A new year, a renewed interest in my Journal. I have been neglecting this Journal and not much has happened, but I feel like I should be giving it an update. It may be fruitless, because with the LiveJournal layoffs who knows how long this website will last. However, I will leave the update for later, because I just realized throughout this Journal I have never written about the night I got arrested. My first serious encounter with Law Enforcement and my first ever encounter with imprisonment had a serious effect on me. It gave me an extreme fear of authority figures, a Persecution Complex, and a degree of Paranoia that has persisted in my life up until this point, although it has dwindled over the past two years.
It was the summer of 2003. The Iraq occupation was in full swing, and the news was full of negative stories about the Bush administration’s grabs for Executive Power — including the creation of Guantanamo, the increased intelligence gathering, and the PATRIOT Act. I don’t think the Abu Ghraib
story had broken yet, so all the news about “enhanced interrogations” had yet to enter the public’s eye.
Needless to say, it was a troubled time, especially as portrayed by the mass media. It was a bit strange for me, because I began reading Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara just as the insurgency was ramping up in Iraq, and the parallels were striking. I thought the Iraq venture was doomed, based on what I read and what was happening. I thought the Administration was using the Iraq war and the broader “War on Terrorism” as a pretext to install new, restrictive laws such that after some form of economic collapse (which I also viewed as inevitable based on what I had read about the housing market), these laws could be used to declare an emergency and suppress popular uprisings.
However, I don’t truly know how many of these thoughts were my own. Sometimes I think that none of them were. As Darron once told me, “caco, you’re a born follower.” So I get easily sucked in to persuasive ideas. I was reading a blog by Al Martin and I even subscribed to the Newsletter. He portrayed all news stories in as negative a light as possible and alluded to his “anonymous Defense Department friends” who insisted that a quasi-fascist state was just around the corner. Combine this with the relentless liberalism of the Internet at large, throw in the extremely negative press coverage of the time, and I bought into the story completely. It seemed obvious. I hadn’t descended so low as to become an InfoWars regular, though.
So, in this climate of fear, I began experimenting with various hallucinogenic drugs. Not the brightest idea, I know, but I wanted to “expand my mind.” (What I did was ruin it.) I had been smoking marijuana since 2001, and the only effect it seemed to have most of the time was make videogames more
fun and horrible Adult Swim cartoons seem hilarious. The only serious problem with it was how compulsive I was about it. Because everything seemed so entertaining, I never wanted to be sober. I smoked multiple joints per day. It was a psychological addiction.
However, early in the year I tried LSD once (no serious effect other than shifting plaid walls), mushrooms twice (once I hallucinated that the Mr. Show episode I was watching was melting and the other time I spent the night on the couch writhing and watching Big Trouble in Little China), and salvia in both smoked form and tincture form (the smoked experience I have already written about, and the tincture was a much milder, body experience). I tried all these drugs while I was on the powerful antidepressant Effexor.
I don’t know if it was inevitable, or it was the Effexor, or it was the hallucinogens, or it was a combination of the two, but something tipped me over into Mania. I began dropping dozens of pounds of weight (got down to 160) and making extensive to-do lists and composing letters to ex-president Bill Clinton and taking I-Ching readings and believing in synchronicity as espoused by Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick. Speaking of Dick (a big drug user who had an apparent mental illness) I was also reading him quite intensely (VALIS had a big effect on me) and started to take some of his crazy ideas seriously. I don’t know if this was because of the drugs or because my personality was naturally drawn to him. Needless to say I had little faith in “consensus reality” as I perceived it, due to a combination of many factors.
So with all this stuff going on, at the same time the company I worked for, owned by a friend of mine (Erin), began to fall apart. They started to take money out of the Health Insurance Billing business and put it in a new business: a Collection Agency. (Big mistake.) They needed to have layoffs. What they did was lay off the worst performing employee that Erin had wanted to get rid of for months (Roma) and the most recently hired employee (Bill). However, these two employees I viewed as my closest friends at the company, and I thought the layoffs were a personal smack against me on the part of Erin. (Darron encouraged me in this perception.)
You have to understand, Erin (and the other two Owners who shared the company) held little interest in day-to-day operations. They understood next to nothing about correcting insurance claims, they didn’t know Medicare or Medicaid codes, and they hired rank newbs who were just as ill-informed yet were also personal friends of Erin’s. Any time we ran into problems, we were brushed off and told to “figure it out.” Nevertheless, they made big promises to clients about how their employees were the best and most efficient in the industry, so whenever we went on-site and were exposed as incompetent, we all felt like major shitheads.
In addition, the Owners were rarely around. They only seemed to take interest in the company when clients’ checks came in, or when networking at conferences or selling contracts. (I didn’t realize at the time how important and difficult these latter two facets of Entrepreneurship were.) But in addition
to this, Erin would promise exorbitant salaries and bonuses to the employees, fail to follow through claiming the profit margins were too low, and then take expensive vacations to Jamaica. So it looked bad for all concerned. Resentment among the employees was high, and one of our past-times was bad-mouthing the Owners. I contributed to this quite heavily.
I had just read The Communist Manifesto and Imperialism so I was quite angry with her for being one of the “Owner class” and treating her Company the way she did. I began to view most Capitalist enterprises as consisting of exploitative buffoons with qualifications getting rich off the backs of working folk. Typical stuff most liberals go through, but backed up with experience.
So one night, I got drunk off Knob Creek whiskey (think I drank half the bottle), smoked a joint or two of weed, and decided to walk to Erin’s house to personally confront her about the layoffs.
I figured I would walk by Al DeLarge’s apartment on the way and drop off a movie of his that I had borrowed. I took a wrong street and got turned around trying to find his apartment building — I thought his neighborhood (Kirklevington) was on the way to Erin’s but I was wrong. The streets became totally unfamiliar; I got completely lost. I pulled out my Palm Pilot and started looking at my map of Lexington to see where I should go, but I became extremely self-conscious about it. It was midnight or so. I was walking alone, glancing alternately at an expensive technological gadget and various street signs. I thought for sure anyone who saw me would recognize me as a vulnerable newb and do something . . . . unpleasant. So I put away the Palm Pilot and decided to wing it. (Sigh . . .)
Well, this entry has become quite long, so I believe I will create a cliffhanger and cut it off here. The last thing I will mention is the possessions I had on me: they were extremely conducive to having a negative experience. In my pocket I had a marijuana pipe which was shaped exactly like a automobile’s
cigarette lighter and held about two joints’ worth of weed, a pack of cigarettes, and a Bic disposable lighter. I also had a laptop bag with me, which contained no laptop, but held various notebooks, a DVD of Punch Drunk Love (which I was returning to Al, as mentioned), a DVD of Ernest Goes to Jail, a scholarly work on the Jewish Kabbalah (related to gnosticism, which Philip K. Dick was into), and a copy of the Unabomber Manifesto. I wore a tie-dyed shirt and a pair of jeans, and my hair was disheveled (as usual).
Tune in next time for the continuation of caco Goes To Jail!