What's the Use

      I remember laying down in the back of the ambulance and starring at the inside of the roof and wondering, what is the use, what is the purpose of living if I was only going to live my life as a alcoholic and drug addict.  You see, life as a alcoholic or drug addict is a life of pain. The biggest problem is that we never realize that the pain is a shared pain. We are so caught up in ourselves and what we are dealing with, we never take a minute to look and see the pain in the faces of those around us. I never realized the pain and anguish that I was causing to the ones that cared deeply for me. I never took the time to really look and see what my life was doing to the ones that loved me. I have come to realize that at some level, at some point in time I had begun to believe that since I did not care about myself, there was no way anyone else could possibly care about me. That since there was no love in my heart for another human being, no human being had any love for me in their heart. It would take a long time before I realized how wrong I was.
      When we finally arrived at our destination I had no ides where I was. I was about to have my first experience in a mental lock-down ward. Now you can set there and try to imagine what it's like and even listen to someone try to describe it, but you will never be prepared for the experience. They took me into this building, took me upstairs and locked me in a windowless room, never letting me off the gurney. I laid there for what seemed like hours staring at the ceiling and trying to count the cracks. I don't think I could have counted all them if they had left me there for a hundred years. The worse part was the smell. It was a combination of vomit. urine and someone that hadn't bathed in two to three weeks. If you have ever been in a port-a-potty that hadn't been serviced for a long time, the room I was in was worse. After a couple of hours of laying there and trying not to breath a large man, I mean extremely obese when I say large, and smelling very much like the room I was in, came in and I had my very first experience with Thorazine.
      Thorazine is a drug given to mental patients to calm them down and give the Doctors and Nurses control over the patients, or so that's what they tell us. It actually is a drug that makes the world stop. Clocks stop ticking, the earth stops rotating, people stop moving, but most importantly the person that has been injected with it stops living. Not in the final, no breathing, heart stopped pumping, stopped living way. In the nothing matters, I'll just set here and stare out the window forever way. Nothing matters, life is on hold, and the world is far, far away. Tomorrow does not exist.