Tag Archives: Addiction

Jimmy, part 2

Dependency, Homelessness, Job search/Job prospects, Local news, Thursday posts, , , ,

Thursday 2014-07-03.  Jimmy came up to me at McDonald’s yesterday and sat down and talked about the incident.  He doesn’t say he’d been drinking.  He says people thought he’d been drinking.

Recall his psychiatric diagnoses.

Pastor sent me this clipping about the homeless squatters’ camp underneath the Jones Falls Expressway, which the City was about to raze — again. He thought the housing vouchers it mentions might be available to me. They’re not. A different detail caught my eye: the remark that many people in the camp “struggle with mental illness and addiction.” Note the “and.”

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Jimmy

Dependency, Thursday posts, , , ,

16:01 Saturday 2014-06-28.  [Written in the “smoke pit” at the shelter, waiting admission.]

They escorted Jimmy out of here about half an hour ago.  He’s always been a milquetoast.  Now he was shouting and cursing.  “Yeah, I been drinking.”  Whatever happened at the desk, he’s barred out now.  I owe him $2.

He’s diagnosed with bipolar II disorder and ADHD.  I’ve seen him reading books about both of those diseases, but never anything about alcoholism.

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News from the world of homelessness

Homelessness, Poverty, Squalor, , , , , ,

Monday, March 12, 2018

This addict — from the way he acts, and the way he is in conversation, you’d never suppose he has a problem — complained to me that we’ve had an unusual number of crazies at the shelter in recent days.

Related:  Life in the looney bin

Someone’s taken to stealing caps.
You know, knit ski caps?  Those things.
Someone’s stealing them.

Now, they PROVIDE those things, for the asking.
Someone’s stealing them
from other homeless men.

Now, in Lutheran theology,
we speak of “the Three Uses of the Law,” that is, God’s law, the Ten Commandments.
The “First Use” is to provide order in society.

I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Me, Me, Me

Dependency, Get on your feet, Homelessness, Motivations, Poverty, Squalor, , , , , , ,

(Originally published 06/06/13 at Trojan Horse Productions.  Republished here 10/30/13.)

This has been a very heavy day, and there’s a lot here. For the moment, at least, I will not try to organize this.

Darkness at times appears to serve Light; destruction, to serve creation.

It is a rude awakening for me to have to revisit the world of infantile self-centeredness, apparently to have to re-learn correctly this time (at age 57!) some things I didn’t learn correctly on the first go-round.

A world where it is correct for me to want things only for “Me, me, me!”
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* ΔFosB: The genetic addiction risk factor

Dependency, Science, ,

I only this week became aware of this.

Wikipedia:  FOSB

The article is extremely technical, but makes clear in no uncertain terms that Delta FosB is the genetic risk factor for addiction.  All addicts have it, regardless whether the addiction is chemical or behavioral.

It also helps me understand how, without having been born with the specific genes for alcoholism, they came to be present for me in middle age; how, after decades of consuming alcohol no differently than any normal person, I abruptly became a “drunk” at about age 32.

Related: Alcoholism basics

Reblogged 2023-04-27.