Sunday, March 27, 2011

Observations from the Edge 3.27

I was finishing a day of shopping with a friend when I got one of those calls I sometimes get. She called just to hear me answer, to see if I was alright, basically to see if I was alive. There was a time when the calls bothered me, I thought people didn't trust me, but I learned over time it wasn't a matter of trust but that the caller cared and really just wanted to make sure I was well.

Sadly there was another reason for the call. She had just lost an acquaintance who she told me was the smartest person she had ever met in her life yet she had never seen a day when he wasn't wasted on something. He was a star lacrosse and soccer player in high school and in a gifted student program all his life. He was attending a major university where he had been awarded an honors scholarship to study psychology.

Now he is dead, he overdosed on a mixture of heroin and fentanyl* which is otherwise known as magic. I recently read somewhere that a one dose bag of heroin is cheaper than a six pack of beer, it really is a messed up world we live in. Such a terrible sad fucking waste.

I really don't mind the calls at all.

*If you don't know fentanyl is a synthetic opiate about eighty times as powerful as morphine and the use of it and heroin together is a hundred times more likely to lead to overdose and death than the use of either alone.