“It’s a proven fact that prison doesn’t do anything for drug addiction — nothing. Then when they come back they’re recidivists. If you say prison is for punishment, fine. But if you say it’s so people don’t come back then you’ve got to do something so they don’t come back.”
Reblogged 2022-11-17.
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.”
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.
Until you do, nothing else matters.
(Originally posted 05/21/12 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reposted 02/22/18.)
(Originally published 06/06/13 at Trojan Horse Productions.)
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!”
Continue reading * Me, me, me.
The Homeless Blogger 