13/06/11

So I have decided to keep a journal of sorts. I’m sure if people ever read this they will either think it is the ravings of a mad man or just give up after a couple of pages, because it will probably be shit. But we can all try, right? Better than sitting on your unemployed arse all day getting bored, having these thoughts and feelings and doing fuck all about them, right? Do something for yourself that you can look back on, maybe show the Grandkids, “I remember the days!” *wheeze* - that is assuming I ever get that old, or that I ever have Grandchildren. I don’t really get this obsession with living as long as possible that our culture seems to be going through. Medical advances are great aren’t they? There’s a pill for fucking everything these days, antihistamines, antipsychotics, antidepressants, pain killers, uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, hold on…

Get old, lose your marbles, become a burden on yourself and society, spend the last few years of your life in some nursing home that stinks of piss (I am yet to find one that doesn’t) with other people that are in the same boat – a boat which is sinking slowly but surely, but one whose leaks doctors insist on trying to continually patch up, of course they do, it’s good for business; any way if you were on your way out wouldn’t you want to be off your tits on happy pills? Maybe. Or maybe you just want to be treated with a modicum of respect in your final days.

It’s like an old people scrap yard. It depresses me just to think of it. Don’t get me wrong, I respect old people; I love the ones I am related to, living or dead. These people have shown me nothing but love and support through my life, and it is sad to see their former glory being stripped away. Heroes, both in war and family life, stripped to a shell, purgatory in their own bodies. What a cruel condition Alzheimer’s is, and not just to the recipient. You have to wonder what is going through their heads as they decline, one day a doting Grandparent, the next they don’t even know their own name, let alone yours.

I think I might know what it is like. Take more than 6 E’s in a night, and you start to lose track of your shit, forgetting sentences half way through, having intense thoughts and feelings - but being cut short of expressing them, taking clothes off and forgetting where you put them, circular thought patterns – your friends (or in the case of the Alzheimer’s sufferer, family) then have to start picking up the pieces, get you home safely, make sure you don’t do something stupid, stay up with you until you are cogniscent enough to look after yourself, or sober enough to sleep. You start to spoil their night… Death doesn’t scare me, but becoming that old and decrepid does. Where the fuck is the spell check on this version of Word? Why the fuck don’t I know how to spell decrepit? I feel that way sometimes. Usually after about 6 gurners. Found the spell check now, never mind.

So there we go. This is me. 10:24 am and already contemplating mental illness and its likeness to one of my vices. Well, I say that, but I wouldn’t touch an E these days unless you paid me. Sure it’s fun, but superficial and in many ways empty – it certainly fucks your brain and leaves it with nothing but a cab fare in the morning. I have a sketch somewhere that I did which I entitled something along the lines of ‘Drug Culture: road to nowhere’ – kind of sums up how I was feeling about my whole use / abuse at the time I guess. I’ll scan it in at some point, help complete the point I was making, this project will be more amusing with my childish attempts at art, and I am sure. Raves used to be my life, my ‘raison d’etre’ – but, as with many things in life, you fall out of love with something that is bad for you. You keep the good bits though, the friends, the music, and most definitely the bud. Funny how the natural substances are the best, eh? I’m not even going to get into my feelings about legalisation now, but needless to say I resent a government that denies its citizen’s access to A FUCKING PLANT! Some kid goes nuts after smoking skunk all day every day, stressing their undeveloped brain, he has to hide it from his family, teachers and all the rest, because he is afraid of getting in trouble, all the while getting into trouble all of his own. Why does he feel the need to do that in the first place?! The plant must have made him do it. Ban it!!! Put it on the front page of the Daily Mail! Get the biddies up in arms about it! Change it from class C back to B because it has suddenly got stronger and more dangerous over night! As if it’s really going to make the slightest bit of fucking difference. Little Johnny was probably unhappy and unstable in the first place. Whoops, and there was me saying I wouldn’t get into that. I guess you are starting to see how my mind works, I have a disobedient mind. It is also a mind that adores psychoactives.

It’s been a very very long time since I did any writing of this nature, not since at school in fact, and that was always underpinned by an agenda, or ‘curriculum’ as they like to call it – this, well this is unplanned, it’s my mind speaking to the paper. It’s good to let loose, I had forgotten. But recently my creativity has been rejuvenated, renewed, subtle changes have been made to my outlook, and I am ready again to expose this side of myself to the wider world. So what was the catalyst? I hear you ask. A FUCKING PLANT! But not the usual Indica or Sativa, no, this illness, this inertia required something very special, very exotic, mind bendingly beautiful, terrifyingly weird, and, at times, heavenly sublime. This plant is a Shamanic tool. It is a gateway into our deepest recesses, and quite literally beyond. It is a catalyst in its very purest form, and the active ingredient is within every last one of us. A good hit of DMT will show you unimaginable beauty and terror, all wrapped into one. It will show you life, death, and everything in between. In colour that goes beyond colour, images crisper than any High Definition television could ever produce, emotions as deep and touching as the first time you truly express your love to someone dear, or indeed as deep as the pain once one has lost a much loved Grandparent. It may bring deep inner calm to those with a stable, open mind, or it may crush those that are foolish enough to venture in and believe they can fight it.

But this Shamanism is just Amazonian witch craft, right? Those sorts of practises have no place in our society, right? Wrong, we have so much to learn from these Jungle Alchemists – and yet those pharmaceutical companies that make those pills have so much to lose. This awakening is what many yearn for, what many need, and certainly what many are afraid of venturing into. They may never receive it until that last day in the nursing home, where, surrounded by decay and piss, they are thrust out of their body, into the bardo, another plane of existence, surrounded by strange, beautiful beings, unimaginable scenes, and indescribable, bottomless emotions. Let go, let go. Stop holding on, it will do you no good, you are a twig floating down a mighty river, what chance do you stand? 10 life changing minutes later you are re-born, equipped with knowledge you could only speculate about before. Unless you died for real, and then who knows when or where, or if you will reincarnate? We may just reconnect with the greater consciousness, we may just fizzle out. The more I explore hyperspace, and interact with the spirit beings that inhabit these far out realms, the more I am less inclined to believe the ‘fizzle out’ part though, but that does not mean I am the type to rule it out.

If that isn’t remarkable, I’m not sure what is. I’m sure anyone who has looked into this is tired of Joe Rogan regurgitating other people’s experiences, probably because he finds it so hard to articulate himself in this matter, as we all do – words only go so far with this sort of thing, you are taken to a place beyond articulation, to experiences just as frightening as a car crash, to art beyond anything a mortal mind could express. And yet, it is trickling through to those brave, or stupid enough to take that leap. For as long as I can remember, I have always been one of those people. I don’t like to just believe, I like to know. Dogma will only get you so far, and you will always be snared by man’s fallibility in the end. At least this way, if you fall, you only have yourself to blame. Better that, I say, than to put all your stock in organised, often money oriented religions, institutions that have covered up some of the most extensive abuses of their followers in history – paedophilia, the spread of AIDS through the discouragement of the ‘evils’ of contraception, ‘righteous crusades’ to convert the heathens – there is an agenda here, and it’s not spiritual, if it is then it is a perverted spirituality. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there is no more powerful than the “word of God” – how do these things become tainted? From the moment the divine touches human hands, it is not what it was, it is a shadow of its former, a representation, and yet people put blind faith in a representation… What was it that God said about false idols in the Bible? Madness - on a massive scale.

“Seek and ye shall find”

Some people aren’t drawn in by these cheap imitations though, these “made in China” products, where we start to see the flaws only a few weeks after purchasing, making the commitment, until eventually it just stops working, or you just get tired of fixing it. Sure, it’s based on the original quality product, but it is rushed, mass produced, and lacks the workmanship of the real thing. The problem is that the poor, the uneducated, they cannot afford the real thing; they are forced to settle for the imitation, they have to put up with and work around its shoddy workmanship. And then one day it breaks open and they are blinded by a flying spring hitting them in the eye.

It’s the same with Politics, you are sold these half-truths and spin in order for some twat to make a career. These people get into power and then go back on their word. Almost without fail. Sure, you get the odd good one, but even good people can end up being corrupted. I wonder if there ever was a time when these sorts of people were honourable and true. These same people that ban plants, and yet traces of cocaine is found in the toilets of parliament, the people that cut public spending on health care, yet somehow find it acceptable to spend tax payers money on their duck pond, or cut defence budgets, while embroiling us in more unnecessary conflicts. It seems that positions of power are often positions of hypocrisy. Maybe that is why you don’t see the honourable and true in these positions? We sure don’t make things easy for ourselves. Maybe this whole 2012 thing is the turning point, when we do start to make things easier? Or maybe we will be smashed into oblivion by some big ass space rock, or maybe the world will keep spinning, the twats will keep winning, and we will have to keep putting up with our shitty Chinese imitations.