None of my associates are rooting for my success, so they don’t read my blog, and I feel pretty free to write about them while maintaining their anonymity bc they’ll never know. Wait til you hear about the famous criminals I kinda know–

In Honolulu chances are better than good that we are all connected to each other through shared acquaintances, or friends of friends. There’s an effort to clean out some of the corruption in a local government that is heavily reliant on who you know and who you are related to. It looks like the former police chief and chief prosecutor are going to federal prison in 2020 for various forms of corruption that boil down to theft. It turns out that the associate of mine who christened me Harvard Hooker behind my back, has an old friend who I also met. This old friend gave me a bad feeling and I wasn’t surprised to find out he was calling me “that black chick,” and worse, behind my back. But here is the interesting part, the Harvard Hooker guy, and his obnoxious friend, are acquainted with the present day defendants, the former faces of Honolulu law enforcement. I saw the obnoxious friend on the news very recently, because he is also headed to prison. I guess there is a group of private school graduates who come from the upper economic classes in Honolulu, but they themselves are criminals and scrubs who now take turns living in each other’s cars. They spend their time trying to get control of their finances back from the families that held economic interventions and took over their money supply so it doesn’t all go up in smoke. Without the family money they support themselves through “boosting” Boosting is shoplifting as a way of life in order to get money for drugs and gambling. Practitioners would not call themselves thieves any more than they would call themselves liars because “taking from stores is not the same as stealing from people you know.” But thieves and liars they are, and I admit I felt superior to people who did these things because I didn’t have to take money. People happily gave me money and they didn’t want it back. And yes, I will further acknowledge that I still make a moral distinction between voluntary sex workers and thieves. It is not exactly mind blowing that these game room regulars are somehow connected to the big name criminals I see in the news, the former police chief and his wife the former prosecutor. My peripheral connection to these people was what surprised me. Addiction, be it drugs, or in their case, gambling, strikes people from every segment of society and what I was taught about addicts being low lifes just going lower, is not true. And yet, even though I know the issue of addiction is not about morality, I still struggle not to get on my high horse and consider myself the top of the group of bottom dwellers. Lol. I am not the only one to have come from somewhere socially higher to end up towards the bottom rung of the social ladder. Morality is part of the story but I think we go into our addictions doing what we really thought was ok to do prior to picking up. We were just never put to the test before. Of course, here in Hawaii you should keep in mind that it is very easy to get caught. It’s not six degrees of separation between people, but more like three.