Poppies

One side effect of my workload increasing is that I haven't had time to go to the allotment. It's rapidly becoming waist high in grasses and weeds.

When ground is cleared, it tends to become recolonised firstly by colonising species, such as fireweed, thistles, dandelions, poppies, nettles, grasses, etc.

It's happening on my allotment, and it must have happened too, on the battlefields of France almost 100 years ago. The poppy, of course, has become a symbol of the sacrifice made by those that never returned. That a plant with strong analgesic and narcotic properties got the nod, rather than, say, the dandelion, is hardly surprising I suppose, on a battlefield.

But anyway, poppies can be prepared by drying, and made into tea, or smoked. People have died from doing so from time to time.

From what I can gather, the kind of poppies I have on the allotment are "Papaver somniferum", purple peony.

The "somniferum" bit indicates the presence of opiates. Funny old world isn't it? If I grew cannabis plants there, I'd be kicked off my plot, and probably prosecuted, yet I can grow opium with impunity.

Poppy tea is supposed to be helpful in suppressing restless leg syndrome. Presumably, it would help with migraines too. And presumably it can get you off your head. Not something I'd want to do regularly, as it would quickly lead to tolerance and withdrawal and all that, but I might just brew some up one day soon.


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Try Try Try

My mis-spent youth is catching up with me. All those times where I filled my lungs to the max with whatever shit I could lay my hands on may have left their mark.

Certainly, there are times these days when I'm breathless, even if I'm not doing anything more strenuous than breathing.

Particularly when I'm tired, it sometimes feels like I just can't get enough air into my lungs, no matter how deeply I try to breathe.

This is both unpleasant and frightening. Time, I reckon, to attempt to give up again. I only smoked about 5 rollies today, before running out. I've not had one for quite a few hours, and there is none to be had without visiting a 24 hour garage. It's 2.35 in the morning, and I'm up at 10.00. So the sensible thing to do is go to bed.

That means I have a headstart.When I wake up I shall endeavour not to buy tobacco.

Update: 11.30pm

Well so far so good. Stuffed full of junk food, but didn't succumb to the desire.

Update: 6.30pm

Really really fucking angsty. Just everything. Money. Cowardly pupils. Boredom. Ennui. Fucking Life in  Fucking General. I really want to get drunk, but then I'll smoke.

Fucking fuck the fucking fuckers sideways.

Use and abuse

It's 3.31 in the morning. For the last few nights, I've had very little sleep. 3 or 4 hours a night. I'm pretty shattered, but it's just the way things are right now. I'm wide awake at the moment. This afternoon I could hardly keep my eyes open. Should have had a nap I suppose, but wild eyed rawker that I am, I rode it out.
Anyway, the reason I'm hardly sleeping is because I'm not drinking. Over the last couple of months, I've been drinking increasingly often, and increasingly heavily. And it was getting to the point where it was probably doing me physical harm.

Weirdly, I think a lot of it was because I'd given up smoking. I've now started smoking again, and stopped drinking altogether, at least for now. I know it's [tobacco] just cack that doesn't even give you a hit, but I seem to need it on some very deep level, and without it, I go slowly but steadily off the rails. It's not even about the nicotine. I think I'd be climbing the walls even if I had some kind of NRT. I just seem to need to have some shit in my lungs, and the lack causes unremitting cognitive dissonance. Right now smoking the lesser of two evils in many different and important ways.

Almost made 4 months off the fags this time. Not bad. I'll no doubt give up again in a few months.

Anyway,  a thought struck me.

I abuse alcohol. No bones about it, I found it very hard to tell myself, "No", and if I managed to, it was generally by promising myself the reward of some the next day. I've also abused cannabis. And in the past I couldn't walk past a fruit machine without spending evey penny I had.

Yet I've never heard of anyone abusing nicotine.

So what is abuse? Nicotine is an addictive drug. Why does nobody ever talk about nicotine abuse?

What makes my use of alcohol abusive? Here's what I think.

1. I'm not totally in conscious control of the decision whether to use it or not. 
2. I use it to achieve an aim - oblivion basically - that lies outside it's normal social function. 
3. I use it to an extent where it is causing or could potentially cause serious health problems
4. I spend money on it, despite our needing that money for many other essential things
5. When it is not used, some natural biological functions are affected. Specifically my sleep pattern..

Three and four are closely related to one. If I'm making the decision to use it, despite the fact that it's harming me, and those around me, then there's something wrong somewhere.

There have been times where all five of the above have also applied to cannabis. And three of the five also apply to gambling. The health problems from gambling would be indirect, such as getting beaten up by someone I owed money to, or dietary deficiencies from not having enough money to buy food; and I wouldn't ge the shakes or lie awake at night without my fix of flashing lights and spinning reels; but certainly the other three apply.

So how does nicotine fit into this?

1. Smokers cannot easily stop smoking. So this certainly applies.
2. The social funcion of smoking? What's that then? This is a hard one to define, and without defining it's boundaries, it's difficult to say what kind of use would lie beyond those boundaries. Sticking them up your arse perhaps.  Smoking them to deliberately harm yourself would perhaps be a better analogy.
3. Smoking is bad for you. There are no good things about it healthwise as far as I'm aware. In a sense any use at all is abuse by this measure.
4. It isn't free. It's far cheaper to smoke 10 hand rolled cigarettes a day than it is to get drunk 3 or 4 times a week, but that money would still be better spent elsewhere. It's less abusive than alcohol but still abuse.
5. I don't need nicotine to function and I don't really find any of my physical systems altered by it's lack, so it can't really be abused by this standard.

Right. It's now 4.45. I've smoked my last cigarette of the day and I'm going to bed. Sleep well, kiddywinks.

It started here...

Here, in this unassuming little end terrace.

Me and Dave dropped a tab each, and went out for a walk. Twenty minutes later, and still firmly connected to planet Earth, we arrived here,

This little pub, right down on the Dee marshes was and is stripped down to the basics. It's too small to be anything but a place to drink, so there's no jukebox. No television. No fruit machine. Just tables and benches and a bar, and in the winter, a roaring fire. But this was summer, and we bought ourselves a pint of lager each.

Now I'm not the sort of person that can let a drink go unfinished. Not unless I fall asleep, but now, I was starting to feel the first gentle inklings that the little piece of paper I'd swallowed was going to do something. We left our drinks and walked back into town.

By the time we'd reached the town centre, I was feeling very strange indeed. It wasn't a particularly nice feeling. I was a bit paranoid. A bit confused. But I couldn't stop grinning. I felt like it must be obvious to everyone around that I was as high as a kite. Like there was a big red flashing arrow in the sky above my head shouting "HE'S HERE!!! HE'S TRIPPING!!!"

But then we got back to Dave's and shut the front door, and I was able to relax.



The precise order of events is somewhat unclear. What is clear is that this was a powerful hit. I remember listening to the Psychedelic Furs, "Sister Europe" and the phase effects in the song took me with them to some place far above the earth.

My eyes were closed, yet I could see an image in my mind that was as white as snow. Then the whiteness got sucked through my eyeballs to leave blackness, which in turn sucked through to leave the white again.

There was a clock on the wall. Black hands and black roman numerals with a plain white face and a round pale wooden surround. But now the white was icing, and the hands and numerals were blurring and sinking into it. The patterns in the carpet were writhing and coiling slowly past each other, and when we moved, we left vague image trails behind us, like a Harold Egerton strobe photograph made real.

I found myself incapable of working out what to do with a guitar, and quickly gave it up as a bad job. And I laughed constantly and loudly at the whole universe for what may have been anything between 10 minutes and 10,000 years.

Somewhere in all this, I had to go to the toilet. I crawled up the stairs, and had the most amazing poo of my life. Seriously, words cannot describe the sensation of moving your bowels while you're tripping your tits off.

And somewhere in all this, the phone rang. I was in the back room, laughing my head off, and the phone rang.

Somehow I knew the call was for me, and that it was bad news. Dave answered it, and then called me to the phone.

It was my sister, Kate. My Mum and Dad had been in a car crash. Could I go down and see them and make sure they're ok?

A minute earlier, I was somewhere beyond Saturn. Now I was 100% in the here and now. I promised that I would go down and see them a bit later, but that I couldn't go right at this moment. Turns out that they got sideswiped by someone changing lanes without looking. A bit shook up but otherwise uninjured. But keeping things together while I dealt with the call was not a problem. Somehow the drug just hit the pause button until I hung up. Then I was tripping again.

We watched Copeulation, a compilation of videos by Julian Cope. In the song, "Laughing Boy", the sky was doing exactly what the sky outside our window was doing.



We watched it again a few days later, when we were straight, and the sky in the video was still doing what the real sky was doing when we were tripping. Honestly, you'd think Julian Cope had taken acid or something.

What else is there to say? At some point, things peaked. Then there was a sort of plateau phase that went on for several hours. Then gradually, things became less intense, and perhaps 8 hours after we took the tabs, I was able to go down to see my folks and make sure they were ok.

It wasn't a comfortable visit. I'd also smoked a lot of pot while I was tripping, and I couldn't find much to say. We watched a wildlife programme on the telly. (big African skies doing a little of the same weird shimmering that I'd been seeing all afternoon, and then I made my excuses and headed back to Daves.

Some time around 3pm I went to bed, and surprisingly, slept pretty much straight away.

I've never ever done it again (I tried to once, but the tab I bought from some shady shit called John turned out to be a small square piece of carboard with a picture of a strawberry on it.