Better Days Are A Toenail Away

Better Days Are A Toenail Away is a blog I started on July 18 2020 the same night I lost my wife for good. I’d been walking the dark, narrow, mean streets of first St James Town & then Scarborough in search of a fix. I never found the drugs but I did make this young creature’s acquaintance, who I christened Emergency.

Below the photo, like right now, I’d written:

Here’s a random cat I met last night walking the streets of suburban Scarborough in search of drugs. I’ve named her Emergency.
The opioid crisis is a public health emergency. 
Opiate addiction is a private emergency.
And it really really REALLY fuckin sucks.

I miss my everything.
POSTED JULY 18 @ 7:35PM.

So we’re not a newspaper, obviously. Nor a resource. But if you need help & want to try Suboxone or Methadone, I recommend Dr Eric Solway @ Metro Health Clinic @ Bloor @ Lansdowne (1290 Bloor St W. (416) 537-7000, Ask for Audrey or Natalie and say you need to do a walk-in, you’re a first-timer who need an intake, and that’ll you’re sick. They’ll squeeze you in. And they WILL help you. It might take 10-15 to get to your right dose, but they will help you. If you’ve been injecting 3-4 points a day, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to give you enough methodone to stave off dopeickness. The highest the doctor can legally bump your dose is 15mg every 30 days. If you’ve been injecting his INTERNAL,

If you’re against addiction medicine, then there’s not much we’ll agree on anyhow.

I’ll be posting intermittently, but usually 4 times a week unless I’m really depressed. I am in recovery from alcohol, coke, crack, and the kicker…opiates.

Percs, Oxy Dilaudid, and then what I like to call “the dubious graduation” to heroin, none of which is pure heroin anymore. Meaning you think you’re doing heroin but it’s fent. Which I found out in Jan 2017 after 6 weeks of heavy fent usage.

My ultimate goal is abstinence. I have not been drunk since the late teens of February 2017 (company party, I can’t remember the exact date). I had a few more beers that summer, here and there, never more than one, so I can say for sure that I have not had any alcohol whatsoever since August 2017. Not bad considering that, by the end, I was drinking 12 Tallboys of Pabst, plus a mickey of Alberta Premium, every single day. And so began my hermitic stage. Bars interfered with my careful formula. I began to stay home and drink.

Once I switched to opiates, there were 12 months when I mixed booze and Oxy, but after that I simply switched. I liked opioids better.

So I don’t even get to say I “battled my addiction” and won as my sister Laurel did (sober 10 years this last summer!). I simply found a substitute. And that’s not real quitting.

I stopped smoking cigarettes. I vape now. I love it. My doc calls it “a step in the right direction.” There hasn’t been any cocaine or crack in my urine samples for years. If I’m being honest here: If all His finances were taken care of at age 75, theU would probably try coke again NEXT year cuz because why not?

But you’d have to put a gun to my head to get me to smoke crack again. I’ve dabbled in “Tina” twice, which is what people call crystal meth.

The first time I tried it (around 7PM) I stayed up, keyed up til 10am, not feeling high, per se, but feeling an strong urge to read. I think I blazed through 100 articles in 4 hours, only stopping when I realize I’d had to piss for 3 of them.

The second time, it just enhanced the heroin high, which I greatly appreciated at the time. The only reason I ever got into uppers was to be more awake to enjoy the heroin high. And this was the one & only time it worked! I knew by now, however, to stay the curse and keep a Valium in my mouth at all times.

I knew I’d never get so lucky again, and have stayed the fuck away from Tina as best as I could. In rehab one of the guys I was in there with was a former upper management dude. “I was smokin meth @ work and couldn’t stop jerking off in the private bathroom they gave me.”

(These Seinfeld references are a generational thing. People don’t seem to recall just how ubiquitous the Simpson’s in the late 1990s:)

1. “The amusement park of the future, where nothing can possib-lie go wrong.”

2. Boo-Urns

3. Me Fail English? That's Unpossible.

4. I’d Rather Let A Thousand Guilty Men Go Free Than Chase After Them.

5. Shoplifting Is A Victimless Crime. Like Punching Someone In The Dark.

6. Purple Monkey Dishwater

7. This Anonymous Clan Of Slack-Jawed Troglodytes Has Cost Me The Election. And Yet, If I Were To Have Them Killed, I Would Be The One To Go To Jail. That’s Democracy For You.

8. I Call The Big One "Bitey"

9. On set for the first King Kong film, Smithers…somehow the same age yet back in time, quips: “I Think Women And Seamen Don’t Mix.”

10. Worst. Episode. Ever.

11. Lisa Needs Braces!/Dental Plan! (you can hear it in yr head RIGHT NOW, can’t you?)

12. To Alcohol! The Cause Of... And Solution To... All Of Life's Problems.
    
    
    
    Yep. Like in Seinfeld where George gets one Tina jerking me, griping on Twitter, when he opens his eyes to see Mitch here. off all pilot was 99%
    to give propensity to use his own private bathroom (“Hold my calls please, Estelle”) to smoke meth & jerk off, for hours upon hours. Finally, after years of this, he exited the washroom, flicked off his office light, slipped his Mac Book Pro into a bigger bag with all the tools of the corporate trade, and stepped outside to see the entire company sitting there, waiting for him.

“I guess time got away from me,” the dude shrugged.

“Holy long were you in there for?”

The manager thought about it, then replied “at least three hours. At least.”

But it wasn’t an intervention. Oh no. They wanted to see what he’d been working on. Of course, both parties knew damn well he hadn’t done any work for weeks, and his actuarial risk consultations demonstrated as much. He was green-lighting idiotic business ideas like making your own pizza. (11 years younger than me, he’d never seen the Seinfeld episode where Kramer pulls the same stunt.)

GEORGE: You know, you have to know how to do that. You can't have people shoving their arms into a six-hundred degree oven.

KRAMER: It's all supervised.

GEORGE [exasperated]: Oh, well.

KRAMER: All of it. You want to invest?

GEORGE: My money's all tied up in change right now.

I have a strong support structure and want to use this space to post strange, wonderful, cautionary, or beautiful tales involving heroin addicts. My own ultimate goal is abstinence, In an age where artists’ either take that leap of faith & quit work to pursue their dreams or give un entirely, I’m gonna have to go wth the former.

I live on the fringes of society. Our credit is shot. We’d be lucky to get a motel room anywhere in this country, even with a 5x deposit (a $100 room, $500 deposit). 3 cheers for a cashless society that’ll further marginalize the unhoused & untreated,

I started busking in Oct 2020, same year COVID-19 hit with a vengeance and it’s helped me a lot as a person. Just trying to have one mutual interaction everyday that makes both of you feel better & stronger.

Because storms come. And if you’re not rooted in your belief system (be it scientific or religious), you might see something eerie. Something that wasn’t supposed to be there, like a sparkle at the edge of things.

Anyway, I am currently transferring a series of entires (not all of ‘em, but most of ‘em) from the Tumblr blog to the Substack one. I switched to Substack cuz they said YOU CAN GET PAID AS A WRITER. And the Emily Dickinson part of me said FUCK YOU PEOPLE while the Hawthorne asked “what’s the harm?”

So I have a feature called Street Saints, where humans come out of nowhere, sometimes seemingly like the intend you harm, but then you realize it’s just they way they talk. And they end up doing things so selfless you’re jaw drops to the floor like

PS: the above actually frightened me in the theatre, probably for the same reason the face in The Ring bothered me:

Faces aren’t supposed to move & contort like that. So it’s uh…disconcerting.

ANYWAY the Street Saints series also features a cabbie who saves a strangers life & a paramedic who saves the livelihood of a drug dealer. My former dealer, John.

There’s also a looooong essay on REM and what they meant to me. I’ve loved “Leave” from New Adventures in Hi-Fi for as long as I can remember. Upon learning ____ loved it too, I think I kissed her as passionately as one can kiss another person. She got it. Many listeners can’t get past the unceasing air raid siren, but both she and I could, and did.

So I hope you’ll stick around Better Days Are A Toenail Away. We’ve got post ranging from Travis Meeks’ (Days of the New) seemingly unending litany of crimes, to a 7 Volume Essay1 set on American Transcendentalism, to what amount to just a novel set to images with pertinent quotes above or below.

If you would like to pay for ANY of this content my PayPal is

litteghostrecordingco@gmail.com
e-transfers to danny.lindsay85@gmail.

Subscribers get extra content.

if you REALLY only use cheques, as one US reader told me ( do they not have interac-email money transfer), I relented and told her to mail it to me. Amazingly, this same elderly woman who complimented me on my “reportage,” which is an adorable word.

That’s about it. Better Days Are A Toenail Away tries to send out daily [sic] dispatches from the front lines of the fuckin fentanyl crisis and other bits of pop culture detritus.

Abandon all irony, ye who enter.