traceyh415

This was written by one of my oldest friends. I love him. I was watching the show "Girls" the other day (a show which I despise, my girl was watching a segment only because Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth was in it), maybe a five minute segment, and one of the characters was in a 12 step meeting (at least thats what I gathered, again, I only watched a few minutes of it) and she was arguing with the fella who was leading the meeting and she was saying how Heroin is "Fun". Fun? Fun! I can think of a hundred different adjectives, but fun is most certainly NOT one of them. Dangerous. Yes. Romantic, maybe at first. Life-Fucking. Yeppers. (yes, life-fucking is an adjective in my book, errr blog, err geust post). Another word? How about- Malefic. More? Disabling. Corrupt. Crippling. Let's get more creative, huh?Friend-Euthanizer. Soul-Stealer. Emotion-Hider. Libido-Thief. Death-Dealer. It's also Injurious. Degenerative. Villainous. Oppressive. Ill-Fated. Disgusting. Hor...

One time I washed the dope dealer's dishes hoping for some crumbs. Or was that many times. Or cleaned their house. Or walked their dog. Or watched their kid.  I dropped my heroin into the crib. I didn't know I had lost it until my boyfriend did not believe that I would lose drugs. We argued over $10 worth of tar. Forget the baby. Forget I could have killed a toddler.  I called the mother "hey I dropped my dope." Going out of my way to be a fucking hero.  "I flushed it down the toilet." Such painful words. Such painful fucking words. I dropped my heroin that I forgot I had and she flushed it down the toilet.  The mother ends up with the virus, the daughter ends up on the street. I end up clean. Well, we are all clean now. The insanity of having the junkie watch your kid. I liked the child- I loved her in fact. She was the product of a toss-up. The mother traded drugs for sex and ended up pregnant. That was how she ended up being the dealer. Trading sex for dr...

A junkie experiences a thousand deaths before they learn to live.  All your happy chemicals are stripped and depleted and it becomes impossible to care about anything with the exception of relief.  Every day and any day can because the worst day ever because all your hopes are tied up in a substance and the substance cannot nurture you.  In the end, the veil of cognitive dissonance is lifted and the two realities can't live in harmony- death and life in the same body at the same time. 

The other day my daughter went into the kitchen. She turned on the light. She pulled open the door to the refrigerator. She scanned the food that was present and selected yogurt. She went to the drawer, got a spoon, and sat down. She opened the yogurt by herself and started to eat alone in the kitchen. This event may not be significant to the rest of the world. To me, it was both exhilarating and scary at the same time. My child did not need me. She didn't call for me to help her. She didn't need me to prepare anything for her. She had some form of independence. Suddenly, I shrank into the couch. I was not needed by my little girl. What does this new chapter mean for me? I saw myself in her. What choices lead to my decision to use drugs for the first time. She is six years old. Am I a good model for her? By the time I was five, I was playing truth or dare underneath the picnic table with my neighbor. By the time I was seven, I had gotten high on weed. What can I do to prote...

You will come crawling back to me. It is hot outside. So hot, the sidewalk smells like fermented piss. The concrete is hot. My brain is frying in the sun. I am sticking to the sleeping bag. I am laying underneath a sheet strung between two shopping carts. The carts provide me with shade. I try to drink water but beer tastes better on a hot day. My liver aches as I put the bottle to my lips. "Nooooooooo!" The organ cries out for mercy. I drown my sensibilities with more alcohol. My hair is stuck to my head with grease and sweat. The worst is over. My leg twitches. Theses restless fucking legs. I would be okay if my legs stop popping. "How you doing?" A head pops in my make shift tent. I take another pull of my beer. "I am starting to get sick again." The beer, once cold, is starting to go flat and warm. It was delicious when he brought it to me at six am. My lips hurt as I try to suck down some more misery in a glass vessel. Here it comes. I feel t...

"Hand me the alcohol wipes" I reach over the bed " this is finally starting to drain" He hand me two packets of alcohol pads.  "Damn Tracey. How many fucking times are you going to do this to yourself?" That question rang in my mind for a month to come. I had been performing surgery on myself. I was laying on the bed of our hotel room. We had hustled all day to get the $35 we needed to stay here tonight plus money for dope. Soon, we will have to do the whole thing all over again. For now, I needed a place where I could take off my pants. I needed to lance this abscess to get the pressure off. It wasn't getting all that red or hard but it hurt to walk. I knew the signs. I knew when to go to the doctor. I had been there many times before. The clinic would slice me open and send me on my way with some sterile water and gauze to pack my wounds.   I was quite the amateur doctor, at least in my mind. I had taken a new syringe and stuck in the middle of...

Death is never an easy thing to deal with but that sorrow is compounded exponentially when the person who has passed on was a user of drugs. Suddenly, the person we loved has the privacy they cherished pulled from them. Why did this happen, people ask. The answer becomes drugs. But the truth is more complex. The person who has passed on may have been a full blown addict, an experimenter, a chipper, a self medication expert, or maybe they just liked getting high. We will never be able to ask them. And in the end, it does not really matter because we are powerless to bring them back and reassure them we accept them. We love them. We understand. We want to comfort them one more time. We want to remind them they are not alone. Even if we do not approve of their drug use, we want to remind them they are valued as a human being of worth in this world.  In our moment of pain, we search for answers. Unfortunately, more often that not, the STIGMA of drug use is what killed many of our lov...

I just wanted to take another moment to say thank you to all my readers. 

I am resting my mind in between stories when I reflect on the greedy dope hog. The greedy dope hog is not one person. It is a series of people I have met through my life.  There is the undercover benzo Betty. She likes to nibble on a few bars or consume some klonopin. And never tells you. When she heartily ODs, it's always such a mystery how this could have happened especially because they are prescribed and she was "just sleeping".  There is "I've done this before" Don. He INSISTS he is an opiates regular yet falls out on half a bag. He is either stuck with his head in the toilet or found under a table. Don- you do not need to lie to kick it. I would have shared- especially since you always have money.  There is alcoholic Annie. She likes to drink cheap vodka. And cry about how sick she is or she needs her medicine. Damn bitch. Shut the fuck up. Yet when she turns blue while you went to the store to get a five pound bag of gummy worms you realize she had a ...

He was sitting on the concrete. I barely noticed him there. I was on a mission. I had two balloons in my mouth. One for now, one for later and I needed a quick place to fix my heroin. It had taken me all day to get my money. Why would I notice another sick junkie? I nearly tripped on his feet. Our eyes met WATCH WHERE YOU ARE GOING is what he had planned to say to me. When our eyes met, he whispered "Oh, fuck." This was the kind of statement a person make when they have come upon something so glorious and so destructive at the same time- the force that pulls two junkies together. He had a baby face. He had one of those soft sort of half formed mustaches that was not quite whiskers. He had on a baggy t-shirt and some loose army pants, the black kind, with plenty of pockets, to hold all of his belongings. You could tell he was rail thin under his clothes. I wanted to touch his collarbones. He had wavy short hair and was shorter than most of the men, if you could call him a ...

These are writings from a loved one of one of my regular readers. This person left behind a child and some writings I hope you enjoy . PART ONE: WAY TOO MUCH EXPERIENCE. seriously ive been addicted since i cut my calf damn near off while kicking through a window while drunk. once again mars can vouch for this, he was there. when i asked him how it looked he said "it looks like two hamburger patties fighting every time you take a step. up until this night i HONESTLY DID NOT KNOW WHAT PAINKILLERS WERE. so i went to the ER and they gave m morphine and stitched me up and sent me home with a script for 60 vic's. all the pharmacist said was "eat it with food it might make your stomach upset. the first time i popped i took two and threw up about an hour later and almost swore them off because the pain wasnt really that bad. but the next day i took one and filled a glass of pepsi and popped in fear and loathing in las vegas and fell asleep half way through the movie. the n...

"C'mon Let's GO!" he squatted down, pleading to me in the way that only two dope sick lovers can understand. I am sitting on the floor tweaking through everything in my bag. I have dumped out the contents and packed and un-packed them for hours now. I have been up for a few days now. One, maybe two? A week? A month, a year? I have started back with doing heroin so at least I can sleep from time to time. Right now, I have no heroin and I am content to sit on the floor rumaging through my belongings. Staying inside is unusual for me at this point. I feel trapped inside the walls of these hotels. I am too afraid to leave, too afraid to stay in a place where anyone could come in. It is not usual for people to randomly kick in doors just to see what is inside them. "C'mon Tracey. I am fucking leaving if you don't get up." He is sick and he isn't waiting much longer. This boyfriend is different than many of the others. He had the most beautiful b...

I started writing this blog Jan of last year. I had been privately doing my thing as a semi-soccer mom in relative obscurity until  2011. I started getting a collection of weird facebook requests from people taking about the movie "Black Tar Heroin". Hmm. I wondered why but did not think too much of it. Then, 2012. my ex Spanky pointed out to me that people were watching the movie (or at least poor quality 15 min segments of it) on you-tube. The movie was getting tens of thousands of hits. Suddenly, people were interested in my story over a decade after the filming ended near Christmas. As time went by, I became more interested in the comments section because close to 80% of the comments I saw on you tube were full of fallacy yet it was not just a movie, it was MY life, it was MY friends these people were talking about in those comments. So I decided to make some of my own videos. My first updated video  I wanted to define my own narrative. Finally, in 2013, I started w...