I suppose the blog went the way of its referent, and disappeared. I enjoyed American Dad. Even as I argued with the author, I got the sense of an honorable man who was willing to risk his fortune to speak the truth.

38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

(John 18; King James Version (KJV) Bible)

The notion of truth is extant in a number of different contexts. In the painting, above, we can find a measure of truth, but this truth is aesthetic. Pilate used the term to mock his position, as judge of a trial which he clearly thought was closer to farce than reality. Postmodernist faggots will often assert that no such thing exists as truth. One of the more annoying aspects of working where I do is having to deal with such goons. They’ll often excuse their devotion to orthodoxy, and my lack of enthusiasm for the same, by asserting something like “that’s your truth, but I have my own.” Such statements are meaningless in themselves, and when I hear them, I make a mental note never to take the speaker seriously, in any context, ever again.

I’d like to discuss the notion of truth in a restricted domain, motivated by logicians like Russell and Tarski, who were also fans of the correspondence theory. Bertrand Russell wrote that the logical proposition is the bearer of truth. (1) He also noted that propositions are encoded in sentences. (2) Tarski’s theory of truth (3) is the one most cited today. Like Russell’s theory, it includes a two-language composite structure. The concept of a sentence as truth-bearer is pretty straightforward. By sentence we mean a set of sounds, uttered in sequence, or a set of squiggly lines, which make up a well-formed formula. In either case, the reader or listener is able to intuitively decode the semantic content of the language, which is then metalinguistically used to get at the logical proposition beneath the words. This last part is the tricky part, because all sorts of things can go wrong in the mind of the reader, as he attempts to unconceal the truth-bearing proposition behind the metalanguage. (4)

So what is truth? I’m a fan of the correspondence theory in most contexts; though there are competitors (5) with their own merits. Aristotle was the first correspondence theorist. He wrote:

But on the other hand there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate. This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are. To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false; but neither what is nor what is not is said to be or not to be.

(6)

The concept of truth is pre-epistemological. This is a fancy way of saying that what we know is based partly upon the truth of the thing we claim to know. You can’t “know” something that is false, because falsehoods evade justification, which is another prerequisite to knowledge. Plato called knowledge “justified true belief,” (7), but the Gettier cases (8) suggest that justification and truth are not enough yet to define knowledge. There is some additional prerequisite, which is very difficult to pin down.

So, what does all this complicated stuff mean for us? Basically it means that, s being a well formed sentence:

s is true iff s

In other words, if I make a statement, I am prepared to back it up with a pointer to some fact, some state-of-affairs, that is verifiable. If I say:

There is a blue car in space no. 4 of the parking lot.

Then any listener who can intuit the semantic import of this well-formed sentence can appropriately check space 4, and verify the existence of the car so mentioned.

The correspondence theory and Tarski’s truth conditions have some notable contextual problems, however. Suppose I write on this blog that:

5 + 3 = 8

Can any of my readers be expected to find the numbers 5, 3 and 8 in some spatiotemporal location? It seems unlikely. Try it out.

There are certain truths that can be uttered without metaphysical correspondence. I can claim this sentence is true (and I do). I can be sure it is true. Perhaps more sure of it than most other things, despite the fact that I can never tell you what the number 5 looks like, or where it’s located.

There are people who make pretty good arguments for the untruth of all mathematical statements. (9) Such epistemologists/metaphysicians generally don’t deny that mathematics is useful, but they find it inconceivable to believe that a sentence full of acausal, abstract objects can bear truth-claims.

1. 1. Russell, Bertrand. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. London: Routledge, 2010. 12-13.
   2. Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting” Mind, 1905, 14 (56): 479–493.
   3. Tarski, Alfred. “The Semantic Conception of Truth.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1944, 4 (3): 341–376.
   4. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Model Theory” Accessed 2018 FEB 05 (link)
   5. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Coherence Theory” Accessed 2018 FEB 05 (link)
   6. Aristotle. Metaphysics IV. (1011b25)
   7. Plato. Theaetetus. (201c-210b)
   8. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Gettier Problems” Accessed 2018 FEB 05 (link)
   9. Field, Hartry. Realism, Mathematics and Modality. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

There’s a heated argument down below, in some ancient thread. Brother Kryptonian wrote:

My position has and always shall be, that man NEEDS women, so please stop side tracking this issue

Despite the angry responses he got, I can’t disagree with this brother. I grew up with the sure knowledge that I needed a woman. I remember expecting to find a cute girlfriend, sometime in my late teens. I figured I would serve a Mormon mission, come home and marry her, and immediately begin cranking out hot Mormon babies. We’d grow old together, each having been each others’ first loves, and eventually be buried in the shade of the temple.

Of course, these dreams and expectations were largely ideological: a product of the pre-fab identity I was born into (see Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser for more on this idea). They also grew up alongside a great number of other expectations and dreams, which included (but were not limited to) owning a flying car, and taking regular vacations to domed resort cities on the Planet Venus.

Men need women. This can’t be denied. Men also need antibiotics, regular dental checkups, a functional weight room, and a home with electricity and running water on tap. Everything we were created and/or evolved to need is not necessarily available in the world we find ourselves in. Getting basic: Many men starve to death in places like Africa and Asia. The fact that they were born with a need to eat food did not guarantee food to be on offer.

Thus I read Kryptonian’s arguments with Earl, Honeycomb, et. al. to be an argument of nature v. nurture. Men need women for companionship, to keep their homes, and to serve their emotional, sexual and temporal needs. Unfortunately, women are in very short supply presently. What we have instead are skank-ho wimminz.

At some point in time, between my early years of confidence that I’d end up a married father, and have a career as a radio DJ, and the present day, I found AfOR’s blog. The author lived my dream, only to see his life flushed directly into the toilet by his vindictive wife. In my earlier years (going on seven years now) he was my tutor to instruct me. The fact that I use the term “wimminz” to denote most modern females is a direct result of reading his work in those days. I can’t say for certain that his survival guide saved me for a prison sentence, but I know I’m less likely to be on the end of a false accusation because I follow most of his sound advice.

I do not agree with AfOR on everything. For example: NAWALT. I’m totally fine with the assumption that there are chaste women in the world who will keep their commitments and not screw their husbands over. I am confident of this, despite the fact that many of my friends and relatives have been screwed over, by the wives who promised to “love, honor and obey.” The screwing-over came the minute they became bored, or the screwing-over became convenient, with absolutely no thought of the future consequences, to their husbands, their children, or even themselves.

What I am most certain of is that I can not discern the women from the wimminz. This was one of the first propositions in which I ever had complete faith, and I remain absolutely confident in my own inability to pick out a woman from among the wimminz.

Moreover, it is not my burden to do the discerning. In AfOR’s own words:

Now, how do we differentiate between women and wimminz?

 

Simple, as Men, we don’t… IT IS NOT OUR FUCKING PROBLEM!

(Misogynists-R-Us)

I am, of course, happy that Brother Derek has found a decent woman, and is currently engaged in repopulating his part of the world with his descendants. He is a better and more trusting man than I am. I do hope that Kryptonian can find a woman, rather than ending up suckered by a wimminz into giving up all his money. As for me, I find the cost-benefit ratio pretty fearsome, and I won’t be taking that particular plunge.

I got nothing for your Sunday morning. Fortunately, Pastor Manning is ready to fill in. Sit back, and watch the master (troll) deliver a down-home Christian sermon.

https://youtu.be/EY1bFvVMOak

I just got done with Peter Sloterdijk’s book Bubbles, which is the first huge tome in a trilogy entitled Spheres, that, when taken together, will probably compose the author’s magnum opus.

While I’d never call myself a philosopher, I have become competent at reading philosophy, thanks to bothering people who are smarter than I am, while on the clock. Sloterdijk is a philosopher. He’s in residence at Art and Design University, Karlsruhe (Germany). He also hosts a popular television talk show, where he has featured guests as diverse as Paul Virilio and Slavoj Žižek. It’s illustrative to note the difference between European and American tee-vee audiences by this fact alone. I can’t even find middlebrow stuff on pay tee-vee here.

Sloterdijk’s main point in this book is strangely relevant to the ‘sphere (sorry for the pun). It’s a clumsy segue; but, I’m a huge fan of blogs like The Anarchist Notebook, where there’s a fair bit of philosophical import on offer. The author has lately been critiquing open borders libertarians. Our Questioning comrade writes stuff such as:

Open borders advocates’ argument on immigration and human movement, if applied elsewhere, would hold that drug dealers should be allowed to cook meth in an RV within National Parks because the state has no legitimate authority to enforce those rules because it has no just claim to that land it acquired through coercion and finances through theft. Also, in a libertarian society drug dealing would be legal and so would meth production, so the state has no right to enforce anti-drug laws, either.

(Anarchist Notebook)

Libertarians like the idea of open borders because they think that the border jumpers are, at heart, individuals; and that as individuals are basic to a political system, they can be easily integrated into the system they’re jumping into. Thus we see the philosophical problem at the core of political libertarianism: It is a confusion as to what is basic in the political sphere (sorry, again). Libertarians like to think that the individual is basic, but as Sloterdijk points out, individuals don’t exist. Human beings are born with a sense of longing for communion.

Sloterdijk speculates that we come to the conclusion that we are meant to be together with one other due to the presence of the placenta in the womb. The placenta has its own pulse, distinct from the fetus’, and being flushed through the birth canal (and into the underworld) is the beginning of a psychic separation from which we spend the rest of our lives trying to recover.

(Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres Vol. 1: Bubbles. trans: M. Lowenthal. New York: Semiotext(e), 2011. 343-347)

Thus we find ourselves yearning for our twin, and when we find this person, we instinctively marry and settle down and have children.

(Sloterdijk, 414-419)

This is more important than anyone, these days, is prepared to admit. The basic political unit is the dyad: the two-sphere, the family unit, composed of a man and a woman (sorry faggots). This is what the libertarians get wrong, and this is why they’re destined to endlessly circle-jerk from one failure to another, dreaming of a society in which potheads can drive stoned without a government license, without ever causing any accidents. The libertarian paradise suggests that we can successfully integrate 7 billion African refugees into New Mexico without significant social problems. They’re all individuals, and as such, interchangeable with the legal citizens whose people settled that part of North America, so it’s no big deal.

Society in microcosm is not a single person, it is the relationship between two individuals. Herbert Marcuse noted, way back in the 1950’s, that this relationship transcended sex. He also noted that modern industrialized society found it to be too subversive to allow developing naturally. Marcuse invites a comparison:

compare love-making in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticized. Libido transcends beyond the immediate erotogenic zones a process of nonrepressive sublimation. In contrast, a mechanized environment seems to block such self-transcendence of libido. Impelled in the striving to extend the field of erotic gratification, libido becomes less “polymorphous,” less capable of eroticism beyond localized sexuality, and the latter is intensified.

 

Thus diminishing erotic and intensifying sexual energy, the technological reality limits the scope of sublimation. It also reduces the need for sublimation. In the mental apparatus, the tension between that which is desired and that which is permitted seems considerably lowered, and the Reality Principle no longer seems to require a sweeping and painful transformation of instinctual needs. The individual must adapt himself to a world which does not seem to demand the denial of his innermost needs: a world which is not essentially hostile.

(Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. New York: Routledge, 1991. 77-78)

Ultimately, the study of what exists is ontology. We are designed (by God or nature, it doesn’t really matter) to couple up with someone we like, and we construct a dyadic ontology to protect ourselves, primarily from invasive ideas. The status-quo hates this, and has spent enormous amounts of time and money trying to erase this aspect of human nature, largely through ideological nonsense like radical feminism, white nationalism, and political libertarianism. We can take heart in the fact that eventually, our enemies are doomed to fail. We are hard wired to immunize ourselves from these toxic ideas, and our resistance to them begins at birth.

To begin with, I’d like to sincerely thank our Comrade Soldier, Brother Jason, for sharing his story about overcoming addiction. Given that I could barely quit cigarettes, and still drink coffee, I’m always a bit awestruck at hearing such powerful testimony.  Shades of Nietzsche’s superman peek through such tales.

I should also preface this by admitting that I don’t expect this article to get many hits. Some of you will probably feel offended. That’s fine.

One of the things addictions seem to do is to hollow out the addict’s psychic personality. The constructed subject, in itself, is transformed (often in a very short time) into a machine which has as its goal the procurement of the substance (or behavior) which is the focus of the addiction. All the other aspects of the subject — the things that once made him “him” — are more-or-less blunted to serve the fix, or transformed into means to this end.

Johnny Rotten eulogized his friend, British musician Sid Vicious, in the media. Sid died of a heroin overdose, a day after murdering his Jewish-American girlfriend in New York City. Johnny described Sid’s decline into murder and suicide as a complete transformation: “Once you start on that heroin trail… it’s gone… you just disappear.” (The Unseen Sid Vicious)

What is most interesting is that the same phenomenon seems to happen to many PUA types.

The first clue that this process is at work is an immediate willingness to destroy once close, meaningful social relationships. This is not the same process that single dudes complain about when a brother gets wed. We all know the story about the pal who gets married, and suddenly disappears from view. That’s not what’s happening here. In the first place, the newly married brother has a legitimate commitment to a wife, and is probably working on starting a family. PUA types have no such reasonable conflicts. The women they bang don’t generally want any commitment to a man. They just want to fuck. Fucking such women doesn’t entail long hours at work to save for junior’s private school tuition. Moreover, the meaningful social relationships that such men enjoyed prior to adopting the PUA lifestyle are often destroyed overtly, by antisocial and outrageous behavior. PUA types self-induce a psychic erasure, replacing their authentic personality with a bizarre collection of tics, sexual fetishes, and irregular grooming and dressing habits.

The second clue directly follows from the first. What psychic contents are left are entirely self-centered. PUA types seem to define themselves, far too often, by being as annoying an asshole as possible, despite the fact that this is contextually unnecessary. Before finding books by Tucker Max and Cernovich, many of my pals (and it was not just internet acquaintances – I had meatspace friends who went this route) were on their way to moderately successful careers and had already begun establishing stable lives. After adopting their PUA personae, they generally lost interest in doing interesting stuff, and preferred to slack off, making “being a PUA” their one obvious goal in life. They still made enough money to buy fuzzy hats and get manicured fingernails, but all their higher aspirations seemed to go down the toilet.

In an essay, Jack Donovan defines the “metrosexual” PUA as “a “mirror man” whose highest narcissistic concerns are pleasure-seeking and being regarded as “desirable.” He may be in love with himself, but that, too, is a shallow kind of love. He cares more about how he looks and how well he fucks than what he has achieved or how well he is respected.” (Everyone A Harlot)

Now, the PUA will rebut these observations by claiming that their lifestyle has “liberated” the men who embrace it to build an authentic identity. The opposite is actually true. An authentic personality is socially constructed, and is based upon meaningful interpersonal relationships and ties to community. The PUA lifestyle does not allow for an authentic personality. It obliterates it.

It’s funny because it’s true.

I’ve seen my own clients, many of whom are very decent people, demolished by an anti-male court system…

[Editor: This is the last part in a series of articles on overcoming escapism by Brother Jason, a soldier in the Salvation Army. Jason doesn’t have a blog, but you should show him some love here in this shithole. If you’re joining late, you’ll want to read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.]

Obviously……I didn’t jump, fall or drop off the Golden Gate…but even today, every January in California since then……..it’s always to this day been an uneasy month to realize how close I was. On the 10th anniversary of that fateful day…..I did actually weep a bit at home. Life went on.

What kept me from plunging to my death? A vision. Really. A vision. As I stood, barely balancing on the rail on the rail ready to go to my death…….I saw a man. He had sandals on. Was dressed in a tunic, a robe of sorts with a belt. He had long hair, a beard…….and the most serene dark eyes I had ever seen. He was standing about ten feet away from me. His eyes had such deep pity for me. Real pity. As if he could feel everything I had been through for my whole adult life. All he did was beckon me to come to him. He didn’t speak. He didn’t slip me the answer. He didn’t tell me “I had so much to live for” and he didn’t make any defensive moves to save me from falling.

He beckoned again. I jumped off the rail back on to the walkway and smacked down hard on to the pavement. I looked up and he was was gone. I suddenly felt very sick again……..I started puking again. I passed out.

I awoke in a bedroom. I immediately knew it was a hospital or sorts. A nurse smiled at me and said gently “hey…..you’re awake. you took quite a spill…a passing car saw you passed out on the Golden Gate Bridge. They called the police. They found a dogtag on you, around your neck; assumed you were a veteran and brought you here….you’re at the veterans hospital here in San Francisco. You’re safe now.” (the dogtag was my grandfathers from WW II) “Mr. Jones???” She said cautioiusly….I just shook my head and said “that was my grandfather….”

“You’ve been out cold for almost 48 hours……you detoxed bad, you’re still detoxing we have you on sedatives…….” I then noticed the restraints on my arms and legs.

Once the formalities were cleared up, of who I was………I was introduced to a man from Narcotics Anonymous. It was then I decided that life may not be worth living, but I was going to finish it up the proper way. I also promised “god” that I would never drink and drug again. It would ber a few more years before I became a practicing Christian.

I stayed sober and clean for the fact that I almost tasted death. My life did not suddenly become “easy” after getting sober……in fact for a few years…..it got worsre. All the nonsense I had let go over the years came back. All at once. ALso confessing to my parents that their “bright and promising son” had in fact been using drugs since 1989. The people I hurt, stole from, let down, lied to over the past decade with a clear mind suddenly washed over me hard. I also lost my mother to undected cancer a few years after getting cleaned up. She was only 62. A woman who never smoked, drank and was not by any measure a typical “wimmen” you see clogging the streets, church and Internet today.

I stayed sober and clean for the fact that I had made a “promise” to the “big guy upstairs” and I figured for once I was going to keep a promise…….had not kept one to anybody for a very long time. It wasn’t easy, but it gets easier now…..I do owe a debt of gratitude to Narcotics Anonymous. It really helped me at first…especially in the first year. Jokes about “AA” programs and people aside; all this support group does is to help people who don’t want to use anymore to be encouraged, listened to, understood. I’ve been involved in very heated meetings, cried a lot, argued and laughed too. I am grateful. I am also grateful for the people I saw when I first came. All colors. All walks of life. Old and young. Rich and poor. Clean for 24 hours, clean for 25 years. Drug addiction is an ironic equalizer in our culture.

No, I never relapsed but have been temped more than a few times.

Yes, I did eventually become a Christian…and the man I saw that night on the Golden Gate Bridge???? I am convinced it was indeed the Savior of us all. Jesus Christ.

Here is a video of Fiona Apple, she looked like this when I partied with her. Her song “first taste” probably from 1999 or thereabouts

[Editor: This is the third part in a series of articles on overcoming escapism by Brother Jason, a soldier in the Salvation Army. Jason doesn’t have a blog, but you should show him some love here in this shithole. If you’re joining late, you’ll want to start at Part 1 here. You can also go back to Part 2 here.]

I was now “sneaking” drinks at the nightclub to steady my hand and to stop the “shakes” that were almost uncontrollable when a level of alcohol was not kept up in my body.

The club owner, Harry Denton an “old SF queen” (or “hag” depending on his mood) warned me right before Christmas, “babes, you gotta get it together, I don’t know what’s wrong, but figure it out…you’re on thin ice here.”

I started to pawn off anything, and everything that was of value that I had in storage. When I wasn’t partying, or working…….I was at my roach infested room just crying……..bawling is probably the better term. I remember waking up New Years Day 2005 on the floor in pile of my my own puke in some house waaaaayyyyyyy out in the Richmond neighborhood; I awoke, looked around and saw two “hot girls” giving me looks of hate of “GET OUT NOW”

I came to work on January 5th, 2005. Before my shift started, I was stocking the bar…….and I ducked below, grabbed three shots of Jim Beam…….to steady my hands, they would not stop shaking! I stood up and………there was my boss. The club owner, Harry Denton. “What’s up babes?” He asked, he was smiling, and I figured….okay, turn on the charm. Be cool. He won’t know or he’ll just give me a warning (again).
He jokes with me a bit and then says, I gotta talk to you real quick in the office before you start……..

We get to his swank, and gaudy looking office. He is telling me about work, how he started out as a waiter in San Francisco in 1966; while printing up paperwork…….small talk. No anger, or attitude with me. I’m thinking to myself “dodged it, he’s just making sure I am sober for work, testing me. coolness!” He then, hands me the paperwork he printed up.

He says “Babes. I am really sorry. I have to let you go. You have been sneaking drinks here, which is theft, and it’s a policy when you were hired that there is absolutely NO drinking on the job.” He then tells me to read the document and sign it. He opens a business “checkbook” and then says, “since I am terminating you, on the day of your shift…..I have to pay you for the shift…….and I actually like you. A lot. I am going to pay you for a full forty hour week, and I am doing this as a favor because I do like you.”

I am reading the document, tears welling up in my eyes. So this is the end. Statements from co-workers stating on dates when they saw me “sneaking” a drink. I tried to plead with him, promise him that it would not happen again. The usual last straws of a drunk and druggie. Lies. Promises that I would not keep.

Harry took off his glasses, leaned on his desk, gently smiled and said “I know now that you lost a decent career at IBM probably due to this same issue I am firing you for now. Look, you’re young…..you are slumming it here at place like this, look…you do good work, and you have potentials….but this is MY business. MY career. MY passion that I built from nothing when I arrived in San Francisco almost 40 years ago. If I let this slide, then I will lose control of this whole place. It is a priveldge to work at this club and for ME. I need people here who are on board 100% with MY vision here in this City. Look, get some help. It’s not too late for you. You have your tip-book / log? Let me see it.” I handed him my tip-book.

Harry carefully looked at my tip log, got out a calculator and got an average of the tips I made during a work week. He then opened his wallet and pulled out 950.00 cash and said “Here, I don’t have to do this either babes, but I like you…I am going to ‘tip’ you out for the work week as well.” He then gave me the check for a weeks worth of work.
He again asked me to sign the document…….more firmly now. I picked up the Cross pen, and signed it.

He then stood up, and asked me for my nametag. I gave it to him.. He shook my hand and again said with sadness, disgust, and a tad of betrayal by me…..”Get some help.” He then motioned for me to leave, I did. He walked behind me. There were no other goodbyes or talk. Outside his office, he locked the door and he got on his cellphone and said “Katie, yeah…call in in Jared immediately to work. I just fired Jason…..well, he had plenty of chances……” and he walked away, didn’t even look back at me. I stood there for a minute or two and left the hotel…………

DId I learn???? Hell no!!! I took that money and went on my final bender. Was out all night, well into the next morning! Blew it all on drink and cocaine. Partied for two days straight. Everything was okay for the next two days! I didn’t need that job……..I would find another one. I would get “serious” and “knuckle down” for a bit…………but really, deep down……I knew it was the end. Even if I got another job, I had zero savings to hold me until money started coming in again like the last time back in 2003. I could liquidate my 401K, but that would take a few weeks to get the check. Rent due, and how would I maintain without the cocaine? The drink? For that matter all the other bills I had been putting off. Laundry? Haircut? What was I going to eat? Yes. The end was here. I had that bender, and I decided it was time to kill myself. Off the Golden Gate Bridge. I would go quickly, only one in a hundread survive that drop…and haven”t I been wanting death for a few years now anyway???? I would destroy my ID, make sure it would be a mystery to what happened to me. I would leave no note. Nobody cared anyway…….I destroyed my ID, bank cards, social security card. I would hock my class ring from graduate school (a gift from my parents back in 1994). I would pay the rent with it……..thus not causing suspicion that I was missing,

Four days after I was fired, I was standing on the rail of the Golden Gate Bridge, mid-span at 3am……………I was gonna just lose my balance and just fall down, down, down……WAY down to the cold murky swirling waters below. Should be easy, the shakes were back. I was siging a Beatles song loudly as I recall (Let It Be)…..the fog was heavy………….the fog horn was beckoning me….daring me to do it…..I was starting to detox bad. Delusional visions………..the shakes….I dry heaved a few times while walking out to the Golden Gate and while on the bridge……….never was good enough……no one to call. It would be weeks until perhaps connections were made that I was gone and the body retrieved from the bay was me…..more than likely my landord at that scuzzy place I was living……the prick! Next month would come, and his insipid puss would come knocking for the rent, he would check the room and it would not have been lived in for almost a month (I left the room spotless, clothing folded, everything in its place)……Police would be called….a small but ineffective investigation would happen……some connection to an unknown body found in the bay, the landlord comes to check it on bequest of the fine folks at the SFPD….he would say “yup that’s him, that’s the drunk a-hole who rented from me” and that would be that. He had my first and last name only….it would be perhaps a few more weeks before any family would find out…..the churning waters far below…..”just let it be, let it bee, yeah!!!!” The random car passing honking its horn. Another car passes, and womans’ voice from car yells “do it!!!! Jump!!!!” I feel sick…….dizzy……..I think I can feel myself about to fall….no, no not yet…..the sound of blood thumping in my ears blots out any other and every sound….pins and needles prickling sensation on my lips, my body is preparing for it. In a few seconds……a minute…..whatever…it’s now all over. World 1. Jason 0.

Read Part 4!

[Editor: This is the second part in a series of articles on overcoming escapism by Brother Jason, a soldier in the Salvation Army. Jason doesn’t have a blog, but you should show him some love here in this shithole. If you’re joining late, you’ll want to read Part 1 here.]

I danced. I partied. There were still some laughs I suppose as the decline quickened. I partied with Fiona Apple in 2002 one night. We ended up some underground party and danced, grinded on each other while the group “Morcheeba” sang, and mixed their wizardry on the stage……..she “of course” just wanted to party with me and didn’t want to hook up with me……….

I met Sergio Mendes one night at a nightclub. I jumped from the upper rails of a nightclub down to the crowd below who broke my fall during a “soul / motown / Mod” all night dance party. Everyone thought I was insane. I was so high…….I was hoping to die countless nights. I would always ask myself as I looked in the mirror as I perfectly knotted my tie “This is gonna be the night…hopefully. I’ll pass out, crash out and never wake up.”

The SF Police twice fished me out of an alley deep in the Tenderloin neighborhood, and got me home. My parents back east started to worry about me……..I disconnected my telephone. My work performance sank, and after being given several warnings…..I was “asked” to leave IBM in the fall of 2003. The rush from sweet cocaine now was a problem…..I was honking up well over $1000.00 a week. I was an addict. I was ashamed but there was nothing really anyone could say or do to help me. Who was I gonna talk to? Someone in a club? My parents? Gonna meet a “nice girl” who just understood? My few peers?????

Despite all of this, I found another job rather quickly…….I was hired by a swanky nightclub atop the Sire Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco as a bartender……it was like adding gasoline to an already out of control fire. The party scene now was kicked into hyperspace, interstellar overdrive. I was still keeping myself up, but I hated looking at myself in the mirror while shaving, or sitting in a barbers chair……..I hated everything about me. I was mechanical at my bartending job. I did solid work under stress and pressure…..but the second work ended. Out until the sun came up…..or later at underground clubs for bartenders, or more nefarious places……saw people shooting up heroin in filthy alleys (never touched needles btw). The dance went on……..I lost weight…..the shakes would not stop, and this would be the downfall of me bartending……the IBM stock I had was running out…….taxes killed my portfolio……….the savings was being sucked dry quicker than it was coming in. It finally came to the point when I just “quit” paying rent.

I was evicted from the condo I had been renting since 1997 in 2004.

I moved to a scummy residential hotel in the Western Addition neighborhood…….and that is when the bottom fell out……..

Read Part 3!