I had a girlfriend whose brother drank a beer when he was like 13 and by 15 was drinking a 6 pack in the morning before school.  He threw himself in front of a school bus and was killed.  His mother and father then wrecked a car and got divorced.  My girlfriend, bronchi his sister was taken by a rich neighbor lady who attempted to forcibly adopt her.  She apparently became a little Lolita.  I'd seen a school picture of her that about made me cry.  Not because she was tarted up or anything like that, sales but because in this picture she looked vulnerable and hurt.

At night in bed together sleeping she would wake me crying out her brother's name.

She had run away from her parents and the woman who wanted her to be her child, and lived on a boat with a pretty dutch junkie girl.  There are bits of her story I never quite got.  It did get to a point eventually where I said of her if I want to hear some lies, I just call her.

I had a Polish friend who drank a lot.  We worked together, and got a good deal done.  It was fun drinking.  He said it wasn't how much you drank, but what you did when you were drunk.

The writers joke is: Why do writers drink?  – Because it is something they can do when they are drunk.

Alcohol has its uses.  They don't call it "Spirits" for nothing.

When I was a kid the legal drinking age was 18.  I don't know what people really expect.  15, 16, 17 and kids in their separate world have parties with stuff supposedly reserved for wise old adults, who they suspect aren't really that smart.  I say you don't get wise 'cause you get old, but you get old because you were wise.

A Sunday School teacher who taught teenagers said, "What happens is these kids encounter adult problems for the first time, and sometimes it gets ugly."

Deal with these kids, young adults, long enough, and you lose some.  You lose them to suicide, murder, motorcycles, cars too fast too, and drugs.  It happens all around you everywhere you might live.  Its been going on long as I can remember.

Seems like every ten years like clockwork heroin is added to the mix of temptations, is available, and kids use it.  You wonder why, and what really to do about it that makes the most sense.  I hear over in England they just give it to the addicted.  Think the point being that some people can't quit, and it keeps the Mob out.

Apparently musicians are more prone to use heroin than say young engineers or accountants.  There have been some writers like William Burroughs, and a poet I knew that used heroin.  I hear that musicians like it because they can perform while on it, whereas they don't do so well on stage when drunk on alcohol.

Yah sometimes wonder if its worth it to have a certain type of job, a certain type of career, if you need a certain sort of drug to be and do that work?  Maybe yah oughta do something else.  Maybe Keith Richards was really meant to be a History professor?  Should Aretha Franklin been a pastry cook?  Was Billy Holliday going to be better destined to be a maid?

There is a lot of pain in this world.  We all have trouble bearing it.  The working people just get by with beer, and pot and cigarettes.  They are never rich enough to even start up the more expensive habits like cocaine or heroin during normal times.  Leastways that's the way it used to be before Crack.

People have a propensity towards what we call vices.  Up to a certain point they help us bear the pains of life.  Sometimes cigarettes and books in the dim light of dark nights of loneliness and poverty and isolation have been all the company I had.  I really was depressed and miserable even in my late thirties once due to a broken heart.  Things got better actually when I started drinking again.

I became employable again.

I did give up the motorcycle though.  It was incompatible with drinking.

Lucky me, Lucky world…

Sober all the time and I felt fierce, angry, and suicidal quite a lot of the time.  Too often I thought about jumping off a bridge with piano wire around my neck.  I think the world is better off for my flaws and vices that I am aware of.  I know I am imperfect, and lucky.  Probably I was just as lucky to be poor, as I might have been if I had been rich.

The Sociologists says that the really rich, and the really poor, think about money the same way.  Seems like their youth sure share the same world when it comes to the types of drugs they go for.