The Creator Wanted Me, Not You, to Write The Treatise

When nineteen-year-old me steps into the superintendent's office at the New York State Drug Abuse Control Commission rehabilitation facility in Otisville two New York State Police detectives were inside to serve a Fugitive of Justice warrant from North Carolina on me. After confirming who I am they put me in handcuffs and drove me to some town justice near the Ulster County jail where one of the detectives reads from some papers in hand as he speaks to the judge. I heard and will always remember "burglary" and the precise count of "fourteen thousand (five hundred and thirty-three?) narcotic pills, tablets, and capsules." I …, we knew it was big, and now I had a number: fourteen thousand.

Many a thousand of these narcotic pills, tablets, and capsules were worthless, the bottles never even opened, and disposed of. Stuff like codeine with acetaminophen compounds and tranquilizers like Valium, Thorazine, and Librium, the unavoidable bottles inside the locked cabinet from every drugstore I did.

Kevin and I went to Camp LeJeune to pay a surprise visit to Danny who's going through boot camp. Danny introduces us to another recruit, Feedback, who grew up near the Camp. Soon enough we're talking drugstores, Danny says good-bye to this, and the first one Feedback shows us to check out is a beaut. A department store with a large parking lot directly in front of the buildings’ center entrance doors and with a single entrance door to a pharmacy area twenty feet or so to the right of the main doors. This single door to the pharmacy area is sheeted with glass, not unbreakable plastic. Silent alarm? Yes, but sixty-ninety seconds of time is all that's needed. From the time the alarm trips and then relayed to police to be relayed again to any cars in the area to the time one car is in front of the building, ninety seconds is plenty of time.

Early Monday mornings are the ideal time to do these types of 'ring and runs.' An alarm bell outside a store could ring for hours during the wee morning hours before anyone actually takes notice. There is less traffic on the roads, and cars are less likely to be deliberately parked unseen in some distant area for smooching or conversation on an early Monday morning as most are likely to turn in early to get a good night's sleep as they begin to think the week ahead. I forget what day it was but it was not an early Monday morning … .

Break the glass and (one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand …) be sure to clear obvious shards of glass around the sides of the hole, then climb in and search for the locked cabinet. After the second or third drugstore, the realization came to me that all the quality Class Two and Three controlled-substances are inside some large or small "locked cabinet." When a licensed pharmacist during the workday has to leave the pharmacy area for a short time probably a law in all the fifty States requires that the Class Two and Three substances are to be secured in some way from unlicensed employees. These secure areas are usually wooden kitchen cabinets of various sizes and have only flimsy locks and latches securing the door to the frame. All of the ones I saw had doors that could be easily yanked to then rip the latch screws and the lock from their wooden frame. Most times I find the locks on these cabinets are not even latched closed, so nothing has to be broken before an arm is quickly sweeping all bottles off each shelf and into a pillowcase. Kevin and I look for the locked cabinet …, and at the same time each of us yell to each other, "It's over here," and to quickly realize each of us have found a locked cabinet; there are two locked cabinets in this place. 

Feedback has scampered to the back of the store where cabinets of pistols and rifles are. He's back with us in the pharmacy area in under a minute, tells us he's there and then climbs out through the broken glass door. A siren is heard outside, which means they're still navigating the roads and not yet onto the blacktop of the large parking lot, and I'm placing a box of insulin syringes inside the pillowcase and stepping towards the door. Kevin is stepping out and begins to sprint as I'm near the door and as I'm crunching down and stepping out, and at the first running steps I hear a car accelerating up to speed. There is nothing to view on the parking lot blacktop and no headlights of a car or flashing red lights bouncing off anything near the entrance to the parking lot as my feet step off the concrete and sprinting the twenty-thirty feet of blacktop along the side of the building until I begin stepping into the almost knee-high brush. Four, five sprinting steps of distance in front of me I'm expecting to then jump and begin to run up the incline of a four or five-foot tall embankment. The sound of the car is nearing with steady acceleration as the grass I'm now stepping through has a hidden gully. My foot drops lower than expected bringing my body and my face to fall perfectly flat upon and into the grassy incline I was expecting to begin sprinting up and over. A split second to get a better grip on the pillowcase and to pull a knee up to stand as headlight beams from the car course over me from left to right and into the grass around me where I lay, and then the light disappears. I turn my head down and along the ground and grass as I lie there to see through their windshield both police officers looking towards the broken glass door. They haven't seen me so I turn my head down noticing that the grass is not that tall, and it is not covering me as I lay there motionless. I realize if I get up and run they'll see me, and if they get out of the car to investigate I'll be trapped where I am as other police cars will eventually arrive and I'll then absolutely will be seen trying to run away. Again the headlights wash over the grass where I lie as I hear the car begin to accelerate and moving towards my left along the side of the building and I'll then turn my head to watch the police car moving farther away and along the side of the building towards the back of the building. I get up and quick pace myself inside the brush and twigs and through the trees of the dark forest.

We walked from the parked car the mile or so to the department store, so I know the direction where the road is. It takes me awhile for my eyes to adjust to the darkness and I then begin stepping through the forest with quick paces. I hear Kevin whistling where they are after a minute or two of traipsing alone through these woods.

"Wow," Kevin says to me. " I saw the car stop there and didn't see you. I thought they got you."

"Almost did. Lucky I fell into some ditch or they definitely would've seen me." 

We stay in the wooded areas as we traverse the mile or so back to the car. Helicopters are flying overhead and their spotlight beams can be seen in distant areas. We step past roadblocks and Feedback will keep us away from them thinking that if they have dogs best to steer clear as much as possible. The decision is made to place the drugstore stash, the pistols and a rifle inside a drainage pipe, in a forest area where Feedback assures us he knows the area and can't forget. Eventually, we are in his car and traveling but soon to find ourselves crawling forward towards a roadblock. A long several minutes wait before moving up to and being greeted with flashlight toting policemen. Feedback will show one police officer his military ID as another police officer shines his flashlight at cigarette smoking Kevin and Kurt sitting in the backseat, then we're motioned to move on.

It's a pathetic moment those first moments upon waking and your mind is making sense of some stupid, unfamiliar sound or sounds that are causing you to realize you are now inside a county jail, and then the next moment of thoughts that kick in recalling the details of what happened just a few hours ago that caused this head you're feeling so pathetic with to now be lying upon some detergent-smelling pillow a reality. 

After a few drugstores I realize all drugstores have the largest quantities of Valium than any other controlled substance. To imagine two, three thousand Valium tablets out of the fourteen thousand from North Carolina would not be preposterous. I don't know and can't remember exactly how many Valium tablets there were from North Carolina, but it was the rinky-dink rural towns and drugstores when these always large Valium quantities caught my attention. I'm throwing away let's imagine eight-hundred hits of Valium from a drugstore in Hopewell Junction. And I'm to imagine a pharmacist dispensing scripts of fifteen or thirty hits of Valium, or twenty to sixty scripts every two weeks to certain people in a rural town like Hopewell Junction, and I have to ask, What is going on in someone's life who lives in a small town or village like Hopewell Junction that causes them to need a doctor to prescribe a tranquilizer like Valium? I've done Valium and all it does is make you stop thinking. You can't remember what you were last talking about to someone, or what it was you were thinking about only fifteen-seconds ago. And to think one has this thoughtless type of frame of mind for twelve to eighteen hours of a waking day serves what purpose? and this is thought to be the best recourse instead of some other type of remedy. Why? What is happening in the life of someone who lives in a rural Hopewell Junction that causes them to be so stressed out they need to stop thinking about it? Fifty people in a small town of three thousand, what is happening that causes these people to need and require a drug to stop thinking about it? How about females like my Moms being sodomized, and these type of people are realizing and daily attempting to rationalize this thing called love from the knight in shining armor that they had fantasized about as a young girl, and the castle they've been taken to and will live in for the next five decades till they die includes acts of sodomy. Alone mornings and afternoons while the knight is at work the missus realizes the reality of Love is …? what? What is the Creator doing monitoring relationships like this? with these small percentage types of human female creations in need of diazepam while in a relationship called to love and would otherwise behave strangely or hysterically if they were not under the influence of a tranquilizer? What is the Creator specifically monitoring here? It makes me wonder, … sometimes.

Kevin and I drive from North Carolina and detour towards Boston. We're both on a nice speed run. These guys Kevin knows are the only people we know for the cocaine I'll ever do. And it is this last time we are together and traveling to Boston where after a few lines of cocaine, and then stepping outside to sit on the porch steps, with the sun shining warm and bright, a bird chirping incessant sounds, for the first time I experience sheer joy like never before. Already peaking on Desoxyn for the last twelve, twenty-four hours and then the boost from the cocaine and for the next thirty, forty, fifty minutes all my knowledge and fascination for biology, the living animate object and life itself is rolled up into moments of God blessed thankfulness, and wonder, and fascination for my existence at these very wonderful moments of pure joy coursing through my mind. Life is a beautiful thing, and God? Jesus? "I want to thank you now at this very moment for allowing me these moments of life as I am, … and to express thoughts for your existence …, and that you are absolutely, the dude of Dudes for being the cause that allows me to exist to feel the joy I feel at this moment. You Jesus are the best thing I have ever found in my twenty years of life!"

And after the hour passes and the cocaine wears off, I'm not crashing to a state of normalcy but instead to that level of head only Desoxyn can carry me along with for another twelve, twenty-four hours. And this constant state of joy is branded memorable in my life and mind so much so that when years later I'm in my prison cell at Clinton Correctional facility and begin to ponder the first drafts of my treatise, it was my mind with only a cursory, superficial Biology 101 store of information in the rafters that was able to conjure up the notion of Joy as the polar, dual opposite of Pain and have it become a metaphysical parameter governing the biological systems of homeostasis. 

I could have read all the books in all the libraries and heard all the lectures for the last four hundred years and still never to have put the two and two together.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, God. And thank you, Feedback, and Kevin. See you all in the next life.

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