If I Could Relive a Day of My Life

I don't have a lot of memories of my mother because we were apart.  I remember visits to Terminal Island or Pleasanton.  Cold visits in cordoned areas to mingle with inmates were not memorable even when the inmate was your mother.  There was a time when i was 18 however.  She had been out of prison and trying to get her life together with a man 30 years her senior.  She was supposedly clean but her relationship with heroin and methadone was a palette of smeared colors and images, overlapping and smudging one another into a mural of indistinct confusion.  

My Aunt and Uncle told me my mom was coming to take my brother and I to Knott's Berry Farm.  It was an amusement park.  We rode the rides and she waited.  I did not know how to act.  She was my mom and I longed for her but I did not know how to be close to her.  I went through the motions.  I laughed and smiled and enjoyed the trappings of the park.  I didn't know what to say.  At the end of the night we stopped at Coco's back in town before being dropped off at our home with our Aunt and Uncle.  My mom disappeared to the restroom for a long time.  When she finally returned my brother and i had mostly finished our meals.  She apologized and sat down to her salad.  A moment later her head dropped towards the table and her face fell into the salad.  I was 18.  My mom gathered herself and woke up...some.  She drove us home.  I didn't know.  Maybe I should have but I did not.  I always believed every word she said to me.  When she said she was not on heroin I knew it was true.  Only later when my Aunt and Uncle commented did it occur to me she may have lied, even to me.  

If I could relive that day I would tell her I loved her so much she would not need heroin.  I just know she was looking for love in that drug.  I know she was looking for my love in that heroin.  I know the years and years apart had taken a toll on her.  I know she sought love in all kinds of ways.  I needed her love too.  We were both emptier from not having one another.  It was commensurate.  If I could relive that day I would tell her I love her on the ride to the park, at the log ride, in the old west section of the park, at the games and the roller coasters.  I would tell her on the ride home, too, and at Coco's, and she would feel the warmth and that thing from inside her veins that made her disappear into the ether where memories of a son's love and of bonds unattended are too hazy to know or feel would be obsolete and she would stay clean and the overdose that came  one year later would never need to happen because she would feel loved and contented.

legalize it?

(far be it from me to criticize it...) still, to hear jim gray yesterday on the radio, a judge from the sacred bastion of right wing values that is orange county, california, advocating for the legalization of marijuana and other drugs, was surprising, to say the least, (and a bit refreshing.)

i think it is probably a bad idea to criminalize consensual crimes, (crimes for which the only victim is the self.) it clogs up our courts and prisons. (we incarcerate at a higher rate than any country on earth.) it does not address the social ill nor does incarceration seek to rehabilitate. in fact, the current environment encourages recidivism. moreover, it is not as if there have not been bold experiments in alternative methods of dealing with drug use and addiction. switzerland has recently legalized heroin for prescribed use, based on some encouraging results from long term studies. in holland where marijuana is legalized and controlled, the rate of use is lower than here in the united states. this article does a pretty good job of summing up human nature as it relates to drug use and includes a great graph on the relative harm of all drugs, including alcohol and tobacco.



well, judge jim gray has written a book, why our drug laws have failed and what we can do about it, which serves to indict the war on drugs and the entire mentality represented by that phrase, (which in retrospect seems somehow worse than naive.) in fact, the judge seems to be quite the renaissance man as he has also penned another book about being a judge, a play, and a how-to book for young people to maximize their lives. it seems likely judge jim gray may have his sights set on higher office sometime in the future and based on his primary issues as listed on his website, i am interested in hearing more from such a progressive candidate. (that page lists 13 issues well worth clicking on to give a quick read-through.) one thing the judge points out is that when alcohol was legalized after prohibition, crime dropped by 20%. he expects the same thing would happen today.

what we are doing today clearly is not working. i have not read judge jim gray's book yet but it seems worth the time.