The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Bad experiences’ Category

The fol­low­ing is a hippy health update:

I haven’t men­tioned how I’ve been feel­ing for a bit, because I’ve pretty much been feel­ing the same. There’re two pieces of good news, though…I’ve got a defin­i­tive diag­no­sis. I have some­thing called Hashimoto’s Dis­ease.

Hashimoto’s Dis­ease is an auto-immune dis­or­der, prob­a­bly genetic in ori­gin and it causes my bod­ies T-cells to attack my Thy­roid Gland, result­ing in Hypothy­roidism, which is an under-active Thy­roid and causes all sorts of metab­o­lism problems.

And Dr. Hashimoto is the guy that dis­cov­ered it and it is the first recog­nised auto-immune disorder.

This diag­no­sis ties together all sorts of symp­toms I’ve had over the last 6 months to a year that I hadn’t really put together or even thought were symp­toms of any­thing. I just thought I was get­ting old!

Mainly, it explains the acute inflam­ma­tion in my back, which con­tin­ues to cause me pain, though not nearly as bad as it was when it started. I never thought my back prob­lems would be caused by some­thing big­ger and scarier!

My other symp­toms included loss of energy, appetite and con­cen­tra­tion, poor sleep, a lump in my throat and flut­ters in my chest. I’ve had all of those things to one degree or another and I sim­ply attrib­uted them to mid­dle age and my erratic work and sleep pat­terns. Silly me. I didn’t put any of this together.

When the back trou­ble started, I began treat­ment with a chi­ro­prac­tor, who I credit with help­ing a lot, but I still couldn’t com­pletely shake the pain. After three weeks I saw my GP, because I thought I might have Shin­gles — I had a minor rash on my side. It turned out I didn’t have Shin­gles, but my GP ordered an x-ray (which was neg­a­tive) and a bat­tery of blood tests, which included a test for Thy­roid function.

The test came back and con­firmed my diag­no­sis. My GP also prod­ded my throat and said he could feel my swollen Thy­roid Gland. I had noticed a slight sen­sa­tion when swal­low­ing for a while, but didn’t think any­thing of it. It wasn’t painful, or even uncom­fort­able, it was just different.

I’ve learned a valu­able les­son and that’s to lis­ten more closely to what my body is telling me and to do some­thing about it!

Thank­fully, Hashimoto’s Dis­ease is very treat­able and I will be on a med­ica­tion called Levathy­rox­ine for the rest of my life. It replaces the Thy­roid Hor­mone my body no longer pro­duces and once they get my dosage to the cor­rect level, my body will go back to nor­mal, what­ever nor­mal is…

I’m hav­ing side effects from this med­ica­tion, nau­sea, sweats, and pal­pi­ta­tions mainly, but these should pass soon. I hope.

Left untreated, it could even­tu­ally cause heart fail­ure and death, so its a very good thing my doc­tor caught this. I’m lucky I have a good GP too.

Oh and the other good news is thanks to Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my cool new daily med­ica­tion, I now get free NHS pre­scrip­tions for life. Now all I need them to do is approve cannabis pre­scrip­tions on the NHS and this dis­ease stops being a curse and it becomes a real blessing!

Any­way kids, your Uncle Hippy is on the mend and it won’t be long before I’m back to my old self and try­ing to touch you all up again!

Greet­ings and salu­ta­tions. Hello. Wel­come. Yes, I am still alive.

Well, I’m as alive as I can be, fol­low­ing my recent health troubles.

For the last 15 days I’ve been suf­fer­ing with seri­ous back trou­ble. I could barely walk for the first week or so, every step was pure agony. Sit­ting was agony too and lay­ing down was impos­si­ble. I was well and truly fucked.

I’ve been see­ing a chi­ro­prac­tor and I think he’s helped a lot. I’ve had count­less adjust­ments, start­ing with a home visit because I couldn’t get to his office. I’m walk­ing well now and have much less pain, I’m hop­ing to return to work later in the week.

This episode really freaked me out, I was prac­ti­cally crip­pled. I couldn’t even make it to the loo with­out assis­tance from Mrs. H, I couldn’t get dressed, pre­pare a meal, do any house­hold chores. I couldn’t even sit at my desk and use my iMac, I couldn’t use my lap­top for the first week or so. If it wasn’t for my iPhone, I would have been com­pletely cut off from the world.

There’s a sense of panic and des­per­a­tion that one is over­come with in these sit­u­a­tions and I was no excep­tion. As I sat upright on my sofa, for the fifth or sixth night, des­per­ately try­ing to snatch an hour or two of light, unsat­is­fy­ing sleep, dark and dan­ger­ous thoughts would bub­ble to the sur­face of my brain.

What if this is permanent?

What if this is the begin­ning of my slow, grad­ual health decline lead­ing to my pre­ma­ture death.

What if I don’t get better?

What if the excru­ci­at­ing pain never ends?

What if.…

I found myself hav­ing mini-panic attacks, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing slightly and relief not com­ing through the codeine or spliffs.

Though my back may be improv­ing, I find myself filled with a lin­ger­ing, nag­ging depres­sion over my future.

Is this the begin­ning of the end?

They say that every sec­ond after your born, you are one sec­ond closer to death, so in the more gen­eral sense, the end has no begin­ning; or rather the begin­ning of the end, begins at the very beginning.

But that’s not what I mean. I just have this hor­ri­ble, deep feel­ing that my best years are well and truly behind me. It’s prob­a­bly true, as its undoubt­edly true that I’ve lived more than half my life already as the chances of me even com­ing close to 90 are slim to none.

I’m feel­ing my mor­tal­ity and I don’t like it. I feel like I’ve aged in the last fort­night, like my years have finally caught up with me. I don’t feel youth­ful, as I always have, instead I’ve felt like a decrepit old man.

The thought of a slow, painful slide towards death fills me with dread. I don’t want to suf­fer through a litany of minor and major health prob­lems until one of them finally snuffs me out. That just sounds horrible!

I sup­pose death is very much on my mind because of the death of my cat a few weeks ago, which I wit­nessed first­hand in all its mis­er­able, tor­tur­ous glory. While her death was mer­ci­fully quick, she didn’t go gen­tly into that goodnight.

Watch­ing her con­tort and strug­gle against the hand of the grim reaper has had a pro­found effect on me, though I am still try­ing to deci­pher what exactly what effect it has had. I’d never actu­ally been with any liv­ing crea­ture, human or ani­mal, at the point of death until her pass­ing three weeks ago.

My younger brother, who is far more spir­i­tual than I could ever hope to be, says I absorbed some­thing from this expe­ri­ence, which man­i­fested itself with my back trou­ble, or per­haps was this was the trig­ger for it. I can’t say I am convinced.

When the chi­ro­prac­tor was tak­ing my back­ground and his­tory, one of his first ques­tions was if I suf­fered any trau­mas recently; my cat died about a week before the real pain started, though I had sore­ness in my back a few days before it really hit me.

The chi­ro­prac­tor said that my back trou­ble was build­ing up over time, that the inflam­ma­tion had wors­ened to the point of spasms in my back mus­cles, caus­ing acute pain.

Is this a coin­ci­dence of tim­ing or defin­i­tive cause and effect? I couldn’t really say. You could con­vinc­ingly put across either side of this argu­ment and I just don’t know.

All of this has left me hat­ing aging and mor­tal­ity even more than before and I didn’t think that was pos­si­ble. What’s a self-confessed sociopath and ama­teur nar­cis­sist to do?

Keep hop­ing that some­one works out a way to down­load my brain into a com­puter after the death of my body, so I can con­tinue to exist, in dig­i­tal form. How else can I hope to keep post­ing dri­vel here through­out eternity?

I am in severe pain and have been for 5 days. I did some­thing to my back.

I have no idea what I’ve done, but I do know it hurts like a motherfucker.

It started on Mon­day morn­ing, when I woke up. My back was sore and stiff and I wasn’t mov­ing well. By Tues­day, I could hardly walk and by Weds I was glued to my sofa. Get­ting up is a strug­gle, walk­ing is nearly impos­si­ble. I’ve tried to get out to a chi­ro­prac­tor twice, but couldn’t man­age it. I’m get­ting a home visit tomor­row, he thinks he can help me.

I’m miss­ing out on loads of work, I’m not sleep­ing well or eat­ing. A trip to the loo takes 10 min­utes. This is seri­ously no fuck­ing fun.

Thank­fully, Mrs. H has been around to take care of me, or I would be roy­ally screwed.

It’s a strug­gle to even type this on my lap­top, and sit­ting at my iMac is not an option. I’ve been surf­ing lots on my iPhone though. I’m really glad I’ve got it.

I’m heav­ily dosed up on codeine and weed, which is keep­ing me chilled, but not touch­ing the pain. Please send me all your cool and groovy heal­ing vibes, because this hippy needs to get bet­ter and quick!

My cat died sud­denly yes­ter­day. She was old and in decline for the last few months and I did know the end was near­ing, but it was still a shock to have it hap­pen like this.

One minute before she died, she was eat­ing. I’d helped her to her dish in the kitchen and left her there, hap­pily munch­ing away and returned to the liv­ing room. All of the sud­den, one of my other cats leapt with a start and I heard the sound of some­thing falling over in the hall­way. I thought it was just some post com­ing through the let­ter slot in the front door. I was wrong.

It was my cat, she’d fallen over with what I am fairly sure was a stroke. She was gone in about 2 min­utes, but I was there with her.

She was around 16 years old, but its pos­si­ble she could have been older. Mrs. H got her in 1994 as a fully grown cat, I knew her for over 11 years.

Before Mrs. H got her from the local shel­ter, she had been liv­ing in the local mar­ket, exist­ing on scraps and hand-outs from the traders. She loved peo­ple food and if it was good enough to be on your plate, it was good enough for her — she’s eat any­thing, fruit, veg, meat, cheese, bread, you name it, though of course we mainly fed her cat food.

On Mon­day night, she had cheese from a pizza and licked the rem­nants of a bowl of choco­late ice cream, which was her absolute favourite.

I appre­ci­ate if you’re not a pet lover that this post is prob­a­bly tedious read­ing for you. I am a pet lover, I’ve had dogs and cats my entire life. The rela­tion­ships you have with your pets are some of the most hon­est rela­tion­ships you can have.

My cat hadn’t been well for the last few months. She gone mostly blind, her appetite was decreas­ing and her back legs were get­ting weaker. I would be lying if I said I didn’t con­sider putting her down and my one real regret is that I didn’t trust my instincts. The day before she died I thought about it and even yes­ter­day it crossed my mind more than once. I could have spared her a brief, yet hor­ri­ble death.

Dying is hor­ri­ble and wit­ness­ing my cat’s pass­ing was dis­tress­ing. While it was mer­ci­fully brief, my cat fought and strug­gled to her very last breath, but that’s what she was like. She was a fighter and didn’t take shit from any­one, not even Death, though in the end, Death always wins.

I spent the last cou­ple of days talk­ing to my cat, telling her how much I would miss her when she was gone. I really did sense that the end was extremely near. My other three cats were all dis­tressed as well when she died and could sense some­thing was very wrong. And even though I cleaned up the spot in the hall­way where she passed, they are still sniff­ing around it. They know, even if they don’t understand.

Pets are part of your fam­ily, they have per­son­al­i­ties and strong char­ac­ters and are loyal and faith­ful com­pan­ions, dogs and cats alike. When you lose one, it hurts and hurts deeply.

I can remem­ber when I was a child and we lost a pet, my mother being so very dis­traught that she would always announce with great author­ity and final­ity, that this was the end and she would have no more pets, ever, because los­ing them is so painful. It’s not fair that they have such brief life spans!

I’ve lost 2 cats in the last year and it doesn’t get any eas­ier. I’m lucky now, the three I have are all quite young and I hope it will be a good long time before I have to face los­ing any more.

I’m going to miss my sweet lit­tle girl so much, I already do now and she hasn’t even been gone 24 hours.

In truth, she was partly gone already, as I watched her health decline, espe­cially over the last week or so. I know its a cliché, but she is at peace now. Every day was increas­ingly becom­ing a strug­gle for her. She doesn’t have to strug­gle any more.

I hate death. It sucks, but I think the dying part is the worst of all.

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…

It’s always inter­est­ing to see what words peo­ple stick into Google and other search engines, which lead them to my hum­ble, lit­tle website.

I receive a wide vari­ety of sta­tis­tics via my web­site hosts, but I always like check­ing out the search-terms sec­tion. It’s always good for a laugh.

This is the cur­rent list, for the month of July, to date, count­ing up from num­ber ten:

10) “north lon­don hip­pie” – my name, spelled wrong, with spaces. I’m glad it still leads to my site and I’m glad peo­ple search for me, even with the mistakes!

9) “billi bhatti” – him off Big Brother, evicted a cou­ple of weeks ago. As you will see, BB names are pop­u­lar on this list.

8) “pur­ple ohms expe­ri­ences” – a cou­ple of years ago, I had a bad time on these pills. I took too many, I had an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence. They’re legal highs and I think they are still avail­able, now in non-BZP form.

7) “northlon­don­hippy” – now that’s more like it, spelled cor­rectly, with­out spaces. I fea­ture twice in my own top ten, which means my brand aware­ness is high and get­ting higher. Just like me, I’m get­ting higher too, right now…!

6) “RooR Pocket Friend” – a fine pipe from my friends at RooR. I’ve writ­ten about mine a few times. Usu­ally, there are sev­eral RooR-related search terms in the top ten, but when I write about Big Brother, that tends to over­take it. Go figure!

5) “charley uchea tits” – Thus begins the breast obses­sion at the top of the list, nearly all BB related.

4) “vic­to­ria beck­ham top­less” – see, more tits. As if I would post pic­tures of that bean­pole with fake boobs!

3) “chanelle hayes mas­tur­ba­tion” — BB related, but not so breast-centric. Does any­one know if these pic­tures do exist? I wouldn’t post them, but I might like to see them myself, purely for research purposes.

2) “shab­nam paryani top­less” – I don’t really get this one, espe­cially as it is so high up on the list. Do peo­ple really want to see her top­less? I don’t even want to see her clothed! She’s scary!! Peo­ple have very weird tastes and inter­ests, but this is the inter­net, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

1) “expand­ing the­ory” – A while ago, I wrote up a silly lit­tle the­ory about what I thought the effect of the uni­verse con­stantly expand­ing would have on us. I was very high at the time and it was total bollocks.

Google doesn’t seem to think so, for if you put “expand­ing the­ory” into the world’s largest and smartest search engine, this is what you get as your top hit: CLICK HERE

Go on, check it out. My site is the top hit! Read it!

Do you really think I am an expert on the sub­ject? Should I win a Nobel Prize for inno­va­tion in science?

I should very much think not!

I don’t know if you found that inter­est­ing, but as always, I am inter­ested in what you have to say. I’d like to take an infor­mal survey:

Please email me with how you found my site. Did you stum­ble upon me via a search engine? Do you remem­ber what you were search­ing for? Maybe you saw a link to my site? Where?

How­ever you found me, I’d like to know. Please email me at thehippy@northlondonhippy.com — I won’t spam you or give/sell your address to any­one. I don’t even keep a mail­ing list. I’m just nosy.

I know it’s the sum­mer and I do give a lot of space to Big Brother, but that’s not the only thing I do here on my web­site. I’m all about a whole lot more!

Pol­i­tics, soci­ety, drugs, phi­los­o­phy, and con­sumer elec­tron­ics are among the sub­jects I spew dri­vel on; there’s a lit­tle some­thing for every­one. Well, almost every­one. I’m sure there are some peo­ple who don’t find me to their par­tic­u­lar liking.

They can fuck right off. It’s the rest of you, I’m inter­ested in and more impor­tantly, that should be inter­ested in me!

This is going be one of those ram­bling, unfo­cused posts. I thought I should warn you right now, up front, so you’re not sur­prised when you work it out for yourself.

I’m start­ing a long run of nights at work this evening, so I thought I should pop around and do some­thing. Any­thing is bet­ter than noth­ing, or is that just with sex?

It’s actu­ally been a rough cou­ple of weeks around my place; we had to put one of my cats down. He had can­cer in a big, nasty way and there was noth­ing they could do for him. Well, they tried what they could, but when they opened up his lit­tle cat belly, it was filled to the brim with tumours. To spare him any fur­ther suf­fer­ing, we had the vet put the lit­tle guy to sleep. Mrs. H was there when they did it; I couldn’t face it.

My poor dead cat was one of the nicest, friend­liest, coolest cats I ever had the priv­i­lege to know and I am miss­ing him terribly.

He wasn’t that old, only around 13 or 14 years and his ill­ness was as sud­den as it was unex­pected. I rushed him to the vet’s on a Sat­ur­day after­noon and he was gone the fol­low­ing Tuesday.

Now, if he were a human, it wouldn’t have been as swift or mer­ci­ful because we don’t like to spare peo­ple from suf­fer­ing. Just ask my Dad, who from diag­no­sis to demise, had around a year of treat­ments and set­backs before expe­ri­enc­ing a rather drawn out and unpleas­ant death. Oh wait, you can’t ask him, can you?

We treat our pets with more dig­nity than we do each other. Where’s the sense in that? When my time comes, and I do hope it is later rather than sooner, per­haps we’ll have seen sense and legalised euthana­sia. If it’s good enough for the Swiss, why can’t it be OK for the rest of us? Oth­er­wise, I’m going to have to start a spe­cial con­tin­gency fund, for one final trip to Geneva or Zurich, for when my time does come…closer. It seems like the only sane response to an oth­er­wise insane world!

Have I brought you down with all this talk of death and such? Sorry, but now you know where my head’s been for the last cou­ple of weeks. Thank god for soft drugs. If there were a god, or soft drugs.

But hippy, there are soft drugs and you are puff­ing on them right now.

Oh, yeah.

So besides miss­ing my dead cat, watch­ing BB and work­ing, what else have I been up to?

Not too much. I had a drug-hell expe­ri­ence with some legal highs I’ve been get­ting online. I’m not going to tell you what they are or where you can get them, because I don’t want to see them banned. I’ve even debated men­tion­ing this at all, but as the expe­ri­ence swal­lowed sev­eral days of my life, I thought it would be a fun story to relate.

I dis­cov­ered a new range of legal highs a few months ago, though I’ve been aware of their exis­tence for ages. After read­ing many favourable reviews of this line of pills, I decided to take a chance and placed an order.

I tried them, I liked them and I ordered more. And then I ordered even more.

And then, I had my drug hell with them. I took around a dozen of the lit­tle suck­ers in a con­tin­u­ous 30-hour hedo­nis­tic binge and drug orgy, before col­laps­ing into sleep for around 6 hours.

That’s a day and a half.

When I woke up, I was down, aching and still exhausted and I was greeted with loads of text mes­sages, voice­mails, emails and other assorted forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, ask­ing if I was lying dead in a pud­dle of my own sick.

Thank­fully, on this occa­sion, I wasn’t.

I then had a few days of feel­ing quite low and run down. It was totally self-inflicted, so I’m not ask­ing for anyone’s sym­pa­thy or pity. This is who I am; this is what I do. Sometimes.

Rarely, actu­ally. I haven’t had a drug-hell in ages.

The thing with these par­tic­u­lar pills is they are very fuck­ing good. They are the clos­est I’ve had that approach an E-like high. Taken in mod­er­a­tion, there is no real come­down or other side effect. Taken in large quan­ti­ties, like a total twat, will not end well.

Yes, I was a total twat.

No one is cer­tain what the magic ingre­di­ents are in these pills, but those who have tried them, love them. Maybe a lit­tle too much as I think they are seri­ously addic­tive. Think cocaine-addictive!

I haven’t had any since my last expe­ri­ence and I can’t say I have any defin­i­tive plan to try them again any time soon, but never say never. I still have some and at some point, I might recon­sider, but I will not over do it. Mod­er­a­tion is indeed, the key.

Again, sorry I’m not telling you exactly what I took, but the less atten­tion these pills get, the longer peo­ple will be able to enjoy them. Just because I went a bit crazy with them, doesn’t mean oth­ers shouldn’t be able to have the choice to enjoy them too.

I finally broke down and ordered a new lap­top last week and guess what? It’s an Apple!

I hemmed and hawed for months on which model to get, and wait­ing for the next big update, and blah, blah, blah and quite frankly I just got tired of not hav­ing one. My writ­ing has been suf­fer­ing because of this gap in my com­puter arse­nal and I finally decided, fuck it, now is as good a time as any.

Both lines, the Mac­Book and the Mac­Book Pro were recently updated, and the myth­i­cal ultra portable doesn’t seem to be com­ing any­time soon (although now that I’ve bought one, it is prob­a­bly a week away), so I went for it and placed my order last Wednes­day and it already shipped on Friday.

I chose the black Mac­Book, with the only build to order option being extra RAM, I’ve dou­bled it to 2 gigs. I’ve gone with the stock 160gb 5400rpm hard drive, because I decided the extra speed was bet­ter than 40 extra gigs of stor­age – the 200gb model is only 4200rpm. It’s a Core2Duo, 2.16 and I topped it up with Apple Care.

I’m look­ing for­ward to its arrival, which should be in the next week, or less. They ship them from Shang­hai, which is a long way from north Lon­don, but it’s still fairly impressive.

Once I get it, I’m going to carry it with me every­where. If you invite me over, I’d bring it along, as long as you’ll let me access the inter­net on your wi-fi net­work! You see, it’s not just those lit­tle pills I’m addicted to, I’m hooked on the inter­net as well.

I did con­sider the Mac­Book Pro, but the sig­nif­i­cant addi­tional cost was not jus­ti­fied by the “pro” fea­tures, in terms of my rather mod­est needs. Also, the 15.4 inch model is fairly big, in my opin­ion, to be lug­ging around, where the MacBook’s 13.3 size adds to it’s portability.

So that’s the last fort­night or so this hippy’s life. Wow, what a whirl­wind of drama, emo­tion and big ticket pur­chases! I bet you can’t wait to see what hap­pens to me next!

I’ll be back later in the week, with more BB bull­shit, plus I’m going to start deal­ing with some of the requests you’ve all sent me. One sub­ject has been most pop­u­lar with all of you and…I’ll let you all know what is in my next entry!

Man oh man, I have been as sick as a dog all weekend!

A stom­ach virus, food poi­son­ing or pos­si­bly it was a gypsy curse on my intestines; I’m not really cer­tain, but I do know that I’m been expelling all man­ner of solid and liq­uid from both ends of my body since Sat­ur­day morning.

Nice!

The last time I was this unwell was while on hol­i­day in Crete a few years ago. It was just as nasty then. All I’ve man­aged to keep down my gul­let is water, and on Sat­ur­day even that was a problem.

I’m feel­ing a bit bet­ter today, but not enough to face any solid food, not even my cur­rent favourite from my local take-away, salt and chilli tofu! Just the thought of it is mak­ing me retch some­what, so I must still be sick!

I’ve missed some work, which is never a good thing; as if I go sick, some­one has to replace me. Imag­ine how much fun it is to replace me on short notice for a night­shift! It’s nearly impos­si­ble, which is why I always feel a lit­tle guilty on the rare occa­sions when I do phone in sick.

Oh enough about my health! I’m sick of being sick already! I hate being ill, it is just so bor­ing. All I do is sleep, squirt liq­uid poo and barf a lot!

Ok, I’ve offi­cially arrived in gross-land, pop­u­la­tion one sick hippy!

So how about that weather, eh? See, I’m chang­ing the sub­ject lest I offend again!

It’s still fairly warm and humid here in north Lon­don, though the nice weath­er­man told me it would less of both of those hor­rid qual­i­ties for the next cou­ple of days. That’s good.

Ok, I don’t care about the weather either, but here in Britain, that’s what we talk about at awk­ward moments; the weather! That’s what we talk about all the time! It’s too cold, it’s too hot, it’s rain­ing too much, it’s not rain­ing enough! Moan, moan, moan!

Don’t you have any good news, you mis­er­able hippy?

In truth, right now, I do not.

I guess I could geek out a bit. Why not?

I’m still dig­ging my new Sony Bravia KDL-32V2000 LCD tele­vi­sion very much! The pic­ture on it is spec­tac­u­lar and the increased size has been a bonanza for my view­ing plea­sure. The V2000 range con­tin­ues to gar­ner rave reviews from the tech­ni­cal press and is widely seen as the best LCD tele­vi­sion cur­rently on the mar­ket! It rocks!

The images from my DVD player (over a com­po­nent con­nec­tion) and SKY+ (over RGB SCART) are fan­tas­tic and I am really look­ing for­ward to hav­ing some proper High-Def sources to feed into it in the future.

The obvi­ous choice is SKY HD, but not yet. Why am I waiting?

Two rea­sons:

Firstly, the cost – I think it is too pricey. The box itself is 300 quid and they want another 50 or 60 pounds to install it. The instal­la­tion fee is the real joke, as because I already have SKY+, it would be a straight box-swap, with­out any new cabling or a new dish. Talk about a rip-off!

As an exist­ing SKY cus­tomer, they should be offer­ing me some sort of incen­tive like a cheaper price. They’re not. Demand is high, so SKY have no rea­son to lower the price just yet. When the cost comes down, I’ll be very tempted.

The sec­ond rea­son has to do with reports I’m see­ing on var­i­ous forums from peo­ple who already have SKY HD. The boxes appear to be very prob­lem­atic and laden with bugs.

I don’t want to replace my SKY+ box, which is 99% reli­able with a new SKY HD box that is far less depend­able. TV is too impor­tant to me to risk los­ing out on future record­ings. Let them work the kinks out, then come talk to this hippy.

Don’t get me wrong, High-Def is very good and is worth the extra expense, just not yet. When the box comes down in price and is seen as a more robust piece of kit, then I would love to have it installed.

Another option for play­ing back High-Def mate­r­ial is a PC, or in my case, an Apple Mac. I con­nected my G4 iBook to the Bravia via a VGA input and was stunned by the qual­ity of the image. My G4 is not beefy enough to play back High-Def, not even at 720p because the chip is too slow, but an Intel Mac Mini with a Core Duo would eas­ily rise to that challenge.

So yes, my friends, the hippy is tempted to get a Mac Mini and turn it into my media hub. It could han­dle all my audio and video server needs with ease, includ­ing High-Def con­tent down­loaded from the internet.

I’m more than tempted, I’m going to buy one as soon as they refresh the line again, which could be any­time between now and the end of the sum­mer. There will be a speed bump to the proces­sor if noth­ing else, though Steve Jobs remarked at a recent Apple event that they know peo­ple want an Apple media-hub, so who really knows what the future may hold!

Match the Mac Mini with a wire­less key­board, wire­less mouse and some addi­tional stor­age and you’ve got one lean, mean, media serv­ing machine that will let you surf the net from the sofa and access any con­tent on my net­work. It sounds cool to me.

So there you have it, even while floored by some hor­ri­ble tummy bug, I can still con­tinue to plot and plan my all-new dig­i­tal lifestyle.

Remem­ber, if it weren’t for drugs and con­sumer pur­chases, my life would be noth­ing but an empty bot­tom­less pit of deep despair. If your life is bleak and dreary too, no one would blame you for fol­low­ing my example!

I’m dig­ging my new blog very much!

Ain’t it shiny? Don’t you just want to lick it?

If you do, I’ll charge you extra. This media whore don’t come cheap!

I espe­cially like my new ban­ner. Actu­ally it’s my first and only ban­ner. Ok, so I’m not a ban­ner expert. I still dig it anyway!

My younger brother designed it based on my rather loose spec­i­fi­ca­tions. He did the whole site actu­ally and could do yours too, for a mod­est, yet afford­able fee. Con­tact me for details.

The new site uses some­thing called Word Press, which seems like one pow­er­ful moth­er­fucker of a sys­tem. I don’t think I even know half of what it does yet. It’s a brand new world for me!

I spent most of Thurs­day mon­ged out of my skull on those Pur­ple Ohms and to be hon­est, I can’t say I enjoyed it. The expe­ri­ence has put me off piper­azines and LSA, which is a nat­ural pre­cur­sor of LSD.

For starters, I maxed out the dose, because my expe­ri­ence with these herbal highs is such that to get any­where, you need to take as much as they rec­om­mend pos­si­ble. Maybe that wasn’t wise, but fuck it, it was my birth­day and the pack­age promised “a shroom like expe­ri­ence.” Bullshit!

The speed­ier, piper­azine, BZP, or TMMP aspects of it were as described pre­vi­ously, a bit speedy, slightly euphoric and pleas­ant enough, so I think what dis­agreed with me was the LSA con­tain­ing Argryria Ner­vosa. I could be wrong.

Basi­cally, it lasted for hours and the trip­pi­ness wasn’t pleas­ant, it was that anx­ious, rest­less sort of feel­ing that you get from acid cut with too much speed. I didn’t really enjoy it at all.

When Mrs. H got home from work, I had to have a nap, or at least lie in the dark for a cou­ple of hours. She was not impressed to say the least.

I wouldn’t clas­sify it as a “bad trip” but def­i­nitely an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence that I do not plan on repeat­ing. I get the feel­ing that a lot of these new herbal highs are just a mix of any old legal sub­stance that makes you feel some­thing and not a well-balanced mix of ingre­di­ents that yield a fan­tas­tic time.

Per­haps these new legal highs are still in their infancy and the real arti­sans of the indus­try haven’t cre­ated any­thing ideal yet. At least they are trying.

This lit­tle episode has made me realise just how good magic mush­rooms were and what a tragedy it is that the British gov­ern­ment took them away from us for no good rea­son other than to be seen to be leg­is­lat­ing morality.

My beloved shrooms were safe, reli­able and fun. You knew exactly what you were get­ting and if you were dosage aware, just how strong your trip would be. They were gen­tle on the sys­tem, with a grad­ual come up, com­fort­able peak and relaxed come-down. They were all nat­ural, unprocessed and cheap. Up until last July, you could buy them from a choice of rep­utable retail­ers, online or on the high street.

I miss shrooms quite a bit and noth­ing that’s come along since even comes close. I’m sure if I put my mind to it, I could track some down now, but I don’t want to. They’re “Class A” and I’d rather not mess with that.

No, what I would like is for this gov­ern­ment to do a U-turn. What I’d like to see is some Euro­pean Court over­turn the law! What I’d like is for shrooms to come back, fresh, legal and avail­able to grown-up, respon­si­ble hip­pies like me!

But I live in the real world and that’s just not going to hap­pen, is it?

Instead, peo­ple are going to keep look­ing for that next big thing. And you know what, that next big thing might be far worse than shrooms and it wouldn’t have come on the mar­ket if shrooms were still available!

Accord­ing to a recent report I saw on SKY NEWS, in this coun­try alone, the legal high mar­ket is in the region of 10 mil­lion pounds per year! That’s a shit­load of money; it’s a mas­sive mar­ket and I pre­dict it will expand in the com­ing years in ways none of us can imagine!

And yes, I’ll be here to test drive these new sub­stances for you! Maybe I’ll find one even bet­ter than shrooms!

Some­how I doubt that too!