Fred H.
DOB: 1/7/64; Takoma Park, Maryland.
Click Here for Addict Out of the Dark and into the Light – 51_Fred.mp3
A year after that I decided I didn’t want to drink alcohol anymore either,
because I didn’t like the way it brought what I think human beings, I think human beings are like divine creatures, and think that anything that reduces us to a very low state, to like a state of sub-human level, and makes us into what I might call to be clowns, is negative.
I was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist family. What bearing that has on me now, I am not sure. I think I had a pretty normal childhood. Pretty shock free. I think it was very secluded, in a sense very sheltered. But I went to a Seventh Day Adventist high school, and I guess for most of those years I was pretty much, I accepted a lot of things just as they were presented to me, from my background, from my childhood, what my parents taught, and what the institutions taught me.
But I’d say at a certain point I started to become a little dissatisfied with things, because at least from what was told to me and what I began to see in the world around me, things began to differ. And I think that kind of set me out on a kind of road, on a road to kind of figure things out and find out what was true and what was not true, and to challenge things, both things that were presented to me, and challenge the things within.
So that’s kind of it. It’s always been something that I’ve been wanting to do and have been trying to do. And that was always to find out more and learn more, and information has always fascinated me. And I don’t know how much absolute truth there is, but I have always thought that information was a sense of self-empowerment, of being able to help to prevent you from being duped or being exploited or being taken advantage of. So information is very important to me, and I tend to put a high price on like something being true or as opposed to being unbiased or a lie or false.
So that’s very important to me. I try and live life along the lines of if it doesn’t cut it on a basis of does it stand up under criticism. If it doesn’t stand up under criticism, you’ve got to start to look at it and wonder if it is all that it claims to be.
Right now where I am going in my life I’m not sure. I would hope that this direction in my search for things that are true, and knowledge and information and hoping that knowledge and information go together, will take me to some¬place and where that is I don’t know. I would expect that I would only know that probably a day before I died or something like that, many years down the road.
So I really have no expectations about what there is that I want to, what there is that I will achieve, or what will happen, if there will be some great event that will boost me through into some higher strata, some level of transcendence. I just live, and just live from day to day, trying to see if little by little I can improve myself, and maybe in the smallest way to do that and to see if I can slowly but surely translate that into an externa¬lization of the way I view and treat the world around me. To understand and to live in better sync with the world around me is something that I would definitely feel like I would want to move toward. That’s very important to me.
Otherwise right now I’m going to school at Montgomery College, and I’m taking a series of courses so that eventually I can leave with a certificate in being a legal assistant slash paralegal. But that’s kind of the boring, technical side really. Once again it’s my interest in the idea of information being accessible to people, if you know how to get it. And in the legal area that’s something where you have to know how to be able to access it, and in a sense what the magical incantations are to get to what you want — the information.
One of the things that I have a problem with is areas of life where certain groups of people have established themselves, be it court magicians, that they hold the answers to something and that it’s going to be pretty secret to anybody else. So one of my areas would be to have access to that information, so thereby depriving them of the monopoly that they might have on my life or other people’s lives. If I had that information I would disperse it to everyone. As much as I am interested in information I think it should be completely democratized and given to everyone, but that’s it.
I have been clean since 1983. Clean being the farthest I ever went was to smoke marijuana and I did that I would say maybe five or six separate times. It was initiated probably out of a certain amount of — I think I first started it in my senior year of high school and I did so initially, the first time was out of curiosity. I wanted to see what the big commotion was all about, was understanding that in my community Seventh Day Adventists — it was something that was being the end of the world, so to speak, for our children to do and to use. So I wanted to see what it was all about, and I used it actually with one other person, and I did it.
So I said, well, I want to find out, we went. I experi¬mented. I found it to be pleasant. I had a very euphoric sensation. How much of it was psychological I am not sure. But I used it about five more times, just under certain circumstances, and I came back to my love of, in a sense my love of information and love of my brain. And after having done it, well, I said, that’s really interesting, and I find the effects to be really interesting. But I have this love of my brain and I don’t want to destroy it in any way. So I just came to decide that’s enough of that. I’m not going to do that.
A short while after that, maybe a year or so, I just decided, even after I stopped smoking marijuana, I would drink alcohol. But a year after that I decided I didn’t want to drink alcohol anymore either, because I didn’t like the way it brought What I think human beings, I think human beings are like divine creatures, and think that anything that reduces us to a very low state, to like a state of sub-human level, and makes us into what I might call to be clowns, is negative. When you are not in control, I don’t mean in a sense of control like you’re always doing the right things, but I am talking about when you can be responsible for your actions.
So I stopped drinking alcohol. I said, that’s enough. From there on out I have learned by watching other people. A lot of it came from watching other people who I knew were doing drugs and had done drugs. And I thought that there was this real kind of dullness about them that seemed to like stamp out any sort of dynamic personality about them.
And I just thought that was really kind of depressing. And so that’s where I kind of learned from watching people. I said I’ve noticed people who I thought were doing drugs, I was sure that they were doing drugs. And they just didn’t seem to be like people who were like fully functioning at their peak. So that’s where I kind of like got a negative connotation of drug use.