It Came From Inside the Job

I tried hard. I want that in the first line because of where the rest of this goes.

My mother had got me the job. I knew what it was. I knew what it meant that somebody had made a call for me. I was not sitting there deciding to waste it.

I succumbed to meth anyway.

Where it came from

Work. It came from work.

Let us call them Gary and Marco. Gary was a security guard. Marco worked the bar. I am not using their names because their part in my life is my story to tell and their lives are not, but they were real people with real shifts, and I saw them most days.

That is the detail I think matters, more than any amount of description of what it did to me. It did not arrive from some separate underworld I had to go looking for. It was already inside the place my mother had sent me to be okay.

If you have never been near it, I think that is the part that is hardest to picture. People imagine a decision made in a bad neighbourhood at two in the morning. For me it was a Tuesday, at work, with people I liked.

On trying

I used to think that saying I tried hard was making an excuse. I have come around.

Trying and failing are not opposites in this. I tried hard for years and used for years and both of those are true of the same stretch of time. The version where I was not really trying would be more comfortable for everybody, including me, because it would mean the trying works.

I do not know what to do with that except say it plainly. I tried. It was there every day. It took six years and rehab at twenty-four and a lot of other things before any of it moved.

And in those same years I made beats, filmed sketches, and learned most of what I know. The good and the bad have the same address.