicked out of their place and had been living in their van when they got busted. The cops confiscated their van and she had nowhere to go so she ended up moving in. We got along great at first, staying up all night smoking and talking, she seemed normal compared to her goofy brother but I was wrong about that. She didn't show her true colors for a couple months. I was probably acting a little goofy myself because I started drinking again along with the meth. Rick had a girlfriend that supposedly just got out of prison in Arizona and he was going to go see her. She had been in prison for eight years and he had been waiting for her to get out. Truth was she had gotten out of prison a year earlier and never told him. Rick was all excited about going to AZ and he had all kinds of ideas about how things were going to be great. He was acting goofier than hell and the rest of us living in the house were glad he was going to AZ for awhile because he was driving us crazy. He acted like a retard and was always broke and trying to borrow money and cigarettes and never repaying. Always promising shit and never coming through, just a pain in the ass to live with, so I was thrilled that he was going to see his girlfriend and kinda hoping that he never came back. His sister could take over the house and things would be just fine. Don't get me wrong though, Rick and I got to be friends only because I could put up with all his bizarre behavior and I really didn't care as long as I had a place to live and I could drink and smoke meth. Seemed like I could handle the alcohol a lot better while under the influence of meth so I started drinking more and more, back to that bullshit. Alcohol changes everything and my personality with it, problem is I'm the last guy to notice it. Well everything turned upside down when Rick left for AZ. Things went alright for awhile then Rick's sister started thinking she was in charge of the house, she wasn't even paying rent and she turned out to be a real bitch. Ricks sister's nick name was Mush and I had made the mistake of telling her about the outstanding warrant for my arrest. Mark and Rick both knew about it so she would've probably found out about it anyway. I was pretty fucked up all the time and I guess I started to irritate Mush and Mark but I was paying Rick rent and I didn't think I had anything to worry about and I didn't think I was acting strange anyway. I had a couple of knives and they needed sharpening so I bought a ceramic knife sharpener and as with any meth user got carried away with sharpening knives. We had a whole drawer full of kitchen knives that were so dull they couldn't cut butter. Well I made it my project to sharpen all the kitchen knives and there were quite a few of them. I guess meth addicts shouldn't play with knives around paranoid meth addicts because I guess Mark and Mush started freaking out. They asked me to stop playing with the knives because they didn't feel safe and they wanted me to give them my personal knives. I told them they had nothing to worry about and I wasn't going to give up my knives. Mush kept insisting and I said no way. Then she said you'll have to move out if you don't give in and I said fuck you. “I pay my rent to Rick and you ain't in charge of anything”. She called the cops knowing they would show up and arrest me on my outstanding warrant. That's exactly what happened. Next thing I knew I was sitting in the Anoka County Jail thinking it would be a long time before I got out. I'm going to continue telling this story because it's helping me remember some of the stupid shit I've done in the last year or so and I want to update this blog. There's a lot more to this story and it's all real. If you want to read the whole story you'll need to go back a few posts and start from there. I think what I've been doing is pretty bizarre, looking back, but it's just the life of an alcoholic addict.