I’m not quite sure if that was partly because I was high on ecstasy at the time I wrote or just mellow on marijuana; contrary to popular belief I seldom posted whilst drunk as alcohol usually left me too incoherent of thought (yes, I know, not much difference there!) but it was quite nice to just let the random thoughts inside out for a while, you know, let them gambol over green fields to frolic for a few hours before they were herded back inside.

These days it’s all so very different. I stopped taking ecstasy when the price dropped to 50p a pill, sure it seemed great to not have to pay £10 a pill but unless your brain is away with the faeries you should of course realise that having to buy 20 pills to have the same effect as that expensive £10 one is no real saving, especially for your health as you’ve just swallowed an additional 19 pills of something that’s not MDMA, not by a long stretch. It should also be apparent when you go to buy some pure MDMA and find it’ll set you back in excess of £50 a gram and does all manner of wonderful things to your brain, especially when mixed with music.

Much like with cocaine and to a lesser extent ketamine, what is sold as pure is seldom what the average person would consider pure to be. When it comes to drugs users generally accept anything over 60% as being  pure without too much in the way of complaints, assuming they have any idea what 60% is. Likewise I always remember finding it somewhat bizarre that when you asked your dealer for a gram of coke and you weighed it out and found it less than 1.0g it was because he only sold 0.8grams…and people, myself included, accepted that! Crazy huh? Of course the only reason we accepted it was because it was a case of take it or leave it and we all wanted to get high, it always was and always will be a sellers market unless by some strange twist of fate drugs are legalised, in which case a whole lot of people are going to realise just how much they’ve been ripped off over the years by their good friend, their dealer.

Anyway, drugs aside there’s probably a dozen reasons why I’ve not posted more personal entries; forgetting how good it feels to get the thoughts in my head out is certainly one reason but also the fact that more people now visit this site than when I started putting my thoughts out there for all to see. I guess with a birthday fast approaching I no longer care that much if people see more of the realer me. I was going to say the real me but I’m not sure I know the real me so it’s unlikely anyone else will but you get what I mean I hope.

So, after all that, what do I have to say for myself? In all honesty, not very much! Life is pretty good without the chemicals, sometimes I think I miss them but I’m fairly sure that’s the rose tinted filters at work. Due to fairly excessive consumption of alcohol over the years I now find I can’t drink as I used to. Not that my ability to consume has diminished oh no, I can still put it away, but my body appears to struggle to cope; bizarrely it was only after my New Years resolution to go for a year without drinking in 2009 that I discovered I had developed a form of liver disease known as, wait for it…Non Alcohol Fatty Liver Disease!

Yes, I managed to get the version that messes with you without having to drink a pay-packet’s worth of vodka! The NAFLD turned into NASH (which is basically when the liver starts to get inflamed and swells in size) and so now I endeavour to be good and trot along to see a specialist a few times a year to be told to exercise more, lose weight and see how I go.

Sick of being told I’ve not lost enough weight, I was only 80kg, I embarked on the Dukan Diet 5 or 6 weeks before my scheduled trip to the hospital and wow! It worked! Having never tried dieting before I wasn’t sure what to expect, most people I’ve encountered who have dieted usually complain that they don’t work but after 6 or 7 weeks I’ve managed to shed a staggering (to me) 7kg in excess fat, I have also being going to the gym but not daily, it’s just been diet and a mix of gym and walking, usually at least 1km a day on days I don’t go to the gym.

Of course there’s no guarantee that the weight won’t return but much like dealing with a drug use issue, now that I know I can live without eating double helpings of dinner and half a home baked apple pie with a cup of tea, my willpower has had a chance to flex it’s muscles and I find it much easier to refrain from gorging senselessly on crap food. Yes, my brain still sends signals screaming FEED ME CAKE YOU SELFISH SONOFABITCH! but I’ve found that suffocating it with a pillow and/or hitting it with a blunt object works wonders!

My consultant is happy which makes me happy as I don’t get a lecture on how I won’t live a long and fruitful life if I carry on as I’m going blah blah blah. I now just have to watch out for idiotic cyclists instead; the other week I was walking home, on the pavement, when I heard a voice yell out from behind me, “Get off the fucking pavement!” I turned to see a rather irate cyclist who’d realised he wasn’t able to pass me unless he cycled on the road, a place he obviously felt was safer for me than himself. I’ve no shame in saying I responded with a loud, “Fuck off!” as he cycled passed while flipping me the bird…the arsehole!

Right, well I realise I could go on but I’ve already knocked out over 1,000 words and if you’re still reading you’re probably hoping I’ll end soon and if you’re not I really am wasting my time but if you are I can reveal that I gained an entry in the Guinness Book of World records for being part of the 2,227 crowd at WOMAD 2011 who played air guitar to Jimmi Hendrix’s Purple Haze.

Yes, I even played with my teeth; Roy Carson would have been proud of me! Until next time…

One of those things I found was this flash animation which is a humorous look at the word Fuck a.k.a. the F Word. Having just watched it again after several years it still makes me laugh out loud. Before you press play, make sure there are no young ears around as the narrator uses the F Word more than Gordon Ramsey, which is only to be expected when it’s the F Word that’s being discussed.

Just press play to start, I know the screen says to wait until it has loaded but it was created in the days of dial-up!

You may now be scratching your head and wondering, “OK, what’s your point?” so without boring you completely I’ll try and steer my thoughts into a general direction.  To clear things up, I should explain I have not been getting stoned, some might have thought that the lack of blog posts were as a result of me sitting around unable to reach the keyboard, in actual fact when I was getting stoned I was a much more prolific blogger as the thoughts just kept churning out.  Alas, this is not the excuse I have for the tumble weed that has been blowing around lately.

The reality is much more mundane; I’ve either been working, out being social after work or just kicking back once I get home.  Having bought a Kindle from Amazon I’m enjoying the novelty of reading again.  I stopped buying paperbacks in a bid to curtail my book shopping habit, deciding that I didn’t want to have hundreds of paperbacks that were falling apart to hand on to future generations so instead I started emptying my wallet in the general direction of The Folio Society.  The hardback books they produce are exquisite but sadly not convenient for lugging around on the bus or tube but with the kindle I can carry a veritable library in something not much bigger than a diary.

So anyway, that’s my excuse for not being here, that and micro-blogging on Twitter.  I remember blogging about what might happen if I embraced Twitter, would I still blog as much I wondered and it’s fair to say that I don’t however that could of course be down the the lack of getting high.  If I were a committed soul I would buy myself a half ounce and put the theory to the test but the lack of a source for said naturally growing herbal medicine prevents me, that and an enjoyment of not being in a haze all the time, not that there is anything wrong with living in a haze, I’m just not feeling it, you get me?

I did get the saxophone out a few weeks ago but boy do I sound shit and the neighbours were less than impressed, it has been about 2 maybe 3 years since I last played it and whatever I learnt I have forgotten but given the noise of the beautiful hunk of brass makes and the flimsy partitions between me and the people who live around me, I’m not sure how to move it along.  I’ve looked at constructing a sound-proofed partitioned room but it’s more than my budget will allow so I may opt for the next best option which is to stuff a tea towel in the bell!

Regular readers will know that usually there is a meaning with the title of my blog entries, surely you didn’t think I was just going to leave you with the random knowledge that Dr Hook sang a Shel Silverstein song with the opening line of, “I was sitting in my basement” did you?  The reason I thought it apt was because earlier this week Andrew Marr had a bit of a rant about bloggers describing them as, “socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements.” I was a bit offended by Andrew’s description. I may be single, have the occasional spot and be thinning up top but I don’t consider myself seedy or cauliflower-nosed and nor do I have a basement from which to blog from. You’d think a journalist would get his facts right wouldn’t you? Maybe if he followed Shel’s advice and got stoned he wouldn’t let bloggers enter his sphere of thinking? Here’s Shel’s version of the song from YouTube.

As I was writing this entry I was listening to last.fm and a song came on by a Country singer called Brad Paisley.  Andrew Marr would love it, it’s called Online and the video is as hilarious as the song, you must watch it just for the joy of seeing William Shatner!

So, the end result is I’ve deleted all the drafts as can’t seem to find as much enthusiasm to finish them off as I obviously had when I started them.  This means of course that some topics I really wanted to mention I won’t because I’ve forgotten them.  That’s not to say the topics were not worth remembering, it’s because I naturally have a bad memory I sometimes rely on my blog to remind myself of things I like!

One campaign that I should mention is one being run by Aviva, it’s their Tell Us Your Story campaign.  They are looking for people who’ve gone out of their way to help others, caring souls (their words not mine!) who have answered the needs of an individual, family or local community.  You nominate them online and could win a £1,000 prize for Story of the Week.   Stories are also voted for by the public, with the overall favourite receiving a specially tailored grand prize worth £10,000. And it doesn’t stop there!  For every nomination made Aviva will be donating £1 to the Street to School programme.

This was a campaign that was brought to my attention about 3 weeks ago and I started to write about it and got side tracked however I was flicking through the newspaper when I actually paid attention to one of the full page ads, it was actually for the Tell Us your Story campaign.  If I’m honest I only paused to look at it because it was almost a page of yellow and it demanded a second look.  That said, the copy was deathly dull and that may explain why I’ve not heard much about the campaign and as I work in the third sector, these things are usually well circulated.

I think that in itself is a shame as it certainly looks worthwhile but I fear it may miss a larger target audience due to it’s ‘lack of life’.  My experience of the people that have the stories to tell is they do not have the time to read 4 condensed paragraphs of marketing techno-babble, hell I can barely do it and I’m selfishly only looking after myself!

In totally unrelated news I bought another painting from Scott Saw.  This one is based on his Axiom character.  Regular readers may recall I bought a few Axiom prints last year.  I probably ended up paying around $125 more than I needed to because I ended up outbidding myself after making my initial auction bid on the wrong account!  That said, I didn’t mind paying more as I paid what I thought was a fair price and allows the artist to know his work is appreciated.

Now I just need to figure out where to hang things, I’ve already started hanging art in the hallway and some walls have more art than wall on show. Like books and tattoos, collecting is a sometimes impulsive, sometimes long drawn ut process but ultimately very rewarding and enriching, even if we sometimes don’t realise it until much time has passed between acquisition and that light-bulb on moment.

And from charity to art to drugs in a few paragraphs!  I was intrigued to read about some new drug (Alemtuzumab) they’re hoping to licence which is based on the THC found in marijuana.  What’s interesting is that because marijuana is natural it cannot be patented so they have to extract it (the THC), jiggle around a proton or two and call it a unique process, earn a patent and small fortune from governments that prescribe the drug as a relief to suffers of MS.

From what I can gather this drug will cost on average £300pm per patient.  How much cheaper to dispense medical marijuana and allow people to self medicate with cookies, tea or an old fashioned spliff and all for far less than £300 per month!  They say it would be drug dealers who have most to fear from the legalisation of drugs, I’m not so sure myself…Drug patents, legalised drugs, is BIG business with a truly global market.  Something to think about huh?

With luck(?!) the gap between posts will reduce over the coming weeks.

If you live in the UK you will be well aware of the recent controversy a legal high known as Mephedrone which has a rather bizarre street name of meow meow or M-Cat.  The reason it’s such a topical discussion is due to the untimely demise of 2 teenagers from Scunthorpe who had taken it.

The first I heard of the deaths was via a news broadcast on the radio on Tuesday evening but by Wednesday morning the media was in a frenzy on how this legal high was killing people, very much like they whipped up a storm when ecstasy first started doing the rounds.  One thing puzzled me and now slightly annoys me.  On Tuesday night the news reports I listened to all stated that the boys had taken mephedrone, gone out to a club and consumed copious quantities of alcohol and also take Methadone.

Now, you don’t need to be a genius to know that mixing any drug is never a good idea but those three? For crying out loud, methadone is a heroin substitute, hardly the sort of thing you would expect a couple of teenagers to want to take to finish off, quite literally, their Monday night rave?  However by Wednesday morning I found very little mention of the methadone use, just that the mephedrone was considered a contributing factor in their deaths and their parents are widely quoted as saying they only took the mephedrone because it was sold as a legal high… So why did these good boys take methadone, a controlled prescription drug?

Following the subject on the news I listened carefully to the words used by police relating to arrests made in connection with the deaths.  The suspects who had been arrested were arrested for supplying a controlled drug.  That’s not mephedrone which is widely available online (tho it is illegal to sell it for human consumption), methadone however IS a controlled drug.  Could it be that the methadone had more of an impact on the death of the boys?  If I were a betting man, which I am, I’d say it was more a contributing factor than the mephedrone.

As someone who has taken a variety of drugs, legal and otherwise I am still astounded by the great number of people, you and old, who happily take pills, powders and potions with no idea what they are actually taking.  Rule No. 1 in my book is Know what you are putting into your body.  With the advent of the internet this is not difficult. Rule No.2 is Be very, very wary of mixing drugs.  I can’t say don’t mix drugs because I have done so myself but I only did so after I had taken things often enough to now what they did to my body and had a good idea what the effect would be.

Of course with all the scare stories in the press right now you can bet your bottom dollar that sales of mephedrone are rocketing as people clamour to buy it before it is banned, which it will if the British Press has it’s way.  The ignorance of the facts and scaremongering by those who seek to blame anything rather than the cause will only widen the appeal, having the exact opposite effect than originally planned.

Remember ecstasy?  It’s all just a case of history repeating.