Martin, Raglan

Amelia joins me for a weekend in Raglan, the surf capital of New Zealand. After going out to Yot Club on Saturday night we lay down in Bessie Jane to sleep. Amelia drifts off without issue but I am still restless. My brain is running in circles so I decide to go for a run. I whisper this to Amelia and slip on my shoes and head out. I jog around the city center and over to the footbridge where some men are fishing. On the way back, two men sitting on a bench yell at me. I stop, turn, and shout back


“It’s not nice to yell at women. I don’t like that. Be respectful.” 


The men shout back, arguing with me, but I turn down a side road and keep running. 


An idea strikes me—I could interview these two men for my blog! I decide to get a packet of cookies from my car as a "please don't assault me" offering. I go back to the car, grab the cookies, and whisper to Amelia that I’m going to make friends with some crackheads. She mumbles back sleepily


“Okay, be safe.”


Aw yeah, permission!


I round the corner carrying the packet of cookies and come face to face with a man I had met earlier earlier in the night at the bar. He has a tattoo of a star beneath his eye and I’m guessing that he was one of the men on the bench that I passed earlier. For a paranoid moment I wonder if he is following me but I decide to push forward. I ask if I can interview him and we take a seat on a stoop in front of a shop near where Bessie Jane is parked which I am happy about because it means that Amelia can hear me if things go wrong and I need to scream for help. 


Unbeknownst to me, Amelia is inside the car absolutely losing it with worry. She can only hear pieces of the conversation and one of them is that Martin has just been released from jail for assault. She doesn’t let this go for days. Remember when you scared the shit out of me talking to a felon at 3 AM? 


I think that a good portion of what Martin tells me is bullshit—he wouldn’t be saying it on recording if it were true. Or maybe he would, I don’t know—I can tell from his extremely dilated pupils that he’s high as a kite. I am intrigued by Martin and drugs. He tells me that his greatest fear is being stuck inside a drug trip but at the bar I watched him drink things whose contents he admits he didn’t know. He told me that some of them had only liquor and that some of them were mixed with speed and possibly other drugs. He smokes weed and meth and rattles off a list of other drugs, some of which I’ve never heard of. I’m guessing there aren’t any drugs he wouldn’t do and that he probably doesn’t ask what they are or what quantities he’s taking them in. If this is truly his greatest fear, what is the underlying motive to keep taking unknown drugs in unknown quantities? I suspect it has something to do with the various traumas he’s mentioned: a lifetime of adversity that’s left him without the proper skills to navigate his internal world or to make meaningful changes to his external circumstances. I think there is an aspect of learned helplessness—this is the life and the circumstances that he was born into and he has accepted it. He tells me about “title of suffix” which he explains to mean that “you are who you are.” I ask him if he ever thinks about how life could be different and he shoots this idea down. He lives in the present, he says. He enjoys feeling happy and drugs make him feel happy. I try to provide him psychoeducation but he’s not listening. 


Another thing I notice is that Martin engages in mental games with himself not dissimilar to what conspiracy theorists do. He tells me about subconsciously planting ideas in his own head and the explanation for this is convoluted and involves mental gymnastics that I decide to bypass. He also uses a lot of big words and terms incorrectly—I’m sure this makes him feel smart with the crowd he runs in and provides a boost to his ego. Unfortunately I think that this is another link in the chain keeping him stuck. Why be a little fish in a big pond when he can be a big fish in a little pond? 


Overall, I think Martin has potential (and more than some) but there are a multitude of barriers keeping him in place. I think it’s likely that Martin will never change and I think that is a shame. 


Conversation highlights: 


At around the 15:20 mark what’s happening is that a car has pulled up on the other side of the street and a man is getting out. Martin has gotten up and is walking over to him like they are going to fight. I hide behind a bush and you can hear Martin ask where I’m going. It's just a delivery guy. 


At around the 43:10 mark he starts talking about Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s current prime minister. He disparages her, saying that she is clearly a meth head which I think is ironic because he later admits to smoking meth. I don’t get the chance to explore this cognitive dissonance. 


At the 43:45 mark he says that the way to solve social issues like the sex abuse of children is to provide an environmental structure that supports people’s well-being. How can he be so right on the money with the solution and yet so far away on the foundations to achieve the solution? 


At the 51 minute mark I ask him what the longest he’s been sober is and we have an illuminating conversation about his drug use. 




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