Depression: Inside My Life of Fuckin' Madness (Warning: LONG & crazy story) Read at your own risk! You've been warned!

I guess it's about time I show you what I'm so depressed about ^ ... I mean, look at that! Jesus! Lol.

Like the title says, I am just feeling down right now and I figured instead of letting it eat me up on the inside that I would just write down the way I feel, it doesn't matter if anybody reads this, this is just the way I am feeling right now.

I guess I never realized how different I was until around 1999, when I was 15. I was home schooled starting in 3rd grade on, so I really didn't have much to compare myself to to know what normal was. When I was around 11 years old a friend of my Moms had just heard of Asperger's syndrome, and she had a feeling that I had it.

I live in the United States and my Father was born and raised in Holland until he came to the States to attend college, met my Mother, and ended up staying here on Long Island, New York. My Mother was raised in Brooklyn & Queens to Italian immigrants and my Fathers family were dirt poor farmers in The Netherlands. We weren't exactly poor, but we didn't have extra money when I was growing up, that's for sure. I never noticed. I got my first computer when I was 15, we never had one until then. We never had cable television growing up or any entertainment things really. We were all outside kids growing up, a lot of sports, a lot of late night manhunt games in the neighborhood. Boy, things have changed.

I grew up in Nassau County on Long Island until 1999 when we moved a county over to Suffolk County, still on Long Island. This is when everything changed for me. I never ended up getting tested for Autism as a kid, because we didn't have money or insurance, so we just kept going, I never even noticed or thought about it at all. But when we moved, it hit me like a sack of bricks, and changed my entire life. I realize in hind sight that it was the shock of change that Autistic people can't take that led me to take it to the extreme.

I was the nicest kid growing up, but now my heart was full of hate. I begged my parents not to move, I loved my home. But they uprooted us all and moved anyway. In my young age I couldn't understand this, how could they do this to me? My hatred for the next several years of my life was directed towards them. Thankfully they are extremely strict parents in a lot of ways and my Father never stood for me cursing at them, or talking back to them, so I never said anything way too crazy that I would later regret, except a lot of I hate you's and I am going to kill myself threats and what have you.

Because of this though, my hatred was directed inwards. I was alone, home schooled, in the new county, with no friends, and I was extremely different. I was ordering books by Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein and had posters of scientists and quotes by them on my wall instead of being interested in woman and the normal things a 15 year old would be into. So between the mix of hate directed inwards and the lack of an outlet to release that hate things started getting really ugly in my head.

We moved into the new house on Valentines Day, 1999, February 14th. I remember it like it was yesterday. April had come, and the house was still not in order. We had a TV on some crappy stand turned onto the news and I remember we were unpacking boxes. On the news comes the reports of gunfire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. I became entranced in my sick, hateful, teenage madness. But I didn't realize it yet, at this point in my mind I was still the same old nice kid from Nassau County.

The Autistic obsessiveness did nothing to help. My life suddenly became all about Columbine. I had disturbing thoughts like "how did I not think of this?" And jealous that they had died while somehow proving some point that made sense at the time in my undeveloped and twisted mind. I started hunting down people using the AOL search from Littleton and talking to anybody I could from the area about what they knew. I must've come off as a nut, but most people really seemed willing to talk. I remember being jealous this I didn't have it in me, I thought I was some sort of a pussy because I could never kill somebody else, I couldn't even kill myself. I have threatened suicide and been taken off to the hospital because of it and admitted more times than I wish to admit. Thankfully not in several years, but I have been through some very ugly times.

Around the same time I got my first legitimate job at a local McDonald's which I hated with a passion. I had become the most introverted human being by this point and the social anxiety I suffered was beyond outrageous. Crippling. When your hands start cramping up into a fist and you can't even open up your hand, the dripping sweat, eyes darting, shaking, nauseousness.... oh my Lord in Heaven, it was horrible.

Anyway, while working at McDonald's I met this crazy dude who I'll call Joey. Joey ended up getting fired like 2 weeks into working but he had grabbed my phone number before that happened. He called me up one day to hang out and things are a little bit blurry about the first few times we hung out, but I know that drugs weren't involved on my part in the beginning. Anyway, turned out Joey was staying with his parents out here for a little bit because he just got out of jail for running a small time heroin operation in Bushwick, BK. I didn't know any of this at the time. Anyway, at some point he introduced me to cocaine, which surprisingly, was the very first drug I had ever done at this point. I was totally against drugs, but he was getting me to go halves with him on the bags and then he would give me a bump or twos worth and pocket the rest, lmao. I realize looking back how bad I was getting played, but this was my first venture into the street life.

Things went on with Joey, he ended up doing some really stupid shit he got called out to do and got into a shitload of trouble and had to dip. He came back around a while later but he had gotten really bad by this point using (shooting) heroin. He ended up robbing me, my family, coming to my job with gang members with guns and threatening me, my job had to implement entire new security measures after this occurred and things were really serious for a while, to the point where I woke up my entire family one night and told them we had to leave right then, they took it as my Autism making me paranoid or something, but they didn't take it to seriously.

I am not to sure what ever happened to Joey, I've looked him up online in the past and see he was in Florida in jail for some shit. Anyway, at this point I had moved on to hanging out with your non gang affiliated white boys from the suburbs, lol.

It didn't last to long. My nature is such a caring one, that I always feel bad for the worst people, the bad people, the people that other people are smart enough to stay away from. I am like one of those woman who think that they could somehow "change the bad boy" ... only mine is in a totally non-sexual way. I just always want to see people going the wrong way turn out alright and live a happy and normal life.

So I at this point I was a big time pothead, stopped all other drugs entirely and was doing pretty good. I had worked full time, took the train everyday, and worked with one of my close friends who I got a job. We would both take the train every day together, then walk from the station to our job. There was this nice little cut with some woods behind the building we worked in so like clock work we would be back there before work and on breaks puffing our bowls. I have enough stories to fill a book about drug use going on by me and my boy at that job. Tripping on acid, falling over drunk on the job, blowing weed smoke in my GMs face, lmao! Good times, and never got fired for any of it. Oh man, and the E, can't forget the E, those were indeed good times back in the day.

But on with where I was going with this in the first place with the whole pothead thing. Almost everybody in the neighborhood picked up from this one dude. He was always hanging out but had no friends. He was a really nice guy who started selling little bags of weed in his friends to high school and got caught up in the game. He was a genius. He won a trip in high school for how smart he was and got to go to Australia. He took an ounce of weed on the plane and made it to Australia before a dog sniffed him out in line. He got deported right back home and never set foot outside of the airport.

I started hanging out with this dude all the time, became like brothers with him. He was just a pothead but he sold a bit of everything, except for heroin, crack, meth, etc. He was always good with at least 5 strains of exotics, shrooms, acid, e pills, anything that you really were in the mood for. He was also extremely into graffiti, and we did a good amount of pieces, or should I say HE did, I have no artistic ability, I just went with him and held ladders and ducked from the MTA pigs and whatnot. At this point I had a car, he didn't. So I started making really stupid decisions and started transporting a ton of shit around. Doing the main pickups and re-upping on shitloads of e pills stuffed in MacDonald cups and shoved under tons of laundry in the trunk. I was extremely stupid as a teen and into my late 20s even. Very pathetic.

One night while he was on house arrest he had me run to 7/11 for him to grab some munchies while we watched History of the World Part I by Mel Brooks. When I got back to his house he was drunk as fuck already and really angry on the phone. Some dudes had called saying the acid he sold them was fake (definitely wasn't, tripped balls on it myself more times than I can remember) and they wanted something in return. He cursed them out and they were saying they were coming for him and shit. I wanted no part of any of that trouble, so I told him I was leaving. Nothing happened that night. Life went on for like a week... then I get a call from him one night and his voice is shaky as fuck, he sounded like a mess. Some girl from the neighborhood (ended up having nothing to do with the acid pickup people) set him up to be robbed. A couple bloods from out east came to his house and just acted like they was there to pick up a couple ounces of weed. This dude had the sweetest pitbull, but if you fucked with him, this dog would tear your nuts off. So I guess they weren't comfortable in the house. They asked him if they "could try it before they buy it" outside on the porch so he packed a bowl (thankfully left the bud in the house). When he got outside one put him in a choke-hold from behind while the other pointed a gun in his face and asked where the weed was at. He said it was in the house but they ran his pockets anyway. Took his cellphone and then tried to go inside the house. As soon as the door was open an inch the pitbull was there going wild, ready to kill, so the dude slammed the door and they dropped my boy from the neck and walked back to the car. The dude tried to act all tough and stood on the hood of his car holding his gun out pointing it at my boy trying to prove a point I guess or something. They left, and my boy called me.

Now, you have to remember my childhood... I was raised religious, home schooled, I wasn't really a bad person, I was still a moral guy throughout this whole drug stage of my life. Just a depressed addict is all, like most addicts. I wasn't bad, I was depressed as fuck with who I was, where my life was, future aspects, etc. So when he called me he asked me what he should do, we both know the girl who set him up, as she called him to set it all up in the first place. It was my good friends sister, and he hated her with a passion. Her own brother, she was a local alcoholic and prostitute nasty ass bitch regardless. So I told him to call the police. Which he did. Oh they knew immediately what was up, but without proof, the cops couldn't do anything. We just told the cops we don't know why they robbed him, what they wanted, lol. Stupid looking back, and a year or so later my boy went down HARD regardless, so they got him in the end, haha. Anyway, the cops asked if he knew who did it, and they drove him to the apartment where the girl lived and pointed her out, she was arrested. She ended up snitching out the blood members and they all got pinched and I believe at least two of them did 2 years or more on it in the end. She didn't really do too much time, I seen her out less then a year later, 10x nastier than when she went in.

A couple months before this all went down the whole neighborhood was getting shitty. One of these crazy kids we hung out with who's Pops was doing life on a triple homicide was acting all sorts of crazy lately. He started lacing strawberry shampoo onto the blunt wraps and not telling us, we'd here it crackling and be like what the fuck, he'd be there laughing his ass off. He was a big guy, not afraid to fight anybody, but lost almost all of them. He was definitely filled with all sorts of mental illnesses and he lived in an essential shack with his Mom and felon brothers. He got into this fight with this kid one day, and the Father of the kid ended up calling up my friend, said he wanted to meet up down at the train station to smoke a blunt & drink a few beers and talk over their differences. Anyway, they met up after Midnight and everything was going fine, just talking. All the sudden something spooked my boy and he pulled a hunting knife and ended up stabbing the guy 19 times. The guy staggered to the pay phone at the station and amazingly survived in the end. This retard was caught within an hour and he directed the cops right to the storm drain he had thrown the knife down the minute they even asked, lol. Not the brightest guy, buy this was back in like 2004 and he is still locked up, so he is doing a long stretch.

When I found the "fake weed" K2, Mr. Nice Guy, Scooby Treats, etc. type bullshit, Mamma Mia!! This is when I found out what the word addiction really meant. At first they were using this chemical called JWH-018 to give you the weed high, it was a full on THC high, as hard as a THC high could possibly get, it was insane. I loved it, smoked it like crazy, the high lasted like an hour or so. Was great! Sold it at gas stations all over the Island, lol. Then the government shut it down hard, so I had to find a new way to get it. I started making my own ordering the chemicals from China for a while, but even that got shut down. Then I found this terrible stuff that was called Dark Matter, I don't know what was put in it, but it was like crack mixed with meth. I needed it, and needed it every 15 minutes or so for about 2 years straight. I was an addict like you never seen. I was chasing down the mailmen in my car, pulling them over and asking them to look for a package with my name on it about 3x a week. It was crazy. I was going through ounces of this stuff a week, and spent every penny I had to get more of it, it was hardcore. Out of nowhere, just as my birthday was rolling around and I had a camping trip planned, the website went down, and I couldn't find an alternative before the trip. I ended up going camping, which was supposed to be for a week, but left the 2nd day after I was sicker then I have ever been before in my life. I threw up about 2 gallons of vomit that night in the tent into this giant bowl. I had like a fever, horrible shakes, the shits, it was horrible. I barely got home. I dealt with it for about 3-4 days and the symptoms started to get better and slowly I just went straight into being an alcoholic.

Alright, so now I am used to being fucked up beyond all recognition all of the time. I was already a pretty big drinker but at this point I was drinking all day, to keep the buzz going. I was drinking on every break at the new town job that I had and ended up getting extreme panic attacks and anxiety all the time at work. I would freeze up and start shaking and sweating, I couldn't even talk to people and would mix up my words as my brain would race around in all kinds of directions. I ended up one night desperate as hell to get out of there, so I told my manager I didn't know what to do anymore, and that I was "at the end of my rope" in life. They took it very seriously. I worked in the food department of a hospital, so they held me by the hands and walked me up to the mental health unit and had me admitted. I tried to talk them out of it, but they said I had threatened suicide and would have to be held until I was seen and spoken to by a mental health professional.

I ended up getting out about 8 hours later and went on medical leave. During this leave I just started drinking more and more since I wasn't working anymore. As I drank more my body started shutting down.

I started getting calls from the Human Resource department that my time was running out and I needed clearance for more time, when I would see the phone number pop up, my anxiety would be through the roof. I decided to just stop answering the phone entirely and ended up getting a voicemail a few weeks later that I was no longer employed and I could not be reached or contacted.

The depression at this point got deeper as I continued to lead my family into thinking I was on medical leave still. As the depression grew, so did the drinking. I stopped drinking beer entirely, and only would drink the strongest liquor. I got up to drinking 1.750L bottles every single day with a bunch of 100 proof $1 shots on top of the bottle. After a few months of this, I had stopped eating entirely, my body would not accept food anymore, and I was not hungry do to the insane amount of calories I was in-taking through vodka. It got to the point where for over one month I had consumed nothing but liquor, and I started throwing up everything at this point. I could no longer even sip the liquor without puking, a sip of water I would puke up, a crumb of a cracker I would puke up, my body was rejecting everything.

In my rage and depression, I started blaming my parents one night. All in my head. I just started thinking how being home schooled and all had ruined any chance I would have in the future. How I was stuck in a dead end in life. I was extremely drunk and I remember for some reason taking my shirt off and posing with my rifle because it made me feel better for some reason. (Don't worry, I no longer possess firearms of any kind and have grown up into a far more mature person who is strictly interested and highly invested in a bunch of different blockchains and blockchain applications.) I started texting my sister who moved out years ago to another state how I was feeling. I was blaming my parents to her and for some dumbass reason started sending her the pictures I took with the rifle. She did the right thing (although at the time I was too out of it to realize) and called my parents and told them what was going on.

This was all going on in the middle of the night and at some point I had passed out on my bed wasted as hell with my rifle and an empty bottle of vodka laying with me in the bed. I was only in my boxers and it was maybe 6:30 in the morning when I hear a pounding at my bedroom door. I get up in only my boxers and open my door and there are four police officers standing there with my Dad. They walked right in my room, which was littered with hundreds (I shit you not) of empty liquor bottles. One officer saw the gun on the bed and said "there it is" and another officer took it. They told me to get dressed and I complied without a word. Somehow during all of this I knew what it was all about and I just accepted the fact that I needed help.

I got dressed and went outside with the cops, I ended up feeling extremely faint from anxiety mixed with weakness, sickness, and drunkenness. I asked if I could lay down and I laid in the driveway until an ambulance came to take me to the hospital for a mental evaluation. I somehow conned the docs into believing I was okay and they released me. My Dad came to the hospital and said I was no longer welcome at home. I asked him where the hell I was going to go, he said it didn't matter.

So this was when I became homeless. I started at first sleeping in my girlfriends car, as I had been kicked out by her parents of their apartment at the time for of all things, pissing in empty bottles instead of the toilet. Yes, I am either man enough, or foolish enough to admit it. I got so low that I was pissing in empty bottles because I was too lazy to hit the toilet. Very embarrassing. Sleeping in her car became extremely horrible though, as I am 6'6, and it was summertime. I was so crunched up in the car, and paranoid about cops knocking on the window, and it was so hot, I just started sleeping in the park by her house for a while. I pitched a tent for a bit in some woods a town over and would walk literally like 50 miles every single day, if not more. The drinking became more infrequent and I did pretty good for a little bit, as I was broke, homeless, etc.

Then I met this guy who was extremely straight edge, didn't do drugs anymore at all, but he had been an addict before. He was getting a room in some section 8 housing in this really dump town 3 towns over and asked if I wanted to move in since I needed a place to stay. I did. It was really pretty bad over there, but also very exciting. For those who may know, I was living on Suffolk Ave. in Brentwood, NY. An entirely Spanish town where everything is in Spanish, the store names, the churches, the signs, the supermarkets and bodegas, everything is Latin in Brentwood. Here I was this 6'6, Dutch/Italian white boy moving into the project housing. I enjoyed it mostly, but a few scary times happened as the dude "Ghost" who apparently lived in the room before us was dealing crack and now we had all these people knocking at the door looking for Ghost, and a few times we would tell them Ghost don't live here no more and they would be so desperate they'd start kicking at the door, one guy pushed his way in one time and the guy who I was living with got all big up in his face and I walked up standing as tall as I could and we just told him "look, Ghost ain't here no more" as he looked around the single room we were living in. We never met Ghost, but we met a shitload of his clients, that's for sure.

We had this one crackhead living across from us, every single time she walked past you she would ask for $15 to $20 dollars. Not even like "do you have a dollar you can spare", just straight up asking for $15 to $20. The Cuban dude who lived down the hall would scrape his own ice-block out front and make homemade Italian ices on this little trolley and sell them right out on Suffolk Ave. In the back of the trolley is a cabinet he has all the favors for the ice and he also had tons of liquor in there. He was a drunk, most of the people living there were addicted for something.

At this point we had a ton of free time on our hands, and we lived in the middle of Brentwood, it was exciting, there was all kinds of stuff to do around, and it was like moving to some Spanish country, a completely different culture that entire town. Especially the Suffolk Ave area of Brentwood, like Lil' Central/South America, it was awesome. But with the free time came the drinking again. The landlord was in AA for like 30 years and started asking us to come along. We did. Actually really enjoyed it, but of course, we were drinking before/after AA. We enjoyed it more just for the stories people would share, the people you would meet like yourself, just having similar crowd of people as yourself. It's hard being a scumbag in a room full of good people, it's a lot more comfortable to be a scumbag and sit at an AA meeting, you don't feel judged but feel welcome and part of a similar people.

Anyway, it wasn't enough to get me to stop drinking and I just started drinking more and more. After this one night when I woke up and found my roommate standing over me with a bottle of mustard in his hands and my entire blanket covered in mustard, my clothes, my hair, everything, my pillows, it was gross. He just laughed his ass off and I had enough. Things just got a little too much for me out there and I decided to dip on him without a word. He went to his little day job and I went across the street and hopped on a train back to my girls neighborhood. I remember I started drinking like a madman again. Started having seizures, stopped eating again, throwing up 100+ times a day again. I broke a tooth during a seizure smashing my face into the pavement, still not fixed, why I don't smile in pictures.

Then it happened, most of which I don't remember. I remember for some reason being in my girlfriends room, but nobody else was home. (I found out later she had given me her keys while she was gone with her parents for the day at families in New Jersey.) I remember pounding a bottle as usual, watching tv, laying in her bed. Next thing I remember she is home, standing over me and I am on the floor covered in my own piss and shit and for some reason she is literally beating the shit out of me. Apparently I had shit all over her bed, her floor, her television remote was shit on and broken. And this was that death shit, the tar, not even any type of shit you've probably ever seen. I couldn't understand what she was doing and remember just mumbling "whats a matter with you, whats a matter with you, can't you see I am dying?" She said "NO! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE AND MY LIFE" and I said what am I going to do, where am I going to go? She said she didn't know but she'd help me out because I told her I couldn't walk. I started stumbling out of her room and into the hallway falling onto her living room table in the process breaking it, falling in the kitchen, collapsing in the hallway, and then falling down the flight of stairs to the outside door. I woke up with two paramedics, my friend who lived a few blocks away and my girlfriend standing over me in the parking lot of her apartment complex. They loaded me onto a gurney or whatever its called and put me in the ambulance. I don't remember much but my friend and girl saying they would see me there. I passed back out in a dream like state.

I remember getting to the hospital and at first being treated like every one else, but as soon as they took my readings they got really concerned. My #s were so high that if I wasn't brought in that night I would have died. My body was shutting down completely and that is why I lost all of my piss/shit, fluids. My body was giving up after years of abuse.

I was put on an iv a morphine and some anxiety meds with god knows what else for about two weeks in the hospital. Some sweetheart nurse would talk to me every day about why I drank, what I was going to do when I got out of the hospital, she was very sweet and around my age as well, so very easy to talk to. Plus she had seen my ugliest side, so there was nothing else to hide from her. So I could just be very open and talk to her about all of my problems. Unfortunately I have lost all contact with her since I got out, but to this day I am so grateful that she was put in my life at that time.

When I got out of the hospital I was still too weak to walk, and I was still not welcome home. Thank god one of my girlfriends best friends took me in for a few weeks and I had an air mattress in an empty room all for myself. It was a blessing staying with that girl when I got out of the hospital, because she is the busiest woman I know. She can't sit still, is always on the move, always doing awesome things, has tons and tons of friends, is invited to everything. So when I got out she started cooking me breakfasts, and now that I wasn't drinking anymore but my body was used to insane amounts of calories, boy was I a hungry hungry hippo.

I gained back my strength and she really helped me out a ton. Everywhere she went she took me along. I became like her shadow for a while. Hadn't she kept me so busy I could have very easily fallen into the drinking trap again.

Instead I stayed the course, walked to a nearby shitty ass Dollar store and got a terrible job. I started working my ass off also doing truck unloads for McDonald's. At this point after around 2 months of working, being sober, being in a generally much better mood my parents finally accepted me back home.

It wasn't easy getting used to being home again. I was really busy when I was homeless, as the first thought when I woke up every day was "where will I be sleeping tonight?" And now I was just home and working. I needed something more to my life.

Then came the Bitcoin. I was reading a news article on my phone, flipping through articles and something about Bitcoin popped up. I've heard about it over the years, read about it here and there, but was always too busy drinking and doing drugs to care too much about it. Now was the time though.

I was bit by the Bitcoin bug, and just started reading everything I could about it, using it as much as possible, losing money here, making money there. But it excited me, and took up hours and hours of my time.

Then came Ethereum, which I absolutely fell in love with. That is "my blockchain of choice" nowadays, although I am very much enjoying this SteemIt so far as well. I hold a little bit of a good amount of different tokens, but I am definitely in love with Ethereum and Bitcoin as well. I am fascinated by all the future possibilities that blockchains can enable, and not just blockchain. I am back interested in science again, philosophy, AI, robotics, technology as a whole, very much a futurist. I am a HODLer at heart, and rarely sell any of my tokens. I only buy ones I truly believe in, I've tried trading, but I suck at it, lol.

Anyway, that is about it. I started writing this about 2 hours ago and I was feeling pretty damn depressed about a few things going on right now. But it just hit me right now the reason I was even writing in the first place again. Writing all this really helped take me out of my depressive zone I was in and to get into a better train of thought.

Writing about all those old and terrible times really puts things into perspective for me as to how far things have come for me since. I really couldn't ask for any more in life. I have been blessed beyond words.

Thanks to anybody who actually took the time out to read this, I know it was long and all over the place, but I am glad I spent the time to write this, it has really helped clear up my head a bit.

Have a great day everybody!