When you choose to drink and take drugs (of any kind) you have taken a step toward an addictive path. By making this choice you could enter the subculture. It is a fact I have learned from events I experienced, those that I met, addiction consultants, and friends who lost loved ones.  You have no friends in the subculture!

No matter your age, race, nationality, or gender, your actions make you vulnerable. So let me spell it out:

• You will lose most of the friends and people who care for you!
• The desire to get the source of your addiction will override any rational thinking you still have!
• Your personality will change. You will lie, beg, steal, and sell everything to stay within the subculture!
• Food will run short, and you will rely on churches and charity dinners. At these dinners, you will sit next to people who smell or you smell, people who have not cleaned in days or weeks, people who have slept under a tree or bridge the night before, and people who can not hold down the food, so they vomit!

Yet, remember, the charity and time spent is honest and is intended as a way to save your life.

Note: You are alone. But the desire for survival is still there. Please read the Stop Addiction Before It Starts page.

Watch for these people: those who continually tell you that you are a great person; that specific things you do are fantastic and are good quality. In other words, BS from them that causes you to let your guard down.

Starting in March, I was able to afford a rooming house in Rothville; it was my own room to stay safe and have a roof over my head. Two weeks later I lost my job (my employer found out that I was homeless), bought some alcohol, and went back to the room. That is when I met Larry and his friends who had just moved in for a week. I had no TV, and they invited me to watch a movie with them. I have decades of street smarts and martial arts training, yet I let my guard down. I was robbed of my backpack and alcohol. I had to pay $20 to get my backpack and my journals, which were in the backpack, returned. There was nothing else I could do.

Larry was the perfect example of people in the subculture. The Real People you Read About

Note: Before and after this event, I was robbed at gunpoint and pistol whipped in Leoardville, robbed again of my backpack, and forced to defend myself in Quasqueton. See, that backpack was so important to me because it contained my journals. I valued these as a way to help myself and others. And I paid in money, blood, and scars to keep it.