Dusted: Wipe Off The Dust. Here Comes Glass Cleaner...

Dusted: Wipe Off The Dust. Here Comes Glass Cleaner...: Still haven't posted the final one for this blog, but felt that the following link was one worth sharing with those still waiting for the fi...

Wipe Off The Dust. Here Comes Glass Cleaner...

Still haven't posted the final one for this blog, but felt that the following link was one worth sharing with those still waiting for the final rim shot. Is it the end of an era? Time to clean off the dust and slip behind a glass partition, older and no wiser and even more broken than before. A duster I know likes to say, ":When in doubt, nut the fuck out." Glass cleaner may just be another way of doing that. There's always another way. It didn't start with the monkey, and, trust me, it's not gonna end there.

Read on.

http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20111113/ARTICLES/111119868

Dusted: Dusted To Go From Blog To eBook.

Dusted: Dusted To Go From Blog To eBook.: Does this dust have a future in altruism? We intend to see. It's been a while since we posted anything here on Dusted , and al...

Dusted Gets Booked (No help from Dano)

Does this dust have a future in altruism? We intend to see.

     It's been a while since we posted anything here on Dusted, and although we apologize for the lapse, we;d also like to make it clear that the lapse has been the result of myriad personal factors that have impacted other areas of our life as well,. But it's the dawn of a new day (or era, if you will), and we hope to publish a final post on this blog by the beginning of the week. After that, our efforts regarding subject matter connected to the dust world will be directed toward the editing and publication of our e-book, also called...what else?....Dusted. 
   Writing this blog has not been easy, either publicly or personally, and it's only the compelling sense that it's somehow our obligation (or perhaps destiny) to write it that's kept us on several occasions from just deleting the entire thing in frustration. Dusters aren't the only people with issues out there, and we've been a magnet for dusters and non-dusters with issues of late. The suggestion that we turn what has been an ongoing blog into a one-off book resonated with us right away, not just because it meant that we would be freed from the weekly grind of keeping up with this blog for an indefinite period of time, but because, with any luck, it will allow us to reach those readers who don't follow blogs. Bottom line, it's an idea whose time has come. And we're committed to making sure that Dusted doesn't just end up being another pile of dust. Trust me, where we come from, the one thing that no one needs is another damn pile of dust.
   So, thanks for following us thus far. We hope that you'll continue to support through the publication of our ebook and beyond.

We won't stop until we drop.

Enter The Swan

 It started almost six months ago. The monkey dance, that is. I can't tell you the exact time or place, or what led to those first dangerous steps between my son and his dangerous new partner, but I can tell you about the final moments in this particular stage of the dance. Whether my son and Mr. Monkey will be picking up where they left off is still a question mark, but, for the moment at least, that particular dance card has been cleared and put away.

   Strange how even things that you know are bad can seem bearable until someone from outside steps in and yanks off the blinders that have been keeping you from succumbing to a nervous breakdown for six months. I knew my son was depressed, and I knew that was the reason he'd turned to monkey dust. When his Danish girlfriend made the decision to return with their daughter to Copenhagen the previous December, it had been a heart wrenching situation for all of us.

   

   For my son, who had never been the most emotionally stable person to begin with, it precipitated a downward spiral that surpassed anything that I or anyone else who had helped him through his previous drug troubles had ever witnessed before. It was the reason that I moved in with him, the reason that I stayed even after I realized that there were going to be complications that I hadn't anticipated which might (and did) have personal repercussions for me, But I'd never blamed The Girlfriend for any of it. I mean, people do things. Sometimes they do things that make other people unhappy. I was unhappy, my son was unhappy, and as it turned out, The Girlfriend was unhappy, too. But my son's decision to dance with the monkey was completely his own.

     My decision to stick around even after he started showing signs of dust aggression was my own as well. Open any newspaper or spend half a second on the internet, and you can read about incident after incident in which a duster has gone beserker on the drug. Tales of men with machetes, women with hatchets, teenagers with guns and a sudden inclination to push a fellow teenager out of a window abound. In the city where I've been residing these past six months, a duster met an untimely demise just a couple of weeks ago when his "friend" got pissed off over some dust issue and shoved him out of a second story window. Witnesses say that the victim seemed to be all right, that he was already starting to get up when his "friend" (I just have to include those quotation marks) came out of the building and helped him back inside. No reason to call an ambulance, the witnesses decided. So they left, leaving the victim to breathe his last on his...wait for it..."friend's" couch.

     The stories get even crazier, the death-by-dust twists even more grotesque. In another incident that took place here in the city where I currently reside, a duster arrested after running into traffic (literally) died within an hour of his arrest from what local news sources implied were complications related to his dust intake on a day on which temperatures soared to 100 plus. But dusters and a few others know the real story. I got it from the friend of a brother of a cop. The dead duster got that way after becoming so enraged that he reached down and tore his balls out of his scrotum, and then hurled them across the room. 

    Makes you cringe, doesn't it? It should also make you wonder at the repercussions of using a drug that can somehow drive a man to rip off his own balls. Never mind the woman who, only a few weeks ago, starred in her own personal mug shot after tearing out the bathroom plumbing to barricade the bathroom door in an effort to keep out the people who were after her. The twist is that there were no people after her, the bathroom was in her neighbor's house, and she didn't have their permission to be there. In a related twist, I know that woman, and if you had told me six months ago that she would be arrested for doing something like that, well...you know. Because she's really a pretty nice person. Definitely not the kind of person you'd ever imagine ripping out bathroom plumbing. Because that must be hard to do, right? And she's not Wonder Woman. She wears Celine Dion Perfume, for chrissakes.

      My son has never come close to tearing off his own genitalia or ripping someone's bathroom radiator out of the wall (not sure it was actually the radiator, so don't quote me). But in the last few weeks, he's turned into someone who might be able to do both of those things and perhaps even a few more. It started with the name calling. I couldn't open my mouth or even walk into a room that he was in without him shooting me an look of almost diabolical hatred and hissing, "Shut the fuck up, up cunt" or "Get out of my face, bitch." The epithets became so frequent and so common that I stopped hearing them. Well, at least most of the time. There were some occasions on which, feeling bad about some unrelated matter, a random "Fuck off, bitch" would send me on a crying jag that would last for hours. This would infuriate my son even more. "Oh, boo, hoo," he'd sneer at me. "Poor me.  Boo hoo."   

     Not sure where his anger came from. But it didn't go into hiding when his friends came over to the flat. I tried to be pleasant to them. Even the most strung-out, bruise-ridden junkie could count on a semi-civil greeting from me (unless he was one of the two of three I'd banned from the flat, in which case, I had a few choice invectives of my own to spew. Knowing that my son did dust didn't mean I had to put up with actual junkies, I'd tell them. It felt weird, telling a junkie to his face that he was a junkie. Weirdest part was that I was too damn naive to realize that junkies aren't necessarily born looking like cadavers in T-shirts. And that "junkie" sometimes describes people you love.

   Until last week, my son's rages and personally directed rants were just part of the fabric that  made up our life in one uncomfortable little corner of the dust world. My worries about him have been at critical mass for some time now and I've somehow learned to live with the pressure. But then The Girlfriend came back.

(End of Part One)

Trust No One, Disbelieve Everything You See

     When a duster runs out of stuff and starts jonesing for more, he or she can often be seen induging in a little game known in this particula a packet of dust could have been dropped and might still be extant. The guy who coined the term "dumpster diving" has a way with words and a keen insight into the duster mind because when a duster is really jonesing, that duster is shameless in pursuit of the hallowed prize. If the situation's really bad, reality and fantasy start to merge, and the duster starts seeing dust everywhere. A jonesing duster walked into my kitchen last week and went directly to the washing machine on the lid of which someone had scattered some powdered laundry detergent. He got really excited.

    "Man, there's a lot of dust here," he said.

    He sounded like a kid walking into the Manhattan Toys R Us for the very first time. I almost hated to tell him it was just Arm & Hammer laundry detergent. I don't know if he'll ever be that excited about anything ever again.




   I could have asked him. The dusters who come here tell me a  lot of things about themselves. They do it for a couple of reasons. They know that I'm not going to turn them in or judge them, and they know that I'm interested in what makes them do what they do.

    Not that I don't get pissed off a lot. I lost my car because a duster drove it without permission last week, and I'm still so upset about it, that I can't even give time to the situation in this blog because it will destroy my ability to focus on anything else. But most of the time the things I get pissed off about are things like discovering money or other semi-valuables missing from my space   (a jonesing duster is just like any other junkie, so hide anything you can't do without) and excessive tweaking. Allow me to explain.

      Saturday night, there were a few people here, several of them on dust, all of them known to me. But one of them was a little less known to me than the others and seemed a little more like the kind of people with whom I used to associate. He was closer to my age, too, and we shared a few more reference points. So we spent some time talking, seemingly in a normal fashion, until he started doing the "window thing"---rising up suddenly from his chair and stalking slowly over to the window and pushing aside the curtain to get  a clear view of the darkened street.

    "I don't believe it," he said. "There's a fuckin' cop right across the street."

    "Well, it's a good thing you're not on anything," I said. "Good job."

     "Are you kidding? I'm fucking rolling," he said. "I booted up about half an hour ago."

 "Here in this flat?" I half-screamed at him. "Goddamn it, I don't allow that. (My son) knows that. No one boots up in this flat."

   He wasn't listening. All he cared about was the cop he thought was watching him from across the street.

    "Oh, this is great. There's a DEA right across from the cop on the corner. Man, I don't believe this!"

    Before I could say anything, he ran into my son's room and told the other dusters that they were being staked out by cops and DEAs. Then he ran outside to get a closer look at the situation. He returned a good five minutes later, wild-eyed, as he explained that cops and DEAs had planted themselves at strategic points all up and down the street. It started with the cop and the DEA at the corner. But then there was a guy who had been standing outside a house three doors down from us for a really long time. Yeah, he had a dog with him, but the dog was just standing there, too. And there was a black Subaru that kept going by (there are how many black Subarus in any given city?), and another man who looked hard at the living room window of our flat as he walked past it.

      "Why would they be staking this place out?" I asked. "Wouldn't they be going after the big people? The distributors?"

     "Shit's illegal now," a helpful duster explained. "Cops want to make examples of people."

     That freaked me out. I told everyone they had to leave, and if they had any of their stupid shit with them, they had better make sure it left, too. But the dusters were too scared to leave. They started looking out the window, three of them at once, staring and pointing, and debating whether the shadow next to a streetlamp was the shadow of the streetlamp, or the shadow of someone they couldn't see. Then someone noticed that the guy with the dog was no longer there. That seemed ominous, too.  But the worst thing was that a kid they all knew, who seemed like he could  be a narc, had come by earlier and asked if anyone had seen his bike. That was clearly suspicious.  After all, he could have asked anyone about his bike, but he chose them.

    "Look, just go. I want you all to go," I said. "I have to work. I have to write."

    My son said that it was his flat and not up to me to tell people they had to go. Instead, they all went back into his room and locked the door so that I couldn't come in. A few seconds later, there was a knock on the kitchen door. I froze. The police? The DEA? What should I tell them? Should I--

   "Hey, Ma, it's me! Let me in!"

   It was the dust bunny who had been hanging around our house since July 4th, but who had drifted into other spheres of late. She had come to ask if I could lend her some shoes. Again. I asked her what had happened to the flip flops I had given her a dollar to buy at the Dollar Tree. She told me that she'd been with some people and they'd done some dust and they thought a cop was chasing them. So they ran.

   "But it was a taxi," she explained.

   That hadn't kept her flip flops from falling off. And now it was up to me to replace them. But I wasn't feeling like Mary Poppins at the moment. I told her that I was out of shoes that I could give away. But she was welcome to ask my son if he had anything. She declined, saying that the two of them weren't getting along because he had sided with someone who had called her a rat.

      "What did you rat about?" I asked.

      "I didn't rat about anything," she replied, a little peevishly. "This guy who saw me and your son walking to L-- Street told him I was a rat. But there was no reason for him to say that. I don't know what his problem is, Everybody is just fucking tweaking these days."

      "Yeah, I noticed that," I said. "Maybe they should all just stop doing that crap. What a thought, huh?"

       "Well, I haven't done it for a while," she said.

  She showed me her arms, The bruises were almost gone. Just as I was about to praise her, she shrugged.

    "Last time I did it was last night at (a friend's) house," she said. "But then someone called and said they'd seen a cop circling the street in an unmarked so we got scared and  flushed everything."

    I went into my bedroom and dug out a pair of old sneakers I never wear. She didn't think they were "pretty enough", but I told her that beggars were not permitted to be choosers and bade her good-night. Then I sat down to write, hoping that the sneakers would buy me at least a few solid hours of writing time before another cab driver went monkey on the dust bunny again.

Dusted: Trust No One, Disbelieve Everything You See

Dusted: Trust No One, Disbelieve Everything You See: " When a duster runs out of stuff and starts jonesing for more, he or she can often be seen induging in a little game know..."