Ruined

Ruined

By Mack McColl

Copyright 2024

Synopsis 145 Pages

The story takes place in Vancouver before the 2010 Winter Olympics and wraps up a year later on an Indian Reservation on North Vancouver Island. It follows a man rendering a first person account of a descent into drug addiction in the worst neighborhood in North America, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

The man has a few demons in addition to his addictions, all of which are leading him to ruin.

Prologue

You're not telling me anything because I'm too stupid to listen, and too young, and you're too old, and we don't speak the same language.

Under the observation of a pathologist, I would have been a John Doe, a no-account dead man in a reasonably clean shirt. I would have been an unidentified frozen corpse with multiple contusions having a set, no, a series, of previous abrasions and bruises as if I lived the life of a street fighter; Injuries and defects in this unidentified corpse include a severe concussion from the first of a total of four lethal assaults in the past six and a half weeks. The last one was designed to put me on the slab once and for all. Yet I survived. Oh yes. To tell stories like this one.

Chapter One: No good deed will go unpunished

In the beginning, God lived in my basement and I remember from when I was three years old, at most, even though someone told me once, "Aw you were too young to remember anything at that age." This is the consensus. No. I remember because it is something you don't forget being in a house with God in the basement. People are told to look up for God and this seems to be a major deception throwing everybody off the trail.

I say from personal experience I didn't look up, instead, I crawled down wooden steps to the basement. And there I sat across the room staring at him, in my infancy, of course. The pure infant me relates this in the face of a lot of literary directives from high-minded sources, raising the need to discuss things I have read through the years, including the Holy Bible, a book with a long history containing intense mystery. Okay, enough about that.

One of the first things we learn is we are dust. We are told so by an illiterate God, and his message in the Holy Bible is presented as so much, oh my, such an awful lot, of baffle-gab, somehow inciting people to murderous impulses in so many ways the mind boggles.

Is it objectionable to blame God for taking apart people limb from limb through the millennia based on the instructions from the scribes? Thou Shalt Not Kill (in hordes of less than 5,000 per day in sub-tropical zones with rivers nearby and industrial-grade transportation facilities).

Is it possible not all of us arrive in a world accompanied by months of close confinement with the Almighty? It was the end of my innocence, I can assure you. We are innocent in the eyes of virtually everything and everyone, except God. He's forgiving, not forgetful, yah, forgiving is what he is and does, but innocence doesn't enter the picture as far as I can tell.

God was in the basement during an infancy of twists and turns setting the archetypes of a peculiar bent to put life beyond my control. My older sister would not visit God in the basement, and she was perfectly aware he was there. She refused to hang around him. She didn't like him. He took up space she was accustomed to playing in, with me, of course, and her own friends, so she was angry at him. It is incorrect to suggest God wanted me in the basement either; in my experience he didn't. I remember him barely tolerant of my tiny presence. But God had no friends. None. So I visited.