Tag: drugs

unfortunate criminal name of the day

Man faces jail time for selling crack

A City of Poughkeepsie man faces a stint in jail for dealing crack in the city last year.

Landocalrissan Butler, 25, of Winnikee Avenue, entered a guilty plea Tuesday in Dutchess County Court to attempted criminal possession of a controlled substance, a felony. Butler told Judge Thomas J. Dolan he had five small bags of crack in his pocket Dec. 22 when police arrested him on Morgan Avenue. He said he intended to sell the drugs.

In exchange for his plea, Butler was promised a sentence of six months in jail and five years on probation. He will also be required to forfeit a cell phone and $432 police said he obtained through illegal drug sales.

Butler remains jailed pending his sentencing, scheduled for April 4.

Freedom Science Strikes Again

If you can’t be part of the solution, there’s always money to be made inventing a new problem. That’s how we got new diseases like halitosis and ring around the collar. There’s a product, so let’s create a need: a disease is a good one.

Our enemies—waxy buildup, salmon going red in the can, the invisible filth on our faces—can only be defeated with the help of heroic product managers. This is an old story.

If what you’re selling is the absence of something, the task is a little easier. Best way is to launch a crusade of health and morals against your target. I recommend just lying like crazy ’cause it works great. Today’s example:

http://www.caffeineawareness.org/

The caffeine-free products industry now has its own Reefer Madness, in which the most harmless and beneficial of stimulants turns out to be the worserest thing you can do! Just ask this scientician!

There’s trouble in River City…

thanks to salome_st_john for this

As promised, Stahl delivers the coup de grace on Frey

FREE JAMES FREY! In defense of the post-truth memoir

Why bother with accuracy when the feelings are real? Was it three hours in an empty office, or three months behind bars? Doesn’t matter! What the writer felt when the stuff that really happened was going on is exactly the same as what his character feels when stuff that didn’t really happen goes on in the book. And that’s what the reader feels. Keep up with me here…

If anyone had listened: the Exile on Frey from last year

The Exile had James Frey pegged on Day One and even more so on Day Two, even before he was unmasked as a proven fake.

just another dry drunk asshole. They’re popular these days. Representative quotes:

Rehab stories provide a way for pampered trust-fund brats like Frey to claim victim status. These swine already have money, security and position and now want to corner the market in suffering and scars, the consolation prizes of the truly lost.

Frey got those anecdotes the no-risk way: he stole them from a real druggie/criminal author. A much better and more honest one, a guy named Eddie Little-specifically, Frey looted Little’s great debut novel, Another Day in Paradise.

The accusation of theft from Eddie Little is interesting; I’ll have to find that book.

Thanks to salome_st_john for pointing this one out.

Girls who are sad should take a pill

The best part of my occasional medication-checkup visits to the psychiatrist’s office is the brochures. No, really. The drug companies produce these things, which don’t mention any specific drug but urge you to deal with your problem. I’ve posted some pictures of swag and brochures before. Today’s offering is “Balanced”, a look at one housewife’s indoctrination in to the proper way to handle her problems. It seriously looks like that comic strip “Baby Blues”. Also, note older male psychologist authority figure and emphasis on Women Problems.

Balanced!

Annals of Childhood: My Swinging 70s

I’ve previously written about the Decade of Brown as a cultural phenomenon, and more recently about the Big Kids and their heavy metal lives. The parents are their own story.

My own parents were the identified weirdos in the community. Our family was politically left, pacifist, intellectual, and artistic. And we all had big noses. One friendly neighbor said to my mother over a cup of coffee “Ann, you’re really nice people. But you’re not like the others.” Even in the corduroy 1970s, our corner of Orange County was lily-white, right-wing, know-nothing, and kinda stupid. As registered democrats who didn’t go to church and drove a Volvo, my parents were clearly alien.

The 70s were also the decade of divorce, though. More than half of my friends had split families in elementary school. They’d talk about their weekends with Dad, or how Dad and Mom were fighting about the house or the dog. A lot of them got pretty badly stressed by it. I particularly remember a couple of boys who, after their father left, became very combative and tried to ascend to alpha dog by shoving the other boys and challenging us to fights.

Going to their houses was odd too. You weren’t supposed to mention the dad when the mom was around, and a few of the houses had dad’s den preserved as he’d left it because either removing it or using it was too painful. When the mom said “your father…” to the kid there was ice hanging in the air. Being with a friend at the dad’s house was even weirder. Dad usually lived in a smaller place or in an unconventional kind of housing like the Balboa Bay Club or a boat or some condo tower. He’d be in full weekend dad mode trying to provide entertainment for junior and his friends, which was cool, but there was clearly some panic going on there.

And then there was the sex problem. This was the disco era, and the divorced moms and dads were dating like crazy. I’d be over at someone’s house and realize that the mustachioed, nervous Tom Selleck looking guy this week was different from the last one, and that he wasn’t addressed as a dad but as “Tim” or “mom’s friend”. Tim and mom would stand 5 feet apart when the kids were around, and Tim also had a habit of bringing gifts or candy and smiling in a terrified way at us.

The dads’ girlfriends were disco hoochie mamas mostly, and terrified of children. They’d totter around in heels and short skirts grinning at us and making inane small talk for the minimum possible time before vanishing. They were all very tan and wore lots of jewelry. Sometimes girlfriend and dad would go in a room and close the door and have really loud arguments.

The weirdest part of the divorced households was that the adults would just disappear. Mom or Dad and their life mate du jour would flit off for a precious weekend afternoon together leaving us kids to our own devices. I’m surprised that we didn’t manage to burn down any houses or kill any pets. We did break at least one major appliance that I remember.

Finally, drugs. My own parents were of the pre rock ‘n’ roll generation, and having seen a friend melt his head in very early LSD experimentation, they were anti-drug. Anything more than a glass of wine with dinner was a bad idea in our house. But it was pretty clear that Disco Dad and Saturday Night Mom didn’t live that way. I was fascinated by the sight of “responsible adults” being clearly high, or clumsily trying to hide paraphernalia or pills from us.

I think a lot of my cynicism comes from the huge contrast between the reactionary moral and political attitudes of the adults around me and their own behavior. My parents, the distrusted lefty secular humanist eggheads, had a stable and nurturing family and worked out their problems. And they were sober and didn’t go out on Saturday night and leave me at home with a TV dinner. Meanwhile, the local Elmer Gantrys and Dimmesdales were popping disco biscuits, partner-swapping, and shaking their butts to Peaches & Herb while Junior at home was finding their weed stash.

The Ice Storm was like a documentary about my friends’ families growing up.

Of course, now these conflicted right-wing hedonists are running the country. It explains a lot.

Patio Nights: Bad boys, bad boys

Some of you might remember the strange doings in the insurance office upstairs from the patio. The youngish woman who’s apparently the daughter of the insurance agent using the office at night, lots of comings and goings of obviously freaked out addicts, bad scenes with people waving knives and yelling and kicking things. We were on the verge of calling the cops, mostly because she had her young son around for all this fun and because there are a lot of children on the patio who really shouldn’t have to deal with tweakers flailing about waving sharpened screwdrivers.

And then it all stopped. She still showed up but seemed to be doing legit daytime business stuff, and had a guy with her who looked like he had a job and was nice to the kid, and I thought “well good, she stopped dealing”.

Last night she was there with That Guy Who Gets Arrested On Cops, and they were playing yell at each other and slam the door for an hour or so. It wasn’t clear what was going on, but we started to wonder if she was trying to leave and he kept slamming the door on her. Or whether the quiet bits meant that she was being strangled. Or whether the kid was there. Around the time we were thinking seriously we should call the cops, the door opened and Loser Boy appeared. His first act was to dump a cup of ice from the second floor balcony on to bruisedhips which was a mistake, because that’s when the cops got called.

They showed up in about 30 seconds and were oddly casual. While both of them were talking to her inside, Arrest-Me-Now popped off his keychain, slipped down the stairs, and disappeared. Sierra pointed out that he probably lost the keychain so he could hop the fence in back more easily, because Sierra is O.G. from H.B. and thinks that way. Obviously Bluto didn’t want to talk to any cops at length last night.

No idea what happened to her. Part of me sympathizes with her obviously wretched life and wants Things To Get Better, but considering what she’s putting her kid through it might be better if she spent some time in the snicker while Grampa raised Junior. Whatever’s going on, it’s not the six-year-old’s fault.

I’m mostly a small-L libertarian about “drugs”, but speed is such a terrible, terrible thing.

The Big Kids

I grew up in Southern California suburbia in the 1970s. It was an ideal place to be a kid. I was sheltered from the worst of life but not insulated from reality. There was always something to do, and the weather was always good. I had good schools to go to. And the neighborhood was full of kids, so I always had someone to play with when I ran out the door to find adventure. We had glorious dirt clod wars, made bombs, created entire Tonka truck empires, dug pits, and everything else that was fun.

Like most little kids, I was fascinated by the big kids. Starting at about seven or eight years older than me, they were gods of suburbia: large, loud, rough, authoritative, and frightening. They had long hair, and the older ones rode dirt bikes. They listened to crazy heavy metal music. They knew all the bad words, always had fireworks, wore cool surf clothes, and were big and tan and imposing.

The most impressive part about the Big Kids was that they were all apparently insane. For example, they’d get up on the roof of someone’s house with the heavy metal music blasting and scream at the sky repeatedly. In the middle of the night they would ride their dirt bikes up and down the street in nothing but swim shorts, also screaming at the sky. One time, some of the Big Kids stole another little kid’s bike and leaned it against the tree in front of their house. When he showed up to get it, they shot him a bunch of times with a BB Gun from their window while he sobbed and writhed and ran. I watched from my own window across the street, fascinated and terrified.

The death rate for Big Kids amazed me. The next door neighbors lost two of them, the family three doors down lost one, and I can remember three more just from our street during my childhood. Two others ended up permanently and severely handicapped.

The society of Big Kids was very masculine. The Big Kid girls were mousy and wide-eyed, long hair parted in the center. They were nice to me but totally alien in their teenage world. I remember one girl in particular who had an entirely purple bedroom: carpet, bedspread, walls, even a fuzzy purple toilet seat cover. I was at their house with my parents once staring in awe at her purple den. One of the Big Girls died too.

Not all of them were rough tough crazies. Two of the Big Kids I remember mostly for their cars. One was a paraplegic older brother of a friend’s. He had a ’60s Mustang California Special modified with hand controls that was the coolest thing ever, and he gave me a ride in it so I could see how it worked. Another guy had a VW bug full of CBC radio equipment and drove around talking to people in the bug, which I found ultimately awesome. And three identical tow-headed surfer boys down the street were in a locally famous rock band, and I got to watch them practice in their garage. They were rock gods, and one of them had a Van Halen sticker on his VW squareback.

The Big Kids’ music was dark and scary and fascinating itself. I remember looking at the window display in a Licorice Pizza record store for Blue Öyster Cult’s Agents of Fortune, all weird imagery and craziness, and wondering what it was all about. The screaming sex noises of Led Zeppelin and Van Halen confused and attracted me. To this day my reaction to 70s heavy metal and hard rock is a flashback to those kids with their long hair and work shirts and corduroy pants with the comb stuck in back, howling along to Alice Cooper or something.

Since I was a sheltered little kid, I was unaware of what bound together the big kid craziness, the screaming on rooftops, the shirtless midnight motorcycle rides, the caterwauling music, and the deaths. They were of course all high on hard drugs, mostly heroin and hallucinogens, and drunk. All the time. Of the two kids next door, one died in a DUI motorcycle crash and the other OD’d on heroin and died in the snow in the mountains. The kid at the end of the street flipped his VW fastback on the S-curves under the influence. The girl who died had mixed her heroin wrong that day. Of the Big Kids who died on my street, only one that I remember didn’t die from drink or drugs; he got cancer. All of these things I found out years later.

Looking back on it, those kids were generationally doomed. They were all born within a couple of years of 1960 probably, and hit their adolescence just when the 1970s drugs ‘n’ sex culture was at full blast. At 14 it’s not easy to handle free-flowing hard drugs, no-consequences sex, and pop culture that celebrates total hedonism. Like me, they felt safe and insulated in suburbia. But they’d let in an assortment of incubi and succubi they couldn’t resist.

Victoria Williams wrote a great song for them, because she was one of the Big Kids. It’s called “Summer of Drugs”. When I hear that song I think about those stoner surfer kids shooting up and blasting their 70s rock, and dying.

We were too young to be hippies
We missed out on the love
Born to be teens in the late 70s
In the summer of drugs…

The part of “psychotic First Lady” is to be played by Piper Laurie

zombie lizard queen

Possible explanations for this photo include:

  1. David Icke is right. Both the English Royal Family and the U.S. leadership are actually evil space lizards, or “reptoids”. In this shot Laura Bush has just seen Icke across the room and is uncontrollably morphing into her true reptilian self.
  2. Prince Charles, on a desperate Bond-like mission to save the world from the Bush administration, has his Walther PPK in the small of the First Lady’s back as he tries to force the President to resign. This is a doomed effort because the President doesn’t give a shit about his wife or anyone else.
  3. It has now been proven that if you give Camilla Parker-Bowles an injection of curare directly into her spine she turns into Laura Bush.
  4. Condi Rice is across the room and she and the First Lady are having an “evil face” contest.
  5. Cocaine.
  6. As Mrs. Bush explains to Charles that they’ll be snacking on babies later with Karl Rove, he desperately tries to catch the eye of his assistant to get him the fuck out of there to somewhere he can drink this whole fucking visit out of his head.

Add yours as you please!