Dear Mother Directional,
There’s been no word from Cousin Contagious since he last walked away from the world. But there is good news. Cousin led himself into a treatment facility. His only message to me was short but to the point. He wrote to me about the food, which is not the best and that the bed was not what he was used to. Plus, his roommate snores. So, there were a few times when Cousin had to go outside and sleep on one of the couches in the hallway.
Continue readingDear Mother Directional,
It appears a lot has happened to your city since your last visit. I am not sure you would recognize the place – or want to. I found myself in the old stomping grounds from when I was a young salesman in a suit and tie with a briefcase and a list filled with dreams. The Avenues are the same but much of the stores are different now. The side streets are almost ghost-like with phantom junkies nodding in doorways near 35th Street by 8th Avenue.
It was sad to see how open this is and how flagrant people are with their drug use, as in right there on the street – needles pushed in the veins of lost-eyed victims who pop-off into close-to-death space.
The following notes are all true yet, none of this is real or fact. Instead, the next chapters are written in letter form and will be cases of real fiction which have been taken from real life events and true accounts of life on life’s terms. None of the names are real. However, the emotions and feelings embodied in the upcoming letters are as real as they come.
This is not a test or a cry for help or a worried narrative from a young neurotic man who is lost and unable to find his way. Instead, this is a compilation of ideas, stories and concepts in which real life occurs.
There was a long stream that ran along a road with an old bridge that ran across and led to a street and into a little town. I know this place well. Or, at least I used to. This is somewhere I had seen as a young man. Or maybe I was still a kid. It depends on how I look at this.
I think about this place. Or to be clear, I dream of it.
I dream of the way the stream looked. It was somewhat wide and in an Upstate place in the mountain towns of New York City.
Ah, the shortsightedness of youth. We thought we knew it all.
Didn’t we?
We thought we knew everything about everything; that we were ahead of the game. We were ahead of the curve and that we knew what to do, what to say, and when to say it.
I suppose youth is slightly one-sided in the fact that our predictions never reached so far as to understand that there are other sides of life. There is opposition. There is competition. There are the compilations of fate in which life comes along and throws us a curveball. And there we are thinking, “I never saw that one coming.” Meanwhile, we had been warned “Don’t do it” by people with experience.
I don’t know how we do it. We just do.
Life comes at us from all different directions and
each day, we get up.
We get going and we start all over again.
I think I will close this here . . .
But before I do, please allow me this one final entry.
We reach a point where the chapters end so a new one can begin. Or better yet, we come to an understanding or we move on. We move forward and once we’ve identified our acceptance of what was and now that we realize where our struggles began, we can either face them and change or we can submit to them and deal with more of the same.
Safe to say that I have met good people who were compromised by a challenge or a demon. Safe to say that although I say these were good people, in the same sentence, I can say that they have done terrible things. Then again, it would be equally safe to say that as a human, I am no different. Therefore, the question remains: Is this fixable? Are we truly curable? Or, is our wiring and our chemistry always prone to our defects? Better yet, is recovery possible?
We should go back to the saying, “No matter where you go, there you are,” which is true. It is also true to go back to the quote that says, “I don’t know about you but I have thought about running away more as an adult than I ever did as a kid.” This is also true but then again, chances are that we are adults for a lot longer than we’re kids.
There are times when life becomes complicated. Whether this is an emotional downfall or a personal dilemma, or whether this is a business problem or a work life complication, there are times when you want to run. You want to quit.
You want to pack up your bags and take it on the road. And of course, the adult mind understands that is an irrational option. Intellectually we understand that we can’t just “Get up and go!” But emotion and intellect are not exclusive. The two will often fail to see eye-to-eye.
No one is born into perfection. Then again, nobody is perfect anyway, right?
No one walks into a job and knows everything on the first day. No one gets on a bike without falling a few times and no one among us is above being shaken or disturbed.
The one thing we can all be confident of is that there is always a learning curve. This means we need time to adjust. This means we have to adapt to new information.
This is for you . . .
I am writing this to let you know that it’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to take a minute. Or, if you have to take a little more. Take what you need because it’s okay. Sometimes you have to take a break.
It’s okay to let go of the invisible pressures that suffocate our thinking.
And I get it.
The world can be an intense place. And it’s crazy too. Life is all over the place and if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Sometimes it seems like we’ve jumped out of the frying pan and into the fryer.
There’s always something going on.
The Written Addiction 