1000 moments

Moments are one of those ill-defined temporal phrases people throw around due to laziness in language and convenience. I've been thinking about how full my life is lately, and how I live in moments. They are, after all, subjective measures of time. No one has the exact same sense of what a "moment" is, and, therefore, I am not surprised that I am left waiting on hold for 10 minutes when an automated voice interrupts shitty hold-music to inform me that the faceless corporation I'm calling will address my needs in a "moment". You get my point.

So, I am left at the end of each day to filter through those moments and extract some essence of a lesson or grand theme. Most days it is all I can do to take out my contacts and brush my teeth before retiring.

I went to Needle Exchange tonight, routine for me on Wednesdays. I take the 31 Balboa bus toward downtown. At Leavenworth street I debus and make my way through the damaged masses of the Tenderloin. I'm not being melodramatic here; all the people I see look abnormal, addled, angry, tired, disturbed, sick, dirty, desperate, lost. From the bus stop it is only 3 blocks south, but somehow these moments spend on the streets of the Tenderloin seem to stretch to fill my memory. I pass a middle aged man with an army sleeping bag on his back. As I approach to over take him, he is talking to himself and zig-zagging across the concrete sidewalk. I give him a wide berth--I once bumped a drunk homeless guy on the bus at 2am and spent the rest of my ride with him vociferating curses in my ear. I cross a busy one-way street as a gaunt white women spins and twirls as if the street were a field of high grass. She pauses to yell into the stopped traffic and holds up a single fist. She believes in something, presumably, as her fist is a signal and the hoards will rise up at her command and aid her with the harvest. Who knows really? Just another soul who slipped through the cracks of this capitalist social system we got going--safety nets a-plenty. Where is she from, where are her parents, what did she go through, do her siblings call, do people worry about her, does she remember sitting on a warm summer evening watching the lightening bugs flicker and court in the woods? Or was it always that she was misunderstood? Did anyone ever love her and show it?

Some of the clients, as we are told to call them, are amicable and willing to share the details of their situation, drug of choice, addiction, mechanics of drug administration, sexual preferences and so forth. Some of them sing to us, some nod off as we try to ask them questions. There are those few that seem to be functioning members of society. They do have one common thread, they, at one point, lived in the moment. What was the trigger? What was that first moment when they allowed a needle into their vein?

I while back I watched an HBO documentary called TV Junkie . Briefly, Rick Kirkham, a former TV journalist, started to document his life at age 14 with a movie camera he received as a present. It quickly became an obsession, so much so that he had accumulated 1000 hrs of film by the time the documentary was compiled and produced. He film everything, confessed everything, hid nothing from the camera. It was as if the camera was his Jesus-figure, his confessional, his receptacle of atonement. I don't mind telling you, I cried (mostly for his bewildered baby son).

The above mentioned documentary provides the sober and clean world with a glimpse into a situation of spiraling drug addiction. The subject is somewhat atypical as Mr. Kirkham is a successful white male, which most of HBO's audience is, so they presumably would feel more empathy compared with, say, a homeless black junkie.

Oh, it as been said before: "we all have our addictions". Human self-destruction is fascinating and seems to violate laws of nature we though were concrete. Maybe our evolution has progressed so far that our heads are too big, too complexed for the rules of life to contain. We can't, however, escape pathology and disease in particular. We can quite think our way out of everything and avoid suffering.