The northlondonhippy

Archive for February, 2008

The fol­low­ing is an urgent health bul­letin from the north Lon­don lair of the northlondonhippy:

I’ve been ill for about the last week.

Bul­letin ends
###

But this is a blog! You want details!

I went to work last Weds, feel­ing poorly and by the time I reached my office, I was shiv­er­ing and sweat­ing at the same time — I had a fever. I felt unbe­liev­ably bad, my joints ached, my back ached, every­thing hurt. I finally went home, where I spent the fol­low­ing 2 days, mainly in the same con­di­tion and sleep­ing as much as I could.

I also had the shits. The last time I had it this bad was fol­low­ing a trip to Soma­lia, around 15 years ago. That time, I got to visit the Hos­pi­tal for Trop­i­cal Dis­eases for tests, because I had it for 6 months. It wasn’t fun.

Since then, my bow­els have been rea­son­ably healthy, exclud­ing the odd curry, or minor bout of food poi­son­ing from the office can­teen. Fol­low­ing my expe­ri­ence 15 years ago, this last week has been a bit worrying.

The fever went last Fri­day and as long as I don’t eat solid food, I seem to be OK. Prob­lem is, my appetite returned on Sat­ur­day, but I dis­cov­ered quickly that eat­ing was still a bad idea.

Mrs. H and I had the­atre tick­ets for last night, some­thing we don’t do that often and we planned on hav­ing a meal out as well. We made the play, but had to miss out on din­ner, because I couldn’t risk eat­ing. Sad, eh?

Oh, the play was David Mamet’s “Speed the Plough” at the Old Vic, star­ring Jeff Gold­blum and Kevin Spacey. We both enjoyed it very much, but then with that cast and a Mamet script, you couldn’t pos­si­bly go wrong.

I don’t know what to do about eat­ing and I have to return to work tonight. I can’t live on cans of Coke for the next three shifts…or can I?

Caf­feine and sugar might work, if I ingest enough, I could cer­tainly run on purely Coca Cola for three days with­out any ill effects. I’m pos­i­tive 9 out of 10 doc­tors rec­om­mend a strict Coke-only diet to sort out your poopy guts.

I should check the NHS Direct web­site to see if it meets with their approval.

Any­thing that pre­vents you from ask­ing your doc­tor for help, meets with the NHS’s approval.

I haven’t called my doc­tor on this one, yet, because I really did check the NHS Direct web­site and based upon my symp­toms, I need to shit my brains out for a full 2 weeks before they have any con­cern, unless I am shit­ting blood or have incred­i­bly painful abdom­i­nal cramps. So far, no blood and my cramps are only mod­er­ately painful and they come and go.

What I think I have is some sort of intesti­nal infec­tion, which is why it started out with a fever as well. More than likely, my body will kill off the infec­tion before the NHS-prescribed 2 week period elapses and I’ll be pro­duc­ing solid poo’s again. I’ll send each and every one of you a text alert on that happy day, so make sure you keep your mobile phone switched on!

You see, this is what real blog­ging is all about…an inti­mate tour of my infected intestines. If they put a cam­era up my ass, rest assured the video will be uploaded to YouTube as soon as I can digi­tise it.

If any­one ever tells you that blog­ging is shit, just send them a link to this entry. Peo­ple like to be right and you would be pro­vid­ing them with the val­i­da­tion they so des­per­ately crave.

I was think­ing last night, as I often do, about com­pletely point­less matters.

Yes, I was think­ing about myself.

Its use­ful to take stock in one’s self occa­sion­ally, if noth­ing else, its always for a good laugh and if you can’t laugh at your­self, don’t worry, there will be plenty of other peo­ple to do it for you…

After this short bout of soul search­ing, I didn’t locate my soul (prob­a­bly because I don’t have one), but I did come to a rather amus­ing conclusion:

I am a pro­fes­sional hippy.

It’s true.

Well, sort of.

I don’t make my liv­ing being a hippy, but it cer­tainly con­tributes to the big­ger finan­cial pic­ture, but more than that, when I sit down in front of my iMac, log-in and blog-on to my site, I am indeed a hippy. Dig it!

Think of it like some­one being “gay for pay”, only I don’t have to do any­thing icky.

In my real life, I’m not that much of a hippy, but put me online, send me a lit­tle dosh and I become hip­pi­fied until I am the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of hip­py­dom. I’m so hippy, dippy and trippy, I even techno-trance myself out!

Smok­ing dope like a moth­er­fucker doesn’t really qual­ify me as a hippy, but my pur­suit of peace, love and under­stand­ing does.

You know, I want the world to be a bet­ter place, I want us to love each other and take care of each other and mainly not fuck each other over so much, but who am I kid­ding? What have I done in the last week to make the world a bet­ter place?

Pre­cisely, sweet F-A.

That’s not totally true, I’ve stayed close to home and out of the pub­lic view, that must be good for the world…

I talk the talk, but dammit if I don’t walk the walk. I haven’t brought peace to the world or fed all the starv­ing chil­dren. I haven’t even hugged a stranger, recently.

I had to stop hug­ging strangers, actu­ally. The police, it turns out, frown on that sort of behav­iour. Who would have thunk it?

So what can I do to make the world a bet­ter place? I can just keep blogging!

My words can change the world…provided the entire world reads every one of them and then fol­lows my sim­ple rules to the letter.

And my rules are sim­ple, just do good and be good at every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­nity. Not because you fear god, or you fear the law, or because you fear any­thing, but because doing good and being good are right and proper.

We’re all stuck on this lump of rock together, so we need to be able to share. No one has the right to any more than you, but no one should expect any less either.

Got too much? Give some of it away!

Got too lit­tle? Some­one should help you out! I would, if I could.

Don’t hate peo­ple because they are dif­fer­ent from you, learn to love them for their dif­fer­ences! We’re all the same, you know, deep down, where it counts.

Do some­thing unselfish, do some­thing self­less, do it anony­mously, so that only you know you did it.

Be gen­er­ous, of your­self, your time and your possessions.

You don’t have to love every­one, even I relent on that one, but don’t hate. We all have the right to exist, so lets just let every­one do that. Please.

For­get about national bound­aries. Coun­tries are stu­pid and tribal. Tribes are stu­pid too. There’s only one tribe any of us belong to and that’s the human tribe. We’re all in this together, we should act like it.

Imag­ine for a sec­ond if we abol­ished bor­der con­trols and just let every­one go where they wanted. How cool would that be? Peo­ple could just travel where they wanted, do what they wanted. Why should some­one be con­demned to a hor­ri­ble life on the basis of the geog­ra­phy of their birth?

Be respon­si­ble for oth­ers and look out for them. It doesn’t mat­ter who…your fam­ily, your friends, com­plete strangers, just have their best inter­ests at heart. Don’t worry, if we all did that, your back would be cov­ered too.

Maybe my wide-eyed ide­al­ism is enough to jus­tify bestow­ing the title “hippy” upon me after all!

Let’s all live in the hippy’s social­ist won­der­world! If I could work out how to get you all inside my imag­i­na­tion at the same time, we’d be one step closer. Maybe with a shoehorn?

A-hoy hip­py­fans, there be hip­pies here!

Well, one hippy, actu­ally and I’m not even a real hippy. Sue me for false adver­tis­ing and then request a full refund!

My month of lit­tle work­ing isn’t pan­ning out as I had planned. Who’s sur­prised? No mat­ter how much free time I have, its never enough, but then it’s never really free either.

How do nor­mal peo­ple do it? You know, peo­ple who work Mon­day through Fri­day, 9–5, every week. How do they man­age to keep it all together with noth­ing but the week­end to do their real life stuff? It bog­gles my mind.

For the bet­ter part of the last 20 years, I’ve man­aged to avoid the Mon-Fri rou­tine. The life of a shift­worker is much more fun and there’s noth­ing I like bet­ter than hav­ing days off dur­ing the week. Except maybe easy sex and hard drugs, but then they go hand in hand with lots of free time and the soul of a junior-satan.

Don’t you have the soul of a junior satan? Guess its just me then!

You see, I under­stand the inher­ent dif­fer­ence between good and bad, I’m just a bit capri­cious when it comes to decid­ing which side of the line to choose. I make up my own mind, using my own moral com­pass for guid­ance and my “true north” prob­a­bly dif­fers from most people’s.

I often choose the path of least resis­tance, but then at my age and so lack­ing in ambi­tion and direc­tion, what else would I do?

I spent an entire day this week swap­ping out my shitty, cheap old stereo for a brand new, shiny sil­ver AV Amp. I bought a Pio­neer VSX-917v and saved 60 quid wait­ing until after xmas. That’s when I first scoped it out, back in Decem­ber, but elected to wait and it was a wise decision.

My old stereo, an 8 year old Tech­nics, was a combo CD player, cas­sette deck(!!) and radio receiver, but all I really used it for is the amp, which had SKY+, a DVD player and my mac mini con­nected to it, all with stereo ana­logue con­nec­tions. For the last cou­ple of months, the sound has been cut­ting out, only restored by a well placed, mea­sured slap on the top of the unit with a flat palm. I’m sure that’s the best way to fix any­thing, anyway.

The cut­ting out was steadily wors­en­ing, so I ordered the Pio­neer unit a cou­ple of weeks ago and finally got around to installing it last week.

I bought some dig­i­tal audio cables, TOSlinks for the mini and SKY+ and a dig­i­tal coax­ial for the DVD player. The new amp was too big to go on the shelf where the old stereo lived, which meant I had to tear down the entire set-up and re-cable it all from scratch. Yawn.

It took me a few hours to rip it all apart and clean out the years of dust trapped in the inac­ces­si­ble bits and a cou­ple more hours to rein­stall, con­fig­ure and test every­thing, but even­tu­ally I had it all work­ing well.

The new amp will sup­port 7.1 audio, but my liv­ing room won’t. I can’t even fit 5.1, because I have no space for the rear sur­round speaker. Right now, it only has 2 speak­ers con­nected, but I have a sub­woofer ordered and the space cleared for it when it comes.

Every­thing worked great the first day it was con­nected and I was very pleased with the sound qual­ity. I kept the Tech­nics speak­ers from the old set-up because they are small, but decent and are bi-amped, which the Pio­neer also sup­ports. I am very happy with the sound and expect the sub­woofer will make it sound even better.

On the sec­ond day, Mrs. Hippy dis­cov­ered a burn­ing smell com­ing out of the amp. It turns out, the amp runs ridicu­lously hot and needs to be well ven­ti­lated. It’s cur­rent home, under­neath the shelf where my TV lives, has pre­cious lit­tle space between the top of the Pio­neer and the shelf. Ut-oh. I have to move the Pio­neer. Yawn.

My house is small, and my liv­ing room is smaller. I don’t have any other options for plac­ing the Pio­neer amp. I have to magic up a 50cm x 50cm space, and I think I’ve found it, all I need is a small table to put the amp on…and IKEA sells one for £7.99. Now, I just have to get myself to IKEA, which is hell on earth with extra-added yuppies.

I don’t want my new amp to burn up, it sounds far too good. Right now, I have a small fan aimed at it, which doesn’t really help with the ambi­ent noise lev­els, but does keep things cooler and smelling less like an elec­tri­cal fire! Hope­fully, I’ll have the whole thing sorted out in the next day or so.

I meant to wake up really early this morn­ing and visit IKEA, but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll go later today, if the spirit moves me.

I also need to buy another set of cables…longer ones. Repo­si­tion­ing the amp puts it out of range of all the new cables I bought.

Noth­ing in my life is ever easy, not even the sim­plest of tasks. Swap­ping out an old stereo for a new ampli­fier shouldn’t become a major engi­neer­ing project. And I should be taller, too!

I’m still dig­ging excel­lent cof­fee every day, though, which soft­ens the blow on every­thing. Right now, I am sip­ping a freshly made cap­puc­cino, crafted by my own hand not five min­utes ago, from freshly ground beans that were grown in El Sal­vador and roasted 10 days ago. Yumm.

This week’s cof­fee bat­tle has been over frothed milk. Froth­ing milk prop­erly takes prac­tise and skill and I woe­fully inad­e­quate at cre­at­ing micro­foam, which is the goal of baris­tas. Micro­foam has a vel­vety tex­ture and is pourable, you should never need to spoon it into the cup. It shouldn’t have peaks either and shouldn’t be stiff like whipped egg whites.

I’ve yet to work out the secret to per­fect micro­foam, though I am try­ing all the tricks sug­gested online, from chill­ing the metal jug, to using full-fat milk. Actu­ally, and this makes no sense to me at all, I am hav­ing bet­ter luck with skimmed milk, which defies logic and every­thing I’ve read online. Go figure.

Don’t laugh, one day my cof­fee brew­ing skills may save my life. When TV news finally chews me up and spits me out, Star­bucks here I come!

Peo­ple are always going on about the dan­gers of ille­gal drugs, but pre­cious lit­tle gets said about the abuse of phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal med­ica­tions. Since the death of actor, Heath Ledger, that’s start­ing to change.

Check out THIS ARTICLE from today’s Observer news­pa­per, please.

The only quote I’m going to repro­duce, is a small bit from the tease at the top of the page:

“…mis­use of over-the-counter pills now kills more Amer­i­cans than ille­gal drugs.”

I have to put my hand in the air and admit I didn’t know that. Did you?

Of course I know pharms are dan­ger­ous, any drug can be dan­ger­ous if used irre­spon­si­bly or reck­lessly, but I didn’t realise that they were killing more Amer­i­cans than street drugs.

The only pre­scrip­tion drug I’ve really taken recre­ation­ally is Val­ium and that was usu­ally to make the come down from other drugs eas­ier. And that’s it. In other words, I don’t have much first hand expe­ri­ence of recre­ational pharm use.

I cer­tainly can see the temp­ta­tion though. Swal­low a pill, get high. Sim­ple, clean and effective.

I also know that pre­scrip­tion pills are fiercely addic­tive. And I know that tak­ing too many can lead to death.

Peo­ple turn to legal drugs, well, because they’re legal. They’re also cleaner and less likely to be cut with any old rub­bish. The dosages are con­sis­tent, the man­u­fac­ture con­trolled and reg­u­lated and the dis­tri­b­u­tion, if you have a pre­scrip­tion, is from a nice, well lit shop sell­ing them at rea­son­able prices, along with loads of other use­ful goods. Why not pick up a handy home First Aid kit, while you’re there?

Peo­ple also turn to pharms because what they might pre­fer, is ille­gal, pos­si­bly cut with any old rub­bish, with incon­sis­tent dosages, poor man­u­fac­tur­ing con­di­tions and sold by some creepy guy in the back of a pub or on a street cor­ner in the bad part of town, at night.

Do you see where I’m headed.

If proper recre­ational drugs, like my beloved weed were legal and a safe sup­ply was avail­able, then more peo­ple would smoke dope and less peo­ple would abuse pills, ergo: less peo­ple will die prematurely.

The ille­gal­ity of prefer­able sub­stances is the main thing dri­ving decent folks to abuse what’s in their med­i­cine cabinets.

If you piss-test pos­i­tive for cannabis in a work-drugs test, you’re fucked. If you come up pos­i­tive for opi­ates, you just say you have a “bad back” and no one blinks an eye.The fact that you go home and pain pills with a litre of Stoli is your lit­tle secret…until your body is dis­cov­ered lying in a pool of sick, in your bed and you’re not breathing!

Look, no drug is safe, but all drugs can be made safer if you have the right infor­ma­tion and don’t fear seek­ing it out. Cross­ing the street’s not safe, but we make it safer by learn­ing to look both ways. “Harm reduc­tion” is what its called and with drugs too, you can reduce the chances of prob­lems with a lit­tle bit of knowledge.

In light of this tragedy tak­ing place in Amer­ica, I am issu­ing an open call to all law­mak­ers there to set an exam­ple to the world and legalise all recre­ational sub­stances! Let’s reduce the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who are dying from the effects of pre­scrip­tion drug abuse and give them the choice of safely enjoy­ing the good­ies of their choosing!

Who am I kid­ding? Amer­ica will just declare war on chemists or doc­tors, or the pre­scrip­tion meds them­selves. That’s the more their style. There’s more of a chance of them doing that, than any­thing remotely sensible…

Happy fuck­ing Feb­ru­ary, fuckers!

Feb­ru­ary is one of my favourite months, because its the short­est. It breezes right by like nobody’s busi­ness, though this year there’s an extra day, because its leap year. Great.

Jan­u­ary was hard­core for me, I worked way too much and slept way too lit­tle. Last night I slept 14 con­tin­u­ous hours. I guess I needed it. Feb­ru­ary is going to be easier.

I’m not work­ing as much this month, par­tially by design. I’ve got to sort out a few things that are only pos­si­ble in the day­light and I want to deal with a few per­sonal mat­ters as well.

Hope­fully this also means that you guys will be see­ing a bit more from me, though I didn’t do that badly in Jan­u­ary, con­sid­er­ing my lack of free time. Maybe its all the coffee!

Since I got my new cof­fee set-up, I am drink­ing lots more of the stuff and I am buzzing on caf­feine like crazy. It means I have to smoke even more weed to stay mel­low, so its like I’m groov­ing on nature’s groovi­est speed­ball. I’m up, I’m down, I’m up, I’m down and then even­tu­ally I’m some­where in the middle.

I’ve been check­ing out dif­fer­ent beans because I need to learn more about them. I was using blends, but now I am try­ing some sin­gle estates, all roasted to order from the cool web­site I’ve been order­ing from recently. Mrs. H prefers the sin­gle bean cof­fee and I think I do too. I’m try­ing a dif­fer­ent one every few days or so.

My brother and I have been toy­ing with the idea of revamp­ing my web­site again. This design’s been up for 2 years now, maybe it is time for a change. What would you like to see me do differently?

How about a forum? It would solve my com­ment prob­lem. I miss hav­ing peo­ple com­ment here, but I don’t miss the 1000s of spam-comments I was receiv­ing day after day. Besides, if any­one is going to punt coun­ter­feit via­gra on my web­site, it’s going to be me, dammit! Coun­ter­feit via­gra is prob­a­bly just as effec­tive as the real thing, any­way, because its all just a placebo effect. Swal­low this blue smar­tie and have the increased con­fi­dence in your erec­tion, or chew it for a nice choco­lately treat!

Or how about a stream­ing web­cam show­ing you my life 24/7? You could watch me order take­aways and roll spliffs and that’s just at work! At home, you would get to see me clean­ing out lit­ter boxes and brew­ing espres­sos, often at the exact same time!

Maybe the stream­ing web­cam is a bad idea, since I’d never be able to have another wank again, unless I did it in pub­lic and there are far too many CCTV cam­eras to get away with that, so I might as well just do it at home in front of my stream­ing web­cam and all of you.

There’s not going to be a web­cam and there’s not going to be any wanking.

With­out the web­cam, though, you’ll never know for sure!