One more theory about my missing friend Kitty

It was in a camp like this under a Seattle overpass that her
backpack and computer were stolen while she slept.

             The last time I heard from my friend Kitty was January 31, 2015. We had chatted online almost daily for at least a decade until that day. A drug user from the age of 16 or 17 she was going into rehab. During a late afternoon online chat the day she was waiting to be picked up by rehab operators in Seattle, she broke it off saying simply, ”they’re here, gotta go.”

That’s the last I heard from her but she has been on my mind often since then, particularly during intense times when I have been working on a writing project in which she is the central character. She will be 33 next Thursday.

            As time has passed I've thought of many reasons for her silence. They range from the positive (she rehabbed successfully and decided she had outgrown me) to the negative (somehow she had died from an overdose after failing at the rehab) and include several other scenarios as well.

                    Recent developments in the news have raised a new fear for her. In the past week or so the issues of opioid use and misuse have risen, particularly when an Oklahoma legal case went against one manufacturer to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and another manufacturer facing multi-Billion- dollar court decisions has offered a settlement or it threatens to declare bankruptcy. In the meantime, an estimated 400,000 persons have died from use of “oxy” drugs.

            This news has made me recall the weeks prior to Kitty disappearing. At her lowest, she had slept several nights under one of those overpasses in Seattle. One night someone stole her backpack which had held her computer. For a time she hiked every day to a library where she connected with me so we could talk. Later she had moved into a house with some other women. She also reached another low point and had gotten into trouble with a dealer, owing him a considerable (for her) amount of money. In her condition where she had no steady income and had used up just about everything she had a hundred dollar debt is considerable.

            Under threat of physical harm he had her turning tricks to gain the drugs she needed and pay down the debt. It was one of those deals that kept her under his control because she was never going to be able to pay the debt as long as she kept using. That was partly her reason to find a rehabilitation situation, to escape him.

            Kitty’s drug of choice was meth, and over the years it had seemed to me she controlled it better than all the horror stories say is possible. But this drug dealer stopped giving her meth and instead substituted one of the “oxy” drugs. She told me she didn’t like it but that was all she could get so she used it. Thinking back I recall now a change in her once she started using that drug. Though there were highs and lows constantly over the years, generally she seemed to function and was even happy with the meth. At the time I didn't know opioids were as bad as we have learned. In fact, I thought she might be better off than with methamphetamines.She did turn more serious and more depressed with her situation on the oxy, and probably with the situation with the dealer as well.

            As opioids have come more into the forefront and I have learned more about them, it has me beginning to wonder if that is involved in her disappearance. Could she have disappeared into a mental haze caused by the drug? Could she have overdosed and died? Could the dealer have caught her? It’s one more possibility added to the already full basket of causes, none of which has provided an answer to date. So, she'll be 33 next week. We talked once as she approached 30 about how she was beginning to look a little more seriously into her future. I suggested she might be approaching a change into maturity in life and she agreed that might be happening and being willing to accept it. But now almost four years later the greatest mystery of my life has grown even deeper.

BELOW ARE A FEW CONVERSATIONS FROM OVER THE YEARS
One path to life on the street
Busted
Another descent into that methamphetamine mind
Out of the haze of drugs a day of optimism
Conversation with a young prostitute

The Trump death sentence

Maria Isabel Bueso was 7 years old when she came
to the United States from Guatemala at the
invitation of doctors who were conducting a clinical
trial for the treatment of her rare, disfiguring genetic disease.
From The New York Times and the Maddowblog. 

It just gets unimaginably sicker. This woman came to the US at the age of 7, invited because of a rare disease she has. She was invited to participate in trials for treatment. The trials were successful and she is now in her 20s but still needs treatment to stay alive. Meanwhile what was learned from her has helped others. She was told this week by the Trump to get out of the US. The story is much more poignant than I can say, read this:

Sick migrants ordered out of the country

The Arctic is on fire

     When I first saw that headline it took a moment to fully recognize its significance. Imagine it. We grow up thinking of the Arctic as a severely cold environment, much of it covered by ice and underlain by permafrost where few people have the fortitude to survive. Polar bears and ice and not much more where the temperature rarely rises above 40 F and can dip to minus 50 or more. and you could walk from Alaska to Siberia on the ice in the Bering Strait. Tough to imagine it could be on fire, but it is, almost all the way around the world at least in the sub-Arctic regions.
ALASKA

Alaska in July when we were just getting going. By Aug. 25 more than 750 fires covering 2.6 million acres had been reported. (NASA photo)

SIBERIA

EUROPE

     So what?
     Well, here's what. while we've been looking north we discover all the lands along the Equator, all the way around the world are on fire and it looks a lot worse from here.
     First there's the Amazon
SOUTH AMERICA

Impressive, huh? Those are the lungs of the wold burning today.

     But there is more. And then just when we have that absorbed that we learn there are more fires in Equatorial Africa than in South America.

AFRICA

Seldom mentioned as such, but this has to be a huge oxygen generator as well.

     If there were a large land mass out in the Pacific Ocean it would probably be on fire as well.
     Those fires in the Amazon and Africa may be the most dangerous. In Alaska we have serious fire-fighting ability. You have to wonder what's available in Amazon and African jungles. Both look so massive as to seem impossible to extinguish. And, they are consuming large numbers of trees in areas that produce a large portion of the available oxygen for the planet.

VIEW A NASA ANIMATION OF THE AMOUNT OF CO2 EMITTED BY FIRES WORLDWIDE

     Does anyone think climate change is junk science now? You have to wonder if by the end of the year if the fires continue we will have passed the tipping point, where Earth heats up to the point no mitigating measures can reverse the effect, those resources that regenerate naturally have been exhausted and eventually our planet becomes uninhabitable much sooner than the most radical of those fake scientists predicted.
     Aren't we lucky Antarctica doesn't have trees? Oh, wait. There's melting.
Does it all seem so far away it doesn't matter? Well, it does. As my friend Patricia Monaghan wrote several years ago, "You are nowhere where you are not part of the world."

At least 2.6 million acres have burned in Alaska this summer
The Amazon can't be recovered once it's gone and the cause is political
More fires burning in Africa than in South America
More than 1,600 fires reported in Europe this year.
Siberia: World largest forest has been burning for months

The new standard

     Years ago I heard Julian Bond give a speech, talking a lot about Martin Luther King Jr. At one point to illustrate that King was the epitome and the world shouldn't expect every black person who comes along to live up to the standard, he recited a poem he'd written to illustrate the thought.

Look at that girl

Shake that thing

We can't all be

Martin Luther King

    Well, I saw this meme about Paul Newman today, most of which I had known, and had a similar thought. That certainly is a standard we should reach for, but most of us are human, too. It is an ideal, one that few of us can hope to live up to, so I wrote my own poem It goes like this:

Drink that beer

Look at that woman

we can't all be

Paul fuckin' Newman

But we can try.

Do we duck and cover or fight back?

Looked something like this. Photo was with an article titled "Best pants
for concealed carry" on a web site titled "The Truth About Guns."

 Just saying. Yesterday a guy brushed past me in a hurry at the supermarket. Dirty brown Carhartt pants, wife-beater-type undershirt, scraggly unkempt hair. What looked like a Glock tucked in and exposed in the pants waistband behind his back.

     Last night I learned a good friend was taken to the hospital with what he described as a serious condition. Only a little word since, no diagnosis yet, exploratory surgery set for Monday. Two more friends in chemo. And all I can think to do is thoughts and prayers.

    Woke up today to shooting in El Paso, at last count, 20 dead and 26 wounded. So sick of pundits who don't say anything, a reasonably intelligent person couldn't surmise. Ex: I saw a video and the sound included gunshots, spaced out, which to me said the shooter was not just spraying a crowd, but taking time to aim at individuals. Later one of the experts said that too. Gang of reporters surrounding an obviously distraught woman who has not been able to locate her mother. Emotional, tears, wavering voice and still the cameras recording and the questions shouted in her face. Finally two women helped her out of there. A quick-thinking serviceman carrying children out of the store during the shooting. Also on the attaboy side: the guy in the red baseball cap handing out slices of pizza to folks standing in line to give blood; the folks standing in line to give blood (they overwhelmed the capability to collect blood and were told to come back Monday).

      Then, get this: El Paso being a border town, people are reportedly hesitant to go to collection centers looking for relatives for fear of being arrested by ICE and deported. Some might be foregoing medical care as well, for the same reason.

     Police report call came at 10:39; first officers on scene at 10:45; suspect apprehended at 11:09. Thirty minutes, 46 people shot.

      And here's how things get screwed up. This progression is all from one guy: first mention, shooter is from Allen, Texas; next mention, Allen, Texas, near Dallas; next mention, from Dallas area; and for a grand finale, the shooter is from Dallas.

       And news heads attempting to fill space. I heard one guy with an intent, caring expression ask the mayor of El Paso what would be going on in that shopping mall on a normal Saturday morning. Um.

     And then there's the Alaska nongovernor and the US #fakepresident. And the Arctic is still on fire.

    WTF, over!