My most persistent, vicious harasser at the crisis unit is a male patient who is in his thirties. He has spent time in jail for forgery and is a recovering heroin addict.
He once told a group of patients stories about his interactions with the criminal justice system. In one of the stories, he quoted himself as having told a law enforcement officer, "Catch me if you can." Apparently, somebody could and did.
Where might a man who is now in his early thirties have gotten the idea that forgery and heroin were cool things to do? He has never said that the characters played by any movie star in particular were ever his idols and role models for behavior; I don't know how many relatively young men would admit that sort of hero worship to anyone.
He is intelligent and verbose. He can talk for hours about politics and get into a frenzy of hatred for how regular people are routinely betrayed and victimized, mostly financially, by the power elite. There are a lot of things that he could have done with his life by this time if he hadn't destroyed so many of his earlier options with crime, which I think he probably thinks about every second that he's not seeking distraction from his self-hated by harassing me.
One thing that I have disliked about the entertainment industry for a long time is the totally unrealistic way that it portrays the effects of things such as drug use on people's bodies. There are drugs that are very easy to get addicted to and very hard to quit, and few people emerge from years of addiction looking like movie stars, to say the least.
Copyright L. Kochman, April 22, 2015 @ 11:46 a.m./additions @ 11:54 p.m.
