Away & A Way

I’m an asshole, I know.

Posting almost every day last year and then I disappear. While it’s true I’ve been away, the time has helped me find a way to continue this blog. I don’t mean in the technical sense – the WordPress platform is excellent. I mean finding my own personal way. As I was writing the blog, I discovered so much of myself I didn’t like – no hated about myself.

I always had the story in my head, I lived it. But actually turning that story into a cohesive narrative sucked balls. It meant I had to confront the monster Kratom had made me. I had to crawl back into that dark, dirty fold in my subconscious and find that guy again. He wasn’t there, thankfully. But he’d left enough shit lying around for me to pick through so I could tell you about my slow then quite sudden death.

I’m going to say it again – Kratom will change you and I don’t care how many Youtube channels or pro-Kratom groups tell you otherwise. Fuck them. They’re lying to you. And it’s because they like their Kratom. No, they love it. So, getting into that guy’s headspace again really fucked me up in ways I didn’t anticipate. As I write this, he’s here, waiting to talk again. I can feel him just over my shoulder, watching, smiling, and high as a fucking kite. I’ve found a way to step away from the keyboard and let him sit down and continue telling my – our – story, because it’s got a long way to go yet.

If you’ve followed me and enjoyed my previous posts – thank you. I’m glad you’re here with me.

Next, Kratom and I go on our honeymoon, and what a time we had…

5/27

So here we are. We’ve gotten to the core of what this blog is about – being seduced by “K”, loving her, and her loving me back straight into hell. Now that we’ve arrived here together, I have to confess I wasn’t sure what this post would actually say. I know, that sounds weird. Writing it felt weird. What I mean is that my intent with this blog is to tell my Kratom story and how it killed me (yes – it really did) in the tiniest of details – day-by-day, minute after minute, life after death. So far, my previous posts were introductions and set-up and how I actually discovered K. Which lead us here. D-Day. Lift off. The money shot. I’ve taken my first Kratom, took care of that intrusive hard-on, and am ready to take on the world feeling like Jimmy fucking Hoffa.

But not yet.

I’m feeling a little reflective today. Not sure why. No, that was a lie. I do know why. Many times I say that Kratom killed me (I’ve already had angry people defending Kratom telling me it’s not dangerous -well fuck them. Like I’ve said I don’t care what you think). I don’t think people actually get that what I’m saying is real. KRATOM KILLED ME. I DIED BECAUSE OF IT. MY HEART STOPPED AND I WAS DEAD. Can I be any clearer? Do I need to say it another fifty ways because I will. We will get to that day, the day I died, on this blog eventually. You’ll see how it started like any other day and ended quite unlike any other. You’ll see how my family was told by the doctors to prepare to say goodbye to me, how waking up from a coma after nearly a week feels, and how the sight of a catheter jammed down your dick is actually quite funny.

As I write this, it’s six days away from May 27th – the day in 2019 I died. I can’t help but feel reflective. There are reminders everywhere other than the date – the warmer weather, the leaves on the trees, the way the air smells and how the light shines through the windows later in the evening. My family calls 5/27 my second birthday. The new beginning. The day I beat back the dark and came through. I wish I could say I agree. But, I did promise you honesty so I’m not going to pretend. Yes, I lived – I’m grateful. But there is an ever-present anger that keeps shouting that this should have never happened in the first place. But, it did. Which lead me here. And that is why we’re here, so I can tell my story and hope that someone reads it and stops before they reach where I was.

Next, K and I go on our honeymoon –

and what a time we had.

The Kratom Hard-On

I’m not sure what I was expecting. I know what I was hoping for – warm waves of pure pain-killing bliss that would wash over me, taking me away to that special place. So, I waited.

And waited.

And then waited some more.

I remember being pissed. Forty bucks and an hour of my life later and not a fucking thing. Not even a distant twinge of euphoria.

But then something pretty fucked up happened – I got a hard-on. Not just a whatever erection, but a hard-ass, thick-as-steel hard-on. And I was suddenly horny as fuck. WTH? I glanced down and my dick was pressed into my thigh, straining against the thin fabric of my shorts. Where did this come from? So Kratom is a horny pill, not a pain pill? I slowly ran my hand over my underwear and down the length of my shaft – the feeling was electric, and I could feel my balls tighten. Everything in my body was focused between my legs, I was so fucking hot, I thought I was going to explode right there in my boxers.

Fuck this, I thought. I’m way too angry to jerk off right now.

I bought a stupid sex pill. Back pain (so I kept telling myself) was the problem, not getting off. I got up and started yelling at my boner to get lost and exclaiming aloud the horrible torments I would enact upon Old Lady Kratom for selling me a jerk off aid. No wonder she kept grinning at me, the freak.

But wait…something was going on (other than the rager). I was pissed as all hell, yes, but I was suddenly “okay” with that. I was even laughing as I described in detail my evil plan for Old Lady Kratom – not in a Bond villain way, but in an absolute pure expression of joy. Holy shit – the Kratom was doing it’s job after all. It’s hard to put into the right words how that first small “hit” felt. It wasn’t this huge rush that you get with oxycodone, it was more like a subtle sense of things not being as bad as they seemed. That sure, you just spent forty bucks on a dick pill, but fuck it, it’s just okay, and maybe everything else is okay and I’m okay, etc. I didn’t take more K – although I was tempted. I wanted to savor every second and not take too much and do something stupid like go to sleep. It was time to clean the house, fold the laundry, vacuum the dog and take the rug for a walk. There were 3 dishes in the sink – must tidy that up right now, can’t look like a bunch of heathens live here! Oh, and the car could use a bit of a wash, too – that won’t take long and it will look niceeeeeee!

Damn. This shit works.

I couldn’t believe it. How in the hell was this stuff legal? You can’t even buy allergy medicine over the counter anymore and yet here’s a safe, all-natural plant that takes pain away and makes you feel like a fucking boss? How have I not heard of you before? Where have you been all my anxiety-ridden, painful life? This can’t be real.

There has to be a catch…

My First Time With the Crazy Old Kratom Lady: Part 2

There are moments in our lives that are seared into our minds forever. These moments are often turning points in our stories, towering tsunamis of change that crash onto the shores of our lives and change our futures in infinite ways. But sometimes, the waves are small, rolling gently through the sand. We don’t always notice these, and yet it’s these that can steer your life into places you’d never contemplated, one delicate wave at a time. This was one such moment for me. I couldn’t have known the significance of it at the time. Such a simple, unremarkable thing – a little white bottle held in a hand, the first of many hundreds of little bottles – my little white and green soldiers.

I think I shit myself when she told me the price. “Forty bucks,” she said, proudly. For a moment I kind of just stared at the bottle. Like, really? This bottle of whatever it is with the cheap label and stupid green leaf (looked like weed) on the cap is how much?

The self-shitting lasted exactly 4.5 seconds. Fuck it. Google’s no liar – this shit’s the real deal. Gimme. I excitedly handed her my card. She took it, then looked at me. I mean she looked right into me, I swear. “You know about this stuff? Damn near cure anything – except stupid. Can’t cure stupid,” she whispered. To this day I’m not sure if she was warning me, calling me stupid, or just liked getting her creep on with customers. I laughed. “I researched it. Good for my back pain,” I said. She nodded, then did that weird granny grin again, and ran my card. I remember everything felt like it was going in slow motion. I just wanted to get the K and get home so I could take the shit and get on the happy train. Finally, she handed me my card back and gave me the bottle. “Let me know how that goes for ya,” she said, then ambled away as old ladies do.

I got in the car and sat there, staring at the bottle. Full disclosure here – I’m a fucking wuss when it comes to taking new pills. I know – the irony -the comedy of an addict who’s afraid to pop whatever he’s handed, right?

I think I got back home faster than I got to the vape shop -cops in my town really don’t give a fuck about speeders, apparently. I put my new buddy K on the dresser and decided I should do some further research on proper dosage, etc. “Proper dosage…” I’m laughing as I write this because it just occurred to me how much work being an addict is. Think about how much planning and thinking and storytelling and researching goes into getting our fix. We’re not junkies, we’re geniuses. So much wasted time and brain cells and money we’ll never get back.

Most people online agreed newbie dosage is four capsules, with the note that if you didn’t feel anything, take two more (the mission statement of any addict if ever I heard one). Okay, I thought. Here we go. Bags packed, happy train’s coming down the tracks.

Four pills.

This is gonna be amazing.

But, you know that thing about first times…?

My First Time With the Crazy Old Kratom Lady: Part 1

How a vape shop owner became the most important woman in my life.

So now I’m Googling where to buy Kratom with a frenzy I’d usually reserve for porn searches,(come on – y’all know we addicts love porn, too, it’s a cheap dopamine hit, but still a hit). I remember getting the weirdest results. I’d put in my location and these bizarre sites popped up mostly selling tobacco vape juice and bongs throughout the entire country. Made no sense. I was looking for my magic Kratom – I didn’t need to know where in Seattle you could get a four-foot bong. Eventually I found a site that listed a store that was ( I’m not fucking with you, here) 1.5 miles from my house.

Jackpot.

I call the place and this kind sounding old woman answered. I put on my best, most professional “I’m not a drug seeker” voice, ( we all have one) and innocently enquired if she carried this little thing I’d heard about called KRAHH-TOM. She chuckled under her breath and corrected me. “KRAY-TUM?” she asked. I think about this moment a lot. I don’t know why, but it irks the shit out of me that she did that. I wasn’t a Kratom expert yet, I didn’t know the correct pronunciation. Clearly I’m asking about “KRAY-TUM” , why mess with me and quietly LOL? To be fair, she could’ve said she sells dismembered puppies to eat and I wouldn’t have given two shits – I just wanted the K. She told me, yup, she sells it. Then she lowered her voice. “It’s quite a popular thing here,” she whispered. You know, the alarm bells should’ve been going off here the second she started talking like a Dateline killer. For most people – for the “normal people” – the non-addicts – they would’ve been. But nope, not me. She had the fucking elixir of life there, she could talk however she wanted. “Come on by,” she said – like the spider inviting the fly into it’s web. Again, even with that slightly sinister invitation, my alarm bell system was still severely lacking in alarming bells of any sort, so I jumped in the car (I still had one at the moment – more on that another time) and off I went to my new nirvana.

Want to know how fast you can drive 1.5 miles? You really don’t. Whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t legal. It was funny, I’d driven by the vape place countless times, stopped in once, never knowing my future (and the end of it) was tied to it. It was a bizarre set up. The front of the building was a vintage/antique shop while around the back was a separate entrance for the tobacco/vape shop, like all the naughty, dirty people have to go in the back. Instinctively, I went in the rear entrance – guess I knew I was dirty and naughty.

And there she was. Mama Kratom – all 104 years of her wrapped in a hunched-over, wrinkly frame topped with a dark gray ponytail and grandma specs that dangled on the edge of her nose. Man, she even looked like someone out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Reminder – alarm bells – none, okay? She smiled when I came to the counter. I think I counted three teeth, I’m being generous. ‘I called,” I said. She just stared down her nose at me, silent, as if lots of men are calling her all the time. “About the kratom…” I whispered. She broke into a gigantic granny grin, then reached behind her and grabbed a small white bottle off the shelf. She held it up for me to see the words “Green Malay Kratom, 60 capsules”.

I wanted to kiss her, buy her dinner, and finish her crossword for her all at the same time.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” she asked.

We all know what happens next, right? I buy the K, take that blissful first dose and sink into a bed of unicorns and rainbows?

Not quite what happened. Mama Kratom wasn’t done with me yet.

After all, it was our first time…

How Kratom Got On Top & Fucked Me Into Hell

Let’s start at the beginning of the end of everything.

This is how me and “K” got together and how she rode the shit out of me for three years. We’re going to call Kratom “K” from here on out. I like naming things. It gives them a personality, a life of their own. It’s been said that once you name something, you own it. In the case of K, she owned me. I wasn’t looking for her, but in a way I suppose I was. Aren’t we all looking for something, all the time? Us addicts certainly are. We’re not consciously searching for that next big thing – that distraction, the shiny new thing, that high – but in a way I think we are. And if something like K slithers into the room we’re gonna notice her.

My job in 2017 involved driving. All the time. 3400 miles every month. That’s a lot of sitting. You see where this is going? All that driving and sitting doesn’t do anything good to your back. Mine was already fucked anyway. Years of retail work meant lifting every goddamned case of Coke and Gatorade and just heavy shit for ten hours a day, every day. It will wreck you. I’m not gonna go into the boring doctor visits and the blah blah here’s some ibuprophen have a nice day bullshit stories. You know them. You’ve lived them. Basically it was have a surgery that might paralyze you or might fix you or keep going to work and fuck all. So I went with the fuck all. I figured a life stooped over was better than a life of bedpans and Farmville. But the stooping got bad. I couldn’t even sit in the car without the pain tearing from my back down my legs. And getting out of the car? I must’ve looked ridiculous stretching one leg out, then 5 minutes later stretching another out – after I’d managed to slowly swerve my ass around in the seat – IF I even got that far. I should mention at the time I was 41, 42. Not my idea of an old man. But I felt like one. And that sucks. I needed something. Anything.

I have a distant memory of the day K came into my life. Just kind of a feeling, a few details. I remember it was a rainy day, but other than that just a regular day. No impending doom & gloom for what was about to begin. No dreams warning me, no voices telling me I’d be dead in exactly three years because of today. I was Googling natural pain remedies. And there she was. An innocent header on the internet – “Kratom, all-natural pain reliever”. We’ve all heard that one before, right? But something made me immediately jump on Reddit and see what, if anything, I could find about this KRAHH – TOM. Nobody says it right, I swear I’ve heard like ten different fucking ways to mispronounce what is a very simple word. It’s KRAY – TUM. Reddit didn’t disappoint. Holy shit there was subreddit after subreddit detailing the miracles of this little legal green devil. It would wipe away your pain, it would give you your life back, you could dream again, work again, fuck again AND it felt like a Vicodin.

“Excuse me, what?”

And so I spent the next few hours reading everything I could about people’s experiences with K. In retrospect, I probably should’ve lingered on the withdrawal forums a bit more or read about the people living in their cars because they spent all their money on K. But you know how we are – why ruin my amazing discovery with a couple of babies who had the shits in their cars?

Now, I had to find where I could buy this superhero plant, like – NOW.

That’s a whole other story, the first of many stories that don’t end well.

I’ll tell you about that particular hell next time…

Aren’t We Just A Bunch of Dumb Fucks?

Yup. Us addicts are as stupid as the leaf is green when it comes to our drugs. And it can be literally ANYTHING right? Doesn’t matter. Just gimme gimme I want it xtra xtra, monster-sized, triple large, more more – no, that’s not enough, thank you. Keep pouring – I need more than you and you and you over there in the corner, creep. We have to fuck harder, cry louder, laugh longer because if we don’t, what’s the point of even doing it? We are incapable of simply feeling like Mr. & Mrs. Normal, we have to BE the experience. If we could kiss and lick and marry that high, we fucking would. And that makes us not who we think we are – the bestest and funnest person in the room – no – it makes us the dumbest one. Addiction will wrap it’s skeletal arms around you slowly, day after day, high after high, until you can’t see past the blanket of death you’re trapped in. Inside the blanket it’s warm and safe and feels so good it’s like sex used to be. We love being in the blanket, we know there’s something crawling down our back – we can feel it’s spider-like fingers tingling over our skin, but we don’t care. We’ll stay in here forever. Now, if someone dares to try and pull the blanket off, we will hurt you. We will scare the shit out of you. You won’t recognize the person yelling and screaming at you like a five-year old who’s just had his favorite toy taken away. And we will GUILT the fuck out of you. Oh yes, we are so good at the guilt thing –

“But baby, it’s the only thing that helps my back…you want me to be in pain…, “It’s just a drink, you sound like my ex…, “Just one more time – if you cared about me you’d understand,” etc., etc.

We will come out of the blanket occasionally, but only to steal from you. Got credit cards? Not for long. Got a spare twenty dollar bill hanging around? You thought you did – you must be mistaken. I have my own money, honey. Why would I need yours…?

And after all the lies and fights and promises not kept, you’re not the funnest person in the room – you’re the only one in the room, with just your blanket to keep you warm. Alone and dumb.

This blog will show you in every detail what the life of a Kratom addict is. You’ll be with me for three years through every high and every low. Every loss (and there are many) and every don’t give a fucks. It doesn’t end well, and yet it does, because I’m here, I’m alive and able to tell you my story.

This blog will be honest. The most brutal, hot to the touch honest I can be. Some of you will be pissed. You love your Kratom, it’s given you your life back, blah blah. That’s fine. Be pissed. I don’t give a rat’s ass. Kratom is addictive. It took my life, slowly, and then it killed me. It is as evil as any Percocet or Oxycontin or meth. I don’t care this is an unpopular opinion. Reddit is full of addicts debating the best way to potentiate the effects of kratom, what strains produce the most euphoria, or how to lobby the FDA to keep their drug legal. So go over there and hang with your friends. They are legion. I was banned there for speaking badly about this plant so here I am.

I hope you choose to come with me on this journey. Stay, learn.

But leave your blanket at the door.