The northlondonhippy

Archive for February, 2007

When I was a kid, sev­eral decades ago, expec­ta­tions of the end of the world were sim­ple and directly related to the nuclear arms build-up between Amer­ica and the Soviet Union. The planet was going to be incin­er­ated in an orgias­tic exchange of h-bombs. The con­cept was called mutu­ally assured destruc­tion or MAD as it was known at the time.

It still could hap­pen, but prob­a­bly sparked off by one of the later mem­bers of the nuclear club, or even more likely, if some crazy ter­ror­ist group gets their grubby lit­tle hands on one.

Hey ho!

But now, added to that list of cat­a­clysmic hor­ror is cli­mate change and that’s even scarier sim­ply because of its appar­ent inevitabil­ity. This is one run­way train that can’t be stopped!

At least we’ll all go with a deep, dark, trop­i­cal tan…even the polar bears! What fun!

One way or another, the end of the world will come, but my guess is it won’t hap­pen until our sun goes super­nova, in a bil­lion years or so. Until then, the planet will most likely still be here.

So what do we really mean by the “end of the world”? What we really mean is the end of us. We think we are the world, but we’re not, we’re just the peo­ple. Or so sang a bunch of pop­stars in the 80s!

The end of the human race is our big fear, yet we’re doing sweet fuck all to pre­vent it. I would argue that we couldn’t pre­vent it, that our own destruc­tion and dis­ap­pear­ance from the face of this planet is as inevitable as the sun going super­nova. We’re doomed.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing either. It’s just the way things will be. Nobody said we’d last forever!

Why is it so hard to accept that noth­ing is per­ma­nent? I’m not per­ma­nent; I’m tem­po­rary and more so with each pass­ing day. I’m going to die, I just don’t know when, but I get closer to my last day, every day.

I don’t have a prob­lem accept­ing this fairly cer­tain truth. And there’s noth­ing I can do to change it, even if I wanted to, unless they invent some immor­tal­ity brain com­puter, but I couldn’t afford that anyway.

I’m not say­ing we shouldn’t try to pre­serve the human race, or per­pet­u­ate “our way of life” for as long as we can. What I’m say­ing is that doing so is an exer­cise in futility!

And what is our way of life, anyway?

Our way of life is to con­sume, any­thing and every­thing. Our way of life is devour our nat­ural resources in a very unsus­tain­able way. It’s just what we do and we’re damn good at it; so good in fact that we’ll never, ever stop.

All right, what per­sonal sac­ri­fices are you will­ing to make to save the planet? Will you give up your car; jet travel; your cen­tral heat­ing or air con­di­tion­ing? Will you stop watch­ing TV, going to the cin­ema? How about buy­ing your food in shops; are you ready to pro­duce your own grub, make your own cloth­ing? Are you ready to return to the 18th century?

Nei­ther am I!

I love liv­ing in the mod­ern world and all the con­ve­niences it affords me! I love pick­ing up my cord­less, recharge­able tele­phone, read­ing a menu under the glare of an elec­tric light and plac­ing an order from my favourite Malaysian take­away and then wait­ing for 30 min­utes, while they pre­pare my food, flip­ping through the chan­nels on my dig­i­tal satel­lite tv receiver, while watch­ing it on my big screen LCD TV. And much like Pavlov’s dogs, I sali­vate at the sound of the petrol-powered moped as it pulls up out­side my north Lon­don lair with my pip­ing hot dinner!

Stick that in your car­bon foot­print and smoke it!

I recharge my mobile phone and iPod with reck­less aban­don; I don’t think twice about sit­ting on my com­puter all day, while my stereo blasts out my favourite tunes. I drive to the shop to buy my gro­ceries, I drive to work every night. When I’m cold, I turn up my gas-central heat­ing and in the heat of the sum­mer; I do have an air con­di­tioner. I’m a bur­den on the resources of the planet and I’m doing next to noth­ing to redress the balance.

I say next to noth­ing, but I do make some empty ges­tures that are meant to make me feel bet­ter, rather than do any actual good. My car is fairly green, with a very small, fuel-efficient engine. I’ve changed all my light to energy sav­ing bulbs; when I order from Ocado, I always choose the green deliv­ery option. I recy­cle as much as my local coun­cil will allow, which at the moment is alu­minium, tin paper and glass; now if they would extend that to include card­board and plas­tic, my actual rub­bish would be next to nothing!

Does any of that make the slight­est bit of dif­fer­ence? I sin­cerely doubt it.

So what if we’re doomed. Only fools believe that the per­ceived supe­ri­or­ity of the human race jus­ti­fies our con­tin­ued exis­tence for­ever! Don’t be a fool!

How can any­one be sur­prised if our time is com­ing to a close? We’ve done more dam­age to the planet in a cou­ple of cen­turies, than every other liv­ing thing in the mil­lions of years before that! If any crea­ture has earned the right of extinc­tion, it’s us! I say, bring it on!

My nihilis­tic of view of things isn’t meant to bring you down. In fact, it’s intended to do just the oppo­site. Accept­ing our fate and know­ing what’s com­ing should empower us to all do the things that give us the most pleasure.

For me, that means lots of skunky bud, because if I actu­ally had any decent weed right now, I wouldn’t give a shit about the end of the world! And I wouldn’t be fright­en­ing all of you!

Send me some good weed! Please! I’ve had enough of the draught and the grit!

I’ll start with an apol­ogy, which will then grad­u­ally trans­form into a series of lame-ass excuses.

I’m very sorry for my recent lack of par­tic­i­pa­tion here at northlondonhippy.com – I’m a sham, a loser and a blog­ger only wor­thy of your scorn. I’ve dropped the ball; let the side down; I haven’t posted so much as a whiff of any­thing in nearly a month.

For shame, hip­py­boy, for shame!

I can only apol­o­gise for my absence and beg, no plead, no beg and plead for your for­give­ness. Please.

I wish I could chalk my dis­ap­pear­ing act on some­thing excit­ing and sexy, like I was off mak­ing my direc­to­r­ial debut or I was being held hostage by a gang of maraud­ing terrorist-glamour mod­els, but sadly that’s not the case. I just haven’t felt like it.

Oh sure, there have been moments in the last month, when I’ve had ideas and sub­jects that I wanted to write about, but I still haven’t logged in and blogged on.

And of course, I’ve missed you. Yes, YOU, my beloved hip­py­fan! I don’t want to dis­ap­point any­one, ever – even if I’ve been a dis­ap­point­ment to so many peo­ple, already in my life. I didn’t want to extend this into my online realm too.

Too late!

I’m not only feel­ing like a dis­ap­point­ment, I’m feel­ing like a fail­ure too. Yes, here starts the lame-ass excuses; get ready.

It was my birth­day last month. So what? So it’s another year gone by in an ever-decreasing pool of good years left. That can’t be good.

It’s another year of me not ful­fill­ing my poten­tial. What­ever that poten­tial might be. If any­one out there can tell me, you know the email address!

I’m depressed about the state of the world. That fuck­ing cunt, George W. (for WHAT the fuck is he doing now) Bush is send­ing even more troops into the quag­mire that is Iraq. That really pisses me off.

And worse, he’s ramp­ing up the rhetoric on Iran. Don’t believe the bull­shit, folks. Do we all need another point­less, unjus­ti­fied, unwinnable war?

One is more than enough, thank you!

And cli­mate change is wind­ing me up. How can I write about whim­si­cal fun things and drugs if we’re all going to get boiled like lob­sters in the not too dis­tant future?

The end of the world appears to be com­ing, not with a bang, but with the sus­tained feroc­ity of blow­torch. Set air con­di­tion­ers to stun!

Even Celebrity Big Brother turned sour for me. What’s the point of me writ­ing about it, when every jour­nal­ist in the world is wax­ing lyri­cal on the sub­ject? It became world news, so I really didn’t see the point.

But by far the biggest fac­tor in my lack of hip­py­ness is my lack of the one thing is this world that makes me who I am. I’m talk­ing about: weed.

Good weed has been scarce since last sum­mer and it has only got­ten worse in the last month of two. I’m not a happy hippy with­out weed; in fact quite the opposite.

For most peo­ple, dope takes away their moti­va­tion, for me it is the reverse. With­out weed; I don’t want to do any­thing cre­ative. More than don’t want; I just don’t do any­thing cre­ative with­out it.

So where is all the weed? Now that’s big ques­tion. I’ve got two answers for you.

The first is the cops; last autumn the cracked down on as many fac­tory farms as they could. I can under­stand that because these fac­tory farms are often set up unsafely, in sub­ur­ban rental homes, unbe­knownst to the own­ers, who have rented them in good faith. They’re fire haz­ards and they destroy people’s pri­vate prop­erty because the homes are gut­ted for this pur­pose. I’m miss­ing the weed pro­duced in these places, but I can’t argue with the logic of shut­ting them down.

Colour me conflicted.

The other prob­lem is one that I find even more insid­i­ous and unscrupu­lous. Ladies and gen­tle­men, I give you “grit weed”.

I haven’t men­tioned this before, but I’ve been aware of it for a while and in the last cou­ple of weeks, warn­ings about it have appeared in the press, so its time I did say some­thing about it.

Evil crim­i­nals are spray­ing liv­ing plants with tiny glass beads as they grow. The tiny beads are then impreg­nated into the buds, adding weight and giv­ing it that frosted-crystal appear­ance. I guess it means they can har­vest the plants sooner, instead of wait­ing for them to mature nat­u­rally, turn­ing around crops faster while adding weight.

This shit is really bad! If you have any of this weed, I would advise you to throw it away now!

How do you tell if you have some, or more impor­tantly, how do you spot it before you buy some. That’s easy, lick your fin­gers, then pinch a bit of bud between your fin­gers and rub it a bit. Then lick your fingers…If you feel crunch­ing between your teeth, then it’s grit weed! Oh and don’t worry, appar­ently swal­low­ing it is not harm­ful and it will pass through you undi­gested – or so I read.

Every­one has to be on his or her guard for this stuff and you need to refuse to buy it. If every­one stops buy­ing it, then the scum­fuck­ers will have to stop grow­ing it, because they won’t be able to sell it!

So between the busts and the grit, life for this weed­head has been shit lately. I’ve had the odd bit of decent dope, but never enough to feel like I’m sorted.

And guess what? If you can find any decent dope, the prices have gone up and the quan­ti­ties have gone down! This is the law of sup­ply and demand at work.

Here’s the thing, why hasn’t cap­i­tal­ism kicked in? Clearly there is a mar­ket in Britain for good weed, yet no one has stepped in to fill this mar­ket­place vac­uum. I don’t get it!

I know it takes a few months to turn a crop around, maybe there are loads of new com­mer­cial farms, grow­ing high qual­ity, unadul­ter­ated cannabis right now and soon the mar­ket will be flooded with the stuff, but some­how I doubt it. Maybe some clever “busi­ness per­son” is work­ing out a way to bring boat­loads of the stuff here from Hol­land, but again unlikely. Smug­gling stinky weed is not cost effec­tive, when a plane­load of coke or smack is far more prof­itable with around the same risks.

So what’s the answer?

Legalise of course!

As if.

The gov­ern­ment has a respon­si­bil­ity to pro­tect peo­ple and right now they are fail­ing. A safe, legal and taxed sup­ply of weed should be avail­able for all respon­si­ble adults who seek it. As long as mar­i­juana pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion remains in the hands of crim­i­nals, then prob­lems like this will always plague us.

The other answer is to grow your own. I’ve read that there has been a big upswing in home grow­ing since all this non­sense began last sum­mer and it seems like a great way to beat the draught and the grit! I wish I had the space, or knew some­one grow­ing their own, but I don’t.

How about you? Has all this affected your weed intake? If the answer is “no”, then I would really like to hear from you, espe­cially if you can get me some high qual­ity, skunky bud! Maybe you’re so proud of your most recent crop that you’d like some­one else to appre­ci­ate it. I’d be happy to be that person!

Every­one thinks I’m jok­ing when I plead for weed. I wish I were!