The Beat of the Street Steals the Song of the Soul

A gritty, harrowing, yet buoyant memoir by Chuck Hagen, focusing on a fifteen year period when he was driven to the wild streets by his addiction to heroin.

*excerpt from ‘Turn Blue’

And that’s the problem with heroin; once you shoot, you can’t help but become the Devil’s plaything. With a flick of the switch your soul is owned and all you can do is shrink into a destiny of roaming the surface world a ghost. A day-to-day proposition, unravelling yet another mystical tangle. Anonymous at whorehouses. Detached at crackhouses. No one notices, no one cares. They have their own problems; they’re on heroin too.

The battle to win your own heart and mind is lifelong. While the human spirit is conditioned toward the path of least resistance, adversity must be accepted as the agonist to a consciousness upgrade. The trick is to understand time as the sole triumph of the universe, and idleness as a sickness from crown to toenail. When struggle rides, an immaculacy encompasses those in tune, all else degenerates into the spiral of nervosa. Denying consciousness the knowledge of its existence means the gap between thought and manifestation glitches towards self destruction. Negative belief and behaviour. A timetable adhered to not by body, but by mind, because you’re a junkie, and any notion of positivity is psychosomatic.

To be draped in comfort, knowing that pain exists and is beneficial, is an unwelcome irony. Physical sickness dominates comfort, yet on the eternal nod, it doesn’t arrive. Under the spell, physical comfort rules the body, sickness rules the mind, and your fighting spirit is felled, one tiny rock at a time.

And the needle, a titanium trophy cabinet of solidified brutality. The plunger, fifty coiled cobras, impatient with pounds-per-square-inch demolition. What stares back is not a human, but a calculated deployment of offensive gesture. A delve into the twisted mind of all intended by its creation. A flash of white bliss forced by the hand of desperation. Trapped in the cycle, a self-fulfilling warning of self. A laughing reflection. An absence of time executed in the most masochistic pomp imaginable.

It’s not the haunt of loneliness that scares the addict, it’s the panic of sensory overload once the bliss dissolves. The first time, Earth becomes you, and the warmth you emanate becomes your sunshine. You become the giver of light, of life, of love. You. Then you awaken and want to die. So you backpedal, but your light is gone and you grow aware of what is everything and what is now and the hurt yet to come. You’re living a life following the setting sun, seeking stars never to be reached. Allow your senses to chase you down and you’re out of excuses. This ain’t no sucker punch, you know what’s coming. Just keep injecting. Ain’t nothing else can be done.

*due for release in 2025