The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘death’ Category

Blah, blah, blah.

That’s what other people’s excuses and apolo­gies sound like to my jaded ears. Just so much noise and hot air.

I’ll spare you mine. I don’t actu­ally have any. I just haven’t both­ered to post any­thing here.

Call me crap-ass if you like. Mr. Cra­pass. Crap­pen­stein. Crapfuckingtastic.

Just don’t ever call me late for din­ner. You can ask your grand­par­ents where that one comes from because its older than they are.

Its not that I don’t come up with great ideas for things to write about every day, because I do. Com­ing up with this shit’s not hard, sit­ting down and doing it is.

I always seem to have some­thing else to dis­tract me away from doing some­thing semi-productive and nearly use­ful, like writ­ing one of my patented hippy things. Ok, I haven’t actu­ally patented them, because some­one already beat me to it and got the patent on crap.

I’d rather be day dream­ing. I’d rather watch tv, or read or pass out in a drug induced stupor.

Alright, truth be told, its been years since I’ve been in any sort of stu­por because I don’t do those naughty drugs any more. I don’t even drink and trust me, if you’re aim­ing for a stu­por, booze is most def­i­nitely your bestest buddy.

The only rea­son I’m grac­ing you with my pres­ence now is that I popped onto my own web­site and noticed how long it had been since I both­ered to post any­thing and I thought, “fuck man every­body gonna think I be dead or some shit like that”.

Yes, I my inner voice sounds like that, doesn’t yours?

So here I am, after a night­shift and a cou­ple of spliffies, spew­ing utter rub­bish just for the sake of hav­ing some­thing semi-current on the top of my home page. Do peo­ple even call them home­pages any more?

Maybe I’m just los­ing touch. I gen­uinely had to look up some words in the Urban Dic­tio­nary that the kids are using these days, because I didn’t fuck­ing under­stand them.

Maybe I am your grandpa.

Oh yeah, we’re approach­ing my birth­day, its only a cou­ple of months away. Is it too early for me to start my annual moan about age­ing and mid­dle age and dying and death and yada yada yada?

Appar­ently not.

I was going to write some­thing about zom­bies the other day. I can sum it up for you. I saw Zom­bieland. I liked Zom­bieland. I like Zom­bies. Zom­bies scare the bee­jeezus outta me because they are dead, right, but like they’re walk­ing around and you know, they want to eat your brains, only you can’t kill ‘em, um…because like they’re already dead?

Ok, that’s not really my review of Zom­bieland, though I did see it and I did like it, but that was an actual review I over­heard on the street. I might have made up the bee­jeezus part for comic effect, but the rest is pretty much word for word what I overheard.

I was going to stretch all that out to 1000 words. You don’t have to thank me for spar­ing you that zomb­i­fied opus, just send cash or pro­vide sex­ual favours to me and all my friends.

How cool would that be if ran­dom strangers from the inter­net offered to shag my friends, just because I asked them too. I’d be the most pop­u­lar guy around. You’d want to be my friend too. I can sort you out with ran­dom hook-ups, no charge.

Wait a sec­ond, if I have ran­dom strangers will­ing to sleep with peo­ple I know, I’d be a fool not to charge some­thing. How about a han­dling fee? That sounds fair. Shall we call it £200 quid for the hour, you can talk extras directly with your inter­net date upon arrival.

You see, this is how peo­ple sud­denly become pimps. One minute, your just typ­ing some crap on the inter­net, the next you’re run­ning a sta­ble of pros.

Snoop Dogg’s life sud­denly makes a lot more sense to me now.

Nearly 5 years ago to this very day, I wrote a lit­tle some­thing here on the hippy that is one of my favourite posts ever. Back when I had a top-ten favourite list, this par­tic­u­lar post was fea­tured prominently.

Its called ASS BOMBS

Don’t worry if you can’t be both­ered to re-read it right now, I’ll sum­marise it for you: I spec­u­lated on the lengths future ter­ror­ists would have to go through to sneak explo­sive devices on to planes and the addi­tional secu­rity mea­sures that would have to be put in place to main­tain safety. This wasn’t long Richard Reid tried to blow up his shoes.

I the­o­rised that a ter­ror­ists’ rec­tum would become a com­part­ment for hid­ing plas­tique and air­port secu­rity screen­ers would have to play proc­tol­o­gist to make sure all air trav­ellers were not car­ry­ing any­thing up their bot­toms. Instead of “take off your shoes and remove all metal objects”, their instruc­tion would be to “bend over and spread those cheeks.”

It would cer­tainly put fly­ing into a brand new per­spec­tive. Mak­ing sure you wear clean socks with­out any holes wouldn’t seem so impor­tant any more.

It turns out, I was par­tially right. An alleged Al Qaeda fanatic tried to blow up offi­cials at a meet­ing in Saudi Ara­bia with some TNT shoved up his ass, only the idiot left it stuck up there when it det­o­nated and it only killed the bomber. You’re sup­posed to take it out of your bot­tom before it goes off.

You can read the report here in The Sun news­pa­per, under their clever head­line; “Sui­cide Bum­mer”. Did you see what they did there?

Its unlikely as fuck that Al Qaeda visit my web­site, so they prob­a­bly worked this one out on their own. Now that this fright­en­ing and icky tech­nique is out there, how long before air­ports imple­ment new secu­rity pro­ce­dures? Not long is my guess.

Still, there’s an upside. If you’re going to have to dis­play your ring­piece in air­ports for all to see, anal bleach­ing is set to be the next big growth indus­try. They’ll even have a new slo­gan: “Anal Bleaching…its not just for porn stars any more!”

The pow­ers that be haven’t really sold us on the com­ing cli­mate apocalypse.

I’m not deny­ing its hap­pen­ing, I can clearly see its effects reg­u­larly on a world wide scale, I just don’t think our politi­cians and sci­en­tists have explained it to us very well.

“Cli­mate change” has a PR prob­lem, but don’t worry, I’m going to attempt to offer a sim­ple solution.

The planet Earth itself is not threatened.

There, I said it.

Cli­mate change is not going to destroy this rock we’re stuck on, regard­less of the atmos­pheric tem­per­a­ture, Earth will keep spin­ning through space for a very long time, prob­a­bly until our Sun turns into a Red Giant or Super­nova or what­ever it is stars do and that’s mil­lions of years away.

Cli­mate change might kill every liv­ing thing on the planet, or at least most of them. That should be a strong sell­ing point, only we don’t really care that much about liv­ing things other than humans.

And it seems we don’t care that much about all the humans any­way, only some of them. You know, the ones that look like us, dress like us, talk like us, ummmm, us.

Not them.

But most of all, we care about our­selves. Self-preservation is some­thing we all seem to have in common.

Tack­ling “cli­mate change” has to be about sav­ing one’s self from the com­ing Armaged­don. Fear is always an excel­lent sell­ing point.

Slow­ing cli­mate change will save your life and the lives of every­one you care about. Not slow­ing cli­mate change will prob­a­bly kill us all.

“All of us” includes you. You might really die from the effects of a warmer planet.

If the global tem­per­a­ture goes up, more peo­ple will die from heat-related ill­nesses. Remem­ber all those old French folks who died in the heat­wave in 2003? There’d be a lot more deaths like that.

Got air con­di­tion­ing? If the energy sup­pli­ers can’t keep up with demand, it won’t mat­ter and you’ll still fry.

Large, cur­rently heav­ily pop­u­lated areas of the planet will become unin­hab­it­able, poten­tially dis­plac­ing mil­lions. All those refugees will have to go some­where, which will increase crowd­ing in more tem­per­ate regions while stretch­ing dwin­dling resources beyond capac­ity. Life will become more dif­fi­cult to sustain.

Trop­i­cal dis­eases with­out known cures will spread out from the cur­rent hot zones to increas­ingly wider areas and even more peo­ple will die.

Food pro­duc­tion will be dis­rupted, prompt­ing star­va­tion on an unimag­in­able scale.

I’ve read that Lon­don has only a 48 hour food sup­ply at any given time, because of the way super­mar­ket stock is man­aged. Food prac­ti­cally goes from lorry to shelf with­out sit­ting long in the back room. Its a deliver-as-required system.

If your local super­mar­kets ran dry, how would you feed your­self and your fam­ily? Even if you stock­pile long-life meals, they’ll run out even­tu­ally. Think you can get a farm up and run­ning before it does? Assum­ing there’s still enough water and the sun’s not so hot that it fries your plants and live­stock before you have the chance to take the first tasty bite.

Unre­strained cli­mate change means death for you.

Its sim­ple math really, if we don’t do some­thing soon, we’re all gonna end up dead.

It won’t be the end of the planet, or the end of the world, but it will be the end of us.

And that includes you.

Sud­denly, those low energy light­bulbs don’t seem so bad and sep­a­rat­ing your recy­clable goods doesn’t seem like such a chore, does it?

A bunch of world lead­ers are head­ing to Copen­hagen this Decem­ber to go through the motions of a Cli­mate Change sum­mit. Per­haps, if they adopted the fol­low­ing slo­gan, peo­ple might finally start pay­ing attention:

Cli­mate Change = Death

And once everyone’s pay­ing atten­tion, per­haps we all can start tak­ing the right steps to slow down cli­mate change. The life you save just might be your own.

So Mrs. Hippy turns to me last night and says, “Don’t you post on your blog any more?”

She was surf­ing the inter­net on her iPod Touch, which she does quite a bit, pre­fer­ring it to using our iMac.

“Of course I do”, I said slightly defen­sively, try­ing to remem­ber when I last posted some­thing here. I had to check.

It was three weeks ago. That’s long, even by my some­what lax stan­dards. So what have I been up to in that time?

I was kind of hop­ing you could tell me.

I haven’t been work­ing that much. I haven’t been doing much of any­thing, if you must know. I think I am per­fect­ing the art of being and noth­ing­ness. I’m not even sure if I exist any more or even ever existed in the first place.

I might not even be fic­tional. I could just be imag­i­nary, liv­ing only in your mind.

You’re star­ing at a blank screen right now, only your mind thinks you are see­ing words writ­ten by some weird make-believe, north London-based hippy. How’s your imag­i­nary grammar?

See, this is what hap­pens when you start the day with a strong cof­fee and a skunky spliff pep­pered with bubble-hash. Every­one should start their day this way.

I spend inor­di­nate amounts of time sim­ply lost in thought. I dis­ap­pear into my own lit­tle Utopia, where I right the world’s wrongs and allow my cre­ativ­ity to flow freely.

I used to do all that in the real world, but at some point, I stopped.

Oh I’ve worked out when it stopped and why. It was when I first got sick with my stu­pid Hashimoto’s Dis­ease a cou­ple of years ago. I didn’t realise it at the time, it prob­a­bly took another year before I twigged that some­thing was actu­ally phys­i­cally wrong with me, but in ret­ro­spect, it all fits.

Between 2004 and 2007, I wrote 2 nov­els and was rea­son­ably pro­lific here on my web­site too. Towards the end of that period, the 2nd book fiz­zled out while I was writ­ing it and remains one chap­ter shy of being com­plete. The first book was pub­lished, but I didn’t do enough to pro­mote it and it lan­guishes on vir­tual shelves, unread.

The first book was nearly com­mis­sioned as a TV series too, but the media is a fickle and fucked up mis­tress. The guy who liked it and could have com­mis­sioned it with a flick of his pen, moved on; his replace­ments were far less enthu­si­as­tic and the pos­si­bil­ity of pro­duc­ing the series faded away.

Rather than con­tinue to plug away try­ing to do some­thing with it, I let it go too. At the time, I just thought I had lost my enthu­si­asm for the project, but in truth, it was prob­a­bly my ill health that robbed me of my fire.

I haven’t done much of any­thing since.

Of course, that’s not strictly true as I still work (mostly) full time and I do post the odd piece here, but my out­put is not even close to the lev­els I reached a few years ago.

I’m still being treated for the Hashimoto’s Dis­ease and my doc­tor is still adjust­ing my med­ica­tion lev­els. If they ever get it right, I should feel bet­ter and be back to my old self. That’s what they tell me, anyway.

In the mean time, I’ll con­tinue to dis­tract myself with my vivid imag­i­na­tion and soft drugs.

Now, aren’t you glad Mrs. Hippy asked if I still post here? Blame her for the 5 min­utes of your life I just wasted, not me.

The National Health Ser­vice (NHS) here in the UK has been in the fir­ing line this week as Amer­i­cans “debate” over­haul­ing their health­care sys­tem in an attempt to extend access to their 50 mil­lion res­i­dents who have absolutely no cover or access to care.

Amer­i­cans are being led to believe that the free health­care avail­able to all of us in the UK is no good. This is so far from the truth that it would be funny, except for the fact that people’s lives hang in the balance.

The UK has a much higher life expectancy than the USA. Check your sta­tis­tics and see that I’m not lying. The UK also spends less on health­care per per­son than they do in the states, yet they yield bet­ter results.

Go fig­ure!

The Amer­i­can health­care sys­tem is run like a for-profit busi­ness. Think about that, some­one prof­its from your ill­ness and the per­cent­ages of profit are obscenely high.

Insur­ance com­pa­nies, drug com­pa­nies pri­vate hos­pi­tals, pri­vate doc­tors are all in the game to make money from your mis­ery. That can’t be right, can it? Every test ordered that you don’t really need, every over-prescription is money in the bank for someone.

Just ask Michael Jack­son if pri­vate health­care on demand is a good thing. Oh wait, you can’t because it killed him.

In Amer­ica, health­care is seen as a priv­i­lege, not a basic human right. Should one only be enti­tled to health­care on the basis of qual­i­fy­ing for insur­ance, rather than qual­i­fy­ing for need? Shouldn’t every­one have access to healthcare?

Of course they should!

Some of the scenes I’ve caught on tele­vi­sion, of the so-called town-hall meet­ings have been very amus­ing, well amus­ing in as much as the igno­rance fuelled anger is sim­ply surreal.

It seems to me, that the loud­est voices at these town-hall meet­ings are com­ing out of the mouths of peo­ple with the least infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject. These sad, twisted, igno­rant peo­ple have an unjus­ti­fi­able hatred of Pres­i­dent Obama that is prob­a­bly rooted in their inher­ent racism rather than any actual dis­like of a new health­care system.

All you need to do is lis­ten to what they say, their buzz words, like “social­ism” and “this isn’t the Amer­ica I know” to under­stand just how mis­guided and ill-informed these folks are on the subject.

Ok, any subject.

At the heart of all of this is FOX News, the biased and unfair pseudo news net­work owned by Rupert Mur­doch. FOX News pro­vide the stilted talk­ing points and their legions of view­ers turn up at town-hall meet­ings, par­rot­ing the same lame shit.

I can’t say I’ve looked into it, but I am guess­ing a wealthy guy like Mur­doch must have busi­ness inter­ests out­side the media world, say per­haps insur­ance or drug com­pa­nies. In other words, he may have a vested finan­cial inter­est in how this debate plays out. And if not him, then some of his rich robber-baron mates have got invest­ments in the med­ical field. There’s a lot of profit to be protected.

Its funny how SKY News, the sis­ter sta­tion of FOX News, under the News­Corp cor­po­rate umbrella is tak­ing a dif­fer­ent tack here, right­eously defend­ing the NHS against the FOX News inspired attacks. Does one hand not know what the other is doing? Or is SKY sim­ply pan­der­ing to their UK-based subscribers?

I think we both know the answer to that one.

I’m in a fairly unique posi­tion, hav­ing lived con­sid­er­able lengths of time under both health­care sys­tems. Nei­ther the US or UK sys­tems are per­fect, both excel at some things and lack in oth­ers, but over­all, I know which sys­tem I would choose, if I had to…

The NHS all the way!

In the UK, I’ve never had any con­cerns about insur­ance, access to the med­ical sys­tem or being able to afford the costs. I’ve for the most part, had excel­lent care of a world class stan­dard cour­tesy of the NHS.

In Amer­ica I’ve been charged one hun­dred bucks for a wooden tongue depresser — you know what I’m talk­ing about, a wide wooden pop­si­cle stick.

Open your mouth and say “ahhh fuck, you just charged me a Ben­jamin to do that!”

In my world, life is usu­ally quite sim­ple and this unhealthy debate is no dif­fer­ent. What it boils down to is this: “I’ve already got mine, so screw you if you don’t have yours!” It all comes down to com­pas­sion and America’s appar­ent lack of it.

The Chris­t­ian right in Amer­ica preach some­thing known as “com­pas­sion­ate con­ser­vatism”, but sadly they don’t prac­tise it in any mean­ing­ful or tan­gi­ble way. Where’s the com­pas­sion? What would that guy Jesus do?

Jesus would move to the UK, sign on to the dole and get those holes in his hands and feet looked at for free, same for that nasty stab wound in his side.

Uni­ver­sal health­care is an unde­ni­able right, yet 50 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are being denied it. Any com­pas­sion­ate per­son would recog­nise the inequal­ity in the cur­rent sys­tem and want to do all they could to change it.

Where are all the com­pas­sion­ate folks in Amer­ica? Don’t they care about their fel­low man? Maybe if there are any, they could go to those silly town-hall meet­ings and shout down all the igno­rant idiots that are mak­ing Amer­ica look so stupid.

Oh and while I’m at it, lay off the NHS. Ill-informed opin­ion does not make a debate, it just makes you look even more like morons to the rest of the (bet­ter informed) world.

You might not have heard, but Michael Jack­son kicked the bucket recently. You’d think that sort of news would get around.

In truth, it did get around, shock­ingly fast. Thanks to TMZ.com and Twit­ter, the sad news spread around the world at the speed of tweet.

And just for today, MJ doesn’t mean mar­i­juana here, it stands for Michael Jackson.

I was work­ing the night he died, just head­ing into the office as the news broke.

I was early and paused out­side the build­ing to have one last smoke before going to my desk. As I flicked through a Twit­ter app on my iPhone. I caught one of the first tweets that stated MJ had been rushed to hos­pi­tal in an ambu­lance with a sus­pected heart attack.

A col­league of mine joined me at this point and as he lit up a cig­a­rette of his own, I told him what I had just read and we started spec­u­lat­ing on “what if” it turned out to be the worst case and he was dead.

For both of us, work­ing overnight in a news­room, MJ’s death trans­lated into utter fuck­ing chaos for many, many hours. What­ever the out­come, I knew it was going to be a nasty-assed night.

In real­ity, it exceeded my expectations.

Beyond that, the rest of my night at work is not really impor­tant. It was yet another busy one, deal­ing with a large break­ing story. I’ve had count­less nights like that.

It wasn’t until after that night, and the sub­se­quent few at work, that I really had the chance to con­sider the sig­nif­i­cance and mag­ni­tude of his death. That’s not meant to be an over­state­ment, its huge news that will carry on run­ning for a long time, as will MJ Inc. which will exploit his pass­ing even more than the media ever could.

Before you start think­ing I’m some mega-fan of MJ’s, I’d like to take a moment to point out that I’m not. I didn’t hate his music either and I can appre­ci­ate his unde­ni­able tal­ent, I was just never a fan of his solo stuff.

As a child, I did like the Jack­son 5, but it was prac­ti­cally children’s music. A-B-C, its easy as 1–2-3… It was like Sesame Street does Motown, before Sesame Street existed.

I liked some of his music videos, because they were inno­v­a­tive, ground was bro­ken with sev­eral, but I never bought an MJ record.

I should also men­tion that I believed the alle­ga­tions about him. Always did, still do. Per­haps its just my view of the smoke+fire equa­tion, but every­thing I read about it, makes me think there’s some­thing to it.

Every­one seems to be skip­ping over that part of the story right now, per­haps I should too.

I’m old enough to have vivid mem­o­ries of Elvis Pres­ley dying. Its dif­fi­cult to really explain how momen­tous this was at the time. Elvis was even younger than MJ when he died, all bloated, pinch­ing a loaf while squat­ting on the bowl.

Not a pretty picture.

Elvis was big when he was alive, they didn’t call him “the King” for noth­ing, but in death Elvis was even big­ger. You only have to look at his estate’s accounts to see that he’s grossed more money since he died than he ever did alive.

Now, think of the “King of Pop”, or MJ Inc. as I’ve been think­ing of it. MJ’s music is more mod­ern, his audi­ence is still on the young side. Elvis’s audi­ence was mature when he ate his last fried banana sand­wich, yet he has still kept on selling.

Also, MJ’s music sounds more mod­ern, it can eas­ily sit on the radio along side music being released today. An Elvis song sounds old, because they pretty much all are now; per­haps “dated” would be a more appro­pri­ate description.

I liked Elvis, I thought he was cool, at least until his 1968 come­back spe­cial. If you’ve never seen it, it really is worth your time. After that, he kind of became a par­ody of him­self, which was sad to see. I do have one Elvis CD, a com­pi­la­tion of his Num­ber 1 hits.

And even though I like Elvis, I’ve still man­aged to make a cou­ple of jokes at his expense. Imag­ine the MJ jokes I could make; or bet­ter yet, don’t imag­ine, just think of some you’ve already heard from your mates.

Only the really funny ones, please.

Its too soon, we have to con­tinue to feign rev­er­ence for a while longer, before we can stop whis­per­ing the jokes and speak them out in full voice, in a crowded room, to thun­der­ous laugh­ter with­out a hint of shame. Try it now and all you’ll get are muf­fled gig­gles and unde­ni­able gasps.

No one dubbed MJ the “King of Pop”, the title was self-anointed fol­low­ing a spon­ta­neous intro­duc­tion when being pre­sented with an award. Once adopted, MJ’s PR peo­ple forced the media to refer to him as “King of Pop” and after a while it stuck.

Now, no one could take that crown away from him if they tried.

His death was tragic, as is any death at a rel­a­tively young age, but his is made more so because of his immense tal­ent. If ever there was a tor­tured artist…

MJ didn’t have a con­ven­tional child­hood. How could he when he was rehears­ing and per­form­ing from such a young age. His father sounded like quite a taskmas­ter, which is polite speak for moti­vat­ing Michael and his broth­ers by beatin’ on their ass(es).

Michael told Oprah as much on tv, so it must be true.

MJ was screwed up, dys­func­tional even, but I believe the cur­rent, accepted term to describe him is: eccentric.

The prob­lem with being the King, be it Elvis or MJ, is no one ever says “no” to you. For Elvis, it was fatty foods and pre­scrip­tion drugs, for MJ, well we can be fairly cer­tain it wasn’t fatty foods.

If we believe what we’re read­ing in the media, then MJ was using all sorts of doc­tor pre­scribed good­ies that most likely killed him. Most dis­turb­ing is the report of one of the drugs being Propinal (AKA Diprovan), a pow­er­ful anaes­thetic that should only be admin­is­tered in a hos­pi­tal because it is a con­tin­u­ous IV drip and requires full mon­i­tor­ing by a qual­i­fied doc­tor. The risks include res­pi­ra­tory arrest, which is fancy doctor-speak for: shit, he’s com­pletely stopped breathing!

Fuck. Why didn’t I hear of this before? Talk about a celebrity endorse­ment! Where can I get my own pri­vate med­ical doc­tor to come round and make a few days just zip right by, while I’m comatose and prob­a­bly mil­lime­tres from death? All the cool kids are going to want to do some POP (PrOPinal = POP as in the King of, its new, street name).

How messed up in the head do you have to be to want to be dosed up like you were hav­ing your appen­dix removed? How much would you want to escape both the entire world and yourself?

And what sort of licensed physi­cian would admin­is­ter that to some­one pri­vately, in their own home? Don’t they take an oath that says some­thing like, “First, do no harm?”

Play­ing with anaes­thet­ics sounds seri­ously harm­ful to me.

Which brings me back to where I started, with this becom­ing an ongo­ing news story. One of the biggest, most con­tro­ver­sial pop stars in the world died sud­denly, pos­si­bly at the hands of some­one else.

Yes, I am talk­ing murder.

And so is the LA Police, or so it would seem to me. Just because they say they don’t sus­pect foul play, doesn’t mean they don’t sus­pect some­thing foul happened.

If I was to gam­ble, I’d say some­one will end up being charged in con­nec­tion with his death. Some­one will become known as the man (or woman) who killed Michael Jackson.

And even though his funeral and pub­lic memo­r­ial are today, this story will run for years and years.

Expect more rev­e­la­tions about his pri­vate life to be com­pet­ing with the twists and turns in the legal bat­tles, crim­i­nal and civil, while he con­tin­ues to break records for music sales and MJ Inc. makes hun­dreds of millions.

What does it say about our soci­ety that we can wor­ship some­one for their tal­ent, while being fas­ci­nated by their eccen­tric­ity, yet repulsed by their alleged proclivities?

As a char­ac­ter, MJ is about as com­plex and rich a tapes­try as you’re likely to find.

And what does it say about our soci­ety that so many tal­ented peo­ple, in so many dif­fer­ent areas of the arts, are so trag­i­cally fucked up? MJ’s not the first mega-star to suc­cumb to such a sad end.

He won’t be the last, either.

Dig it, hep cats. Your hippy’s back and he’s big­ger, bad­der and higher than ever!

Ok, some of that first state­ment may not be true. Please allow me to decon­struct it for you:

- I haven’t been any­where, there­fore I can’t be “back”

- I’m still the same height I’ve been since I was 16. I’m not “big­ger”, unless you count my ego and I don’t.

- I’ve always been pretty bad, short of mur­der­ing some­one, I don’t think it would be pos­si­ble for me to be “badder”.

- I’m always high, so how could be “higher”? “Higher” than what?

So basi­cally, I’ve already wasted 30 sec­onds of your valu­able surf­ing time with utter non­sense and bull­shit. What a start!

Truth is, much like Lon­don, my brain is a bit fried from the heat. This week’s been a bit unbear­able. And don’t for­get the humidity!

How could I ever for­get the sick­en­ing, thick heavy feel of the atmos­phere around me this week? It would be fine if I was on hol­i­day in the Med on a sandy beach, lying in the shade with frozen daiquiris brought to me when­ever I snapped my fin­gers, but I’m not. Instead, I’m stuck in my north Lon­don ghetto hell.

My lair is bril­liant in the win­ter, it holds on to heat like nobody’s busi­ness, but in the sum­mer that qual­ity is a curse. Also, I have a small, south­ern fac­ing con­ser­va­tory, which acts as a super-efficient solar heater for the entire house. It hit a balmy 46 degrees C in there this week, which eas­ily boosts the over­all temp in my house to 32 or 33 degrees C.

In other words, fuck­ing hot!

And before you ask, the con­ser­va­tory does have blinds, on the ceil­ing and win­dows, light coloured, but they don’t seem to make a dif­fer­ence. I’m con­sid­er­ing replac­ing them with totally opaque blinds, that reflect light and heat. I’ve thought about it before, but its a big job that I couldn’t do myself.

Any­way, I’ve got count­less fans, a cou­ple of dehu­mid­i­fiers (which rock!) and a giant air con­di­tioner, which help a bit, but can’t com­pete with the fierce effects of the con­ser­va­tory. I can just about make it com­fort­able to sit on the sofa in my liv­ing room, but so much as shift posi­tion or god-forbid stand up, and its sud­denly like enter­ing a sauna.

Lon­don wasn’t built for trop­i­cal weather, cer­tainly my 100+ year old house wasn’t. Its early in the sum­mer to be swel­ter­ing like this.

I don’t see how any­one can deny cli­mate change when they have litres of sweat run­ning off their fore­heads and into their eyes. Trust me, it stings.

I won­der if I could get plan­ning per­mis­sion to put a swim­ming pool into my tiny back gar­den. Clearly noth­ing Olympic sized, just a small plunge pool for cool­ing off. How much of a bribe would it take? And how much would the pool cost?

All more than I would want to spend.

One just has to accept that its going to be a long, hot, hor­ri­ble sum­mer in the city and do what­ever you can to just get through it.

And if the heat doesn’t getcha, there’s always the swine flu.

Health author­i­ties in the UK announced this week that swine flu can now not be con­tained, and they are expect­ing 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August. I also read that as many as 40 peo­ple a day could be dying from it in that time as well. Shouldn’t we be panicking?

We’re not pan­ick­ing because its all very abstract. It will become much scarier when you hear about swine flu tak­ing some­one you know. If this is going to be as bad as they say, we’ll all find our­selves in the posi­tion of know­ing a vic­tim even­tu­ally. Oh dear.

So far, there have only been 4 deaths from swine flu in the UK and all of them have had the fol­low­ing code used to describe their deaths: they also suf­fered from under­ly­ing health issues. In other words, you’re more likely to die if you have some­thing else seri­ously wrong with you.

That prob­a­bly won’t always be the case and it will start killing oth­er­wise healthy, fit peo­ple. Ut oh.

Damn, I’ve come over all apoc­a­lyp­tic. Well, when faced with the fires of hell and a pig-based plague from Satan, do you blame me?

Its not lost on me that I haven’t posted any­thing here in an absolute age and a half. I’m all too aware of it.

I haven’t been so well for the last cou­ple of weeks. Hey ho.

I’m wait­ing for the results of another blood test, that I had been putting off, but a few days ago, I had a cou­ple of litres sucked out of my arm.

Ok, it seemed like litres, I didn’t look. I don’t like blood, espe­cially my own if its not deep inside my veins.

The rea­son I’ve been putting it off is because my reg­u­lar GP of nearly a dozen years is now on long-term sick leave and get­ting a blood test meant see­ing a brand new doctor.

The new doc­tor and I didn’t get off to a great start. He took my blood pres­sure using some fancy auto­mated gizmo and when he checked the read­ing, the expres­sion on his face told me it wasn’t good.

My mother suf­fered from high blood pres­sure, took med­ica­tion for it and was mon­i­tored reg­u­larly. With that in mind, I’ve always kept a close eye on mine, and thank­fully it has con­sis­tently been low, 110/70 which for an over­sized, middled-aged smoker is pretty damn good.

The elec­tronic gizmo was show­ing 170/110, which is not good. Its about as far from good as you can be, its “call an ambu­lance now” good.

I was incred­u­lous of this read­ing straight away and told him I’m con­sis­tently 110/70, young doc­tor new guy looked like he going to shit him­self. I asked him to take it again with an old style, man­ual sphygmomanometer.

He had to go find one and I was momen­tar­ily left alone, my mind rac­ing to the obvi­ous, yet slim pos­si­bil­ity that some­thing changed with my blood pressure.

It could explain why I was feel­ing so shitty again.

The new doc­tor guy returned with an old-school blood pres­sure cuff, quickly wrapped it around my arm then pumped the squeezey ball for all he was worth. As he let the air out and took the read­ing, his con­cerned expres­sion relaxed into a very slight grin and I knew it was fine.

And that’s all he said, “its fine”. He didn’t even share the cor­rect, final score with me and I think I know why.

It was 110/70, just like I told him it should and would be.

Doc­tors don’t like it when you know more than they do, even if it is some­thing as per­sonal as your own damn blood pres­sure. Espe­cially, younger, inex­pe­ri­enced and inse­cure doc­tors, like this one, who I unin­ten­tion­ally put on his back foot.

It would have been eas­ier if he just got it right the first time, but that’s true of just about every­thing any­one gets wrong, ever.

I told him I had Hashimoto’s and needed to get my thy­roid lev­els checked, though I said “T4 lev­els” just to be snarky and this time it was inten­tional. To be fair, this was right after he told me smok­ing cig­a­rettes was bad for me, like he was the first per­son to share that par­tic­u­lar pearl of wisdom.

“Well, gee whil­lik­ers, doc, they’re bad for you? I did not know that. Next you’re gonna tell me unpro­tected anal sex with crack whores is bad for me! I did not know that, either.”

He asked me what my symp­toms were and I told him: breath­less­ness, like try­ing to catch your breath on a cold day with­out any exer­tion, very occa­sional, but notice­able heart pal­pi­ta­tions, alter­nat­ing sweats and chills, a big lack of energy and worst of all, my back prob­lems have returned.

When I men­tioned my back prob­lem, he looked at me quizzi­cally and I had to explain to him how I was suf­fer­ing from inflam­ma­tion in the joints of my spine, which were light­ing up nerves in my leg, sci­atic really. I had to go to explain that one of the symp­toms of Hashimoto’s is inflamed joints as attrib­uted by my reg­u­lar GP last summer.

All of this started last sum­mer when my back gave out and for around a fort­night I could barely walk. I got over it and haven’t had any real back prob­lems since, just the occa­sional, iso­lated twinge, but noth­ing of any concern.

Until about 2 weeks ago, when I started get­ting severe pain shoot­ing down my right leg, mainly in bed and bad enough to wake me up. I haven’t really slept more than 3 con­tin­u­ous hours since then, though often I wake up, put an ice pack on my back, or take a hor­ri­ble codeine pill or both, and go back to sleep.

I saw my chi­ro­prac­tor three times last week, which improved it slightly. Since then, I’ve worked a cou­ple of nights and its become bad again. Sit­ting in a shitty office chair for 12 hours will do that to you.

And because of the bank hol­i­day week­end, I can’t see my chi­ro­prac­tor again until Tues­day, which is also bad.

Moan, moan, moan, I’m just a big hippy baby.

I left the doctor’s office with a blood test form, with more boxes checked than I ever thought pos­si­ble, hence the litres of blood extracted. He’s run­ning every test imag­in­able, which is cool, but he did it out of fear, not because he thought there was any­thing par­tic­u­larly wrong with me.

He didn’t really answer my ques­tion about the pos­si­bil­ity of my thy­roid lev­els drop­ping again, requir­ing an increase in my daily dose of levothy­rox­ine. I don’t think he knew the answer. I don’t know either, but right now, its my best and only guess.

I was told by my reg­u­lar (and much missed) GP, that once my dosage was adjusted prop­erly, I would “feel like a new per­son”. That hasn’t hap­pened yet and I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I ever will.

Yep, all of this has me down. I am bored with hav­ing health prob­lems, its tedious always being asked with deep con­cern “how are you? no really, how are you?” I know peo­ple mean it and its not that I don’t appre­ci­ate their con­cern, I just don’t like hav­ing to answer it over and over again.

Mainly I’m bored with feel­ing like shit all the time. Its mak­ing me think all sorts of things, like: this is my life now, my best days are behind me, I’ve achieved noth­ing with my life.

All sorts of uplift­ing shit, really!

Just check out the title of this post, “Run­ning out the clock”. That’s kind of a downer, isn’t it? Now that you know the context.

That’s how I feel right now, like I am just run­ning out the clock, on those last few decades/years/months/days/hours/minutes/seconds (delete as appro­pri­ate) that I have left.

It doesn’t mat­ter if its true, I mean of course its true, its true for every­one, but what mat­ters I guess is that its how I feel right now. And I don’t feel like I have decades or years.

I should point out I have no med­ical evi­dence to sug­gest I am going to die any time soon and in actual fact, ratio­nally I don’t believe I am going to die any time soon. I’m still talk­ing about how I feel.

Emo­tion­ally.

Now, this is the part where I’m sup­posed to remind you (and myself) that I’ve always been a sur­vivor and blah blah, I’ve come through this and I’ve come through that, but again that’s not how I feel.

I feel like I haven’t got any fight left in me, but that’s prob­a­bly just the Hashimoto’s talk­ing. I really do feel like my energy is zapped most of the time and doing the sim­plest things takes tremen­dous amounts of effort.

With that in mind, think how daunt­ing any­thing com­plex must seem to me at the moment, like nego­ti­at­ing my way through the NHS to a bet­ter diag­no­sis and treatment.

Either I need a sim­ple adjust­ment to my thy­roid meds or some­thing else is wrong. I can just about cope with another increase in my dosage and the addi­tional tests required, but any­thing more than that and I don’t think I can be bothered.

Happy days.

I liked it bet­ter when I was the king of fun, but if I am going to get nos­tal­gic, I might as well lament over how much I miss my beloved fresh and legal magic mush­rooms and I still curse the gov­ern­ment for ban­ning them.

What’s the con­nec­tion? Right now, I would really ben­e­fit from a decent, old fash­ioned shroom trip. An after­noon shroomed to the gills would do more for me than 10 years of psy­chother­apy ever could. And it would be cheaper, too.

Six months ago I was diag­nosed with Hashimoto’s Dis­ease, oth­er­wise known as Chronic Thy­roidi­tis. At the time I didn’t really grasp the sig­nif­i­cance or seri­ous­ness of my diagnosis.

I do now.

I’ve prob­a­bly had this stu­pid dis­ease for a while, longer than I’ve known. I had symp­toms that I didn’t know were symp­toms for at least a year prior to being told of the cause.

I just thought I was get­ting old.

I am get­ting old, but age was not caus­ing my prob­lems, my use­less thy­roid was…and is.

I’m still not well. I find myself say­ing that a lot lately, in response to peo­ple ask­ing me why I look tired, or pale.

I’ve been under­go­ing treat­ment for Hashimoto’s since my diag­no­sis. Treat­ment comes in the form of a small pill taken daily to replace the thy­roid hor­mone my body no longer manufactures.

The side effects caused by the pills are very sim­i­lar to the symp­toms of the dis­ease. I get heart pal­pi­ta­tions, breath­less­ness, headaches, dizzi­ness, light-headedness and these get worse every time the dosage is raised.

The dosage gets raised every cou­ple of months as I am still not on a ther­a­peu­ti­cally effec­tive level yet. I started out on 25mg, then went to 50mg and now I am on 100mg of Levothy­rox­ine. Its about to be raised again, prob­a­bly to 150mg, though I am await­ing for the results of a blood test for confirmation.

Lately, extreme exhaus­tion and lethargy have been added to the mix. I con­stantly crave sleep, but I don’t sleep deeply or for very long. I get phys­i­cally tired very eas­ily and don’t have any of my usual stamina.

My nor­mal walk to my local high­street used to take me well under 10 min­utes, it now takes me closer to 15 and the return jour­ney is stretch­ing to the 20 minute mark.

I’m hav­ing con­cen­tra­tion prob­lems too. “Brain fog” is another symp­tom and there’s a real pea-souper in my head most of the time. I find it dif­fi­cult pay­ing atten­tion to peo­ple when they tell me any­thing com­plex, my mind wan­ders and I am eas­ily dis­tracted. The same is true of my read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, if a para­graph drags on too long, as this one seems to be doing, I for­get what it says.

I get waves of nau­sea, my appetite vac­il­lates between hav­ing none at all, to sud­denly being rav­en­ous and I’ve been hav­ing mood swings too.

All of this sucks the big one in a very real, demon­stra­ble way and I am tired of it.

To com­pli­cate mat­ters, I haven’t been hav­ing much fun with the NHS.

My GP referred me to a spe­cial­ist and after wait­ing months for an appoint­ment, I ended up leav­ing the clinic with­out see­ing the con­sul­tant endocri­nol­o­gist. The clinic was over­sub­scribed, there weren’t any seats in the wait­ing room, the nurses were surly and rude and after wait­ing way too long, I left.

I did receive a let­ter of apol­ogy from the con­sul­tant for my poor treat­ment, but that is a small con­so­la­tion. The entire expe­ri­ence left me with a bad taste in my mouth and no desire to ever return to that clinic.

It gets even worse, my reg­u­lar GP, who I have been see­ing for nearly a dozen years has been hav­ing health prob­lems of his own. He’s cut back his hours and for the last sev­eral weeks, I’ve been unable to see him. I finally gave up and saw the surgery’s senior partner.

The senior part­ner imme­di­ately said she would take over man­ag­ing my care, which makes me think my reg­u­lar doc­tor won’t be back full time any time soon.

Being sick seems to be hard work and I worry if I ever had some­thing seri­ously big wrong with me that I wouldn’t have the patience to fight my way through the sys­tem to get the treat­ment I would need to survive.

And speak­ing of sur­vival, peo­ple can and do die from Hashimoto’s Dis­ease. One of the things it does to you is weaken your heart and one can suf­fer from heart fail­ure. I’m not say­ing that’s what I am head­ing for, but quite often it does feel that way to me.

I’m told that once I am on an effec­tive dose of med­ica­tion, I’ll feel like a brand new per­son. I’ve heard that a lot for the last six months. I’d be happy if I could just feel like the old per­son I used to be, before I was diag­nosed and on this stu­pid medication.

The exhaus­tion caught up to me this week and pre­vented me from get­ting to work. I’ve been liv­ing on adren­a­lin and my sup­ply must have finally depleted, I sort of col­lapsed the other night. I’m now signed off work for a week to rest.

I feel like this is my life now and I’ll never feel like my old self again. I know I’m an impa­tient patient, but I just can’t see a path back to good health. Let’s hope my doctor’s vision is clearer than my own.

On Christ­mas Eve, I found out my mother passed away. She would have been 79 next month.

She died the night of the 22nd, the cause of death was pneu­mo­nia. I’m told she died peace­fully, what­ever that means.

Long time read­ers of my site will prob­a­bly remem­ber that my mother had a severe stroke nearly seven years ago and never recov­ered from it. She was pretty much bed-bound, unable to walk or speak clearly. She could just about feed her­self and she needed help get­ting to the toilet.

More detail than you prob­a­bly need to know.

She went into the hos­pi­tal the pre­vi­ous week, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. Short of her dying, my state­side rel­a­tives had never got in touch before. This wasn’t the first time she’d gone into hos­pi­tal in the last few years and I wasn’t told.

The way I found out was less than ideal.

When I woke up at 8pm on Tues night, I had an email from a cousin I haven’t seen or spo­ken to in over 20 years, plus I’d had a cou­ple of inter­na­tional hang-ups on my landline.

I didn’t have to be a genius to work out the most likely rea­son behind this sud­den contact.

I also didn’t know what to do.

My cousin wanted me to phone him back because he had “some­thing impor­tant” to tell me. Instead, I spent the 45 min­utes before my depar­ture for work, doing what I always do, hav­ing a cof­fee, a cig­a­rette and a shower, before dress­ing and leaving.

I decided to email him back, let­ting him know I was work­ing and not in a posi­tion to phone him. Of course, I could have phoned if I wanted to, but I didn’t. I also told him to feel free to share the news via email and that I was braced for the worst.

Around seven hours later, I received his reply con­firm­ing my sus­pi­cions, that my mother was dead.

She’s not hav­ing a view­ing or a funeral, just a quick cre­ma­tion. It’s the same thing my father did. We’re not big on funer­als in my imme­di­ate fam­ily, but it means I don’t have to go rush­ing off to the states.

I don’t need to go at all.

I was sup­posed to work on xmas eve and xmas, but as you might expect I didn’t. I’m going back on Sun­day, though. What else would I do?

I loved my mother very much, but I let her down badly in the last few years of her life. When she had her stroke, I was in the states for a cou­ple of months, help­ing her and help­ing my father.

And then I came back to north Lon­don and broke apart into tiny lit­tle bits. For around 6 months, I cul­ti­vated a fairly impres­sive cocaine and cognac habit, with some E’s mixed in occa­sion­ally for good mea­sure. Not long after that, I fucked up my pre­vi­ous job.

It drove me nuts that I couldn’t do any­thing mean­ing­ful to help my par­ents in their old age.

And then my father got sick.

He spent the first year after my mother came home from the hos­pi­tal and rehab wor­ry­ing about what would hap­pen to my mother if he got sick. All the worry got him sick and less than a year after that, he passed away from cancer.

I didn’t go to visit.

I couldn’t risk it.

I’m a pussy.

I had planned to visit my mother after my father died, but she gave up her home and moved into a nurs­ing home, near one of her sis­ters. The one that was always the most evil aun­tie imaginable.

I warned my mother that it would all end in tears. It did, when my aunt decided it was all too much for her and she washed her hands of my mother and her finan­cial affairs about 6 months ago. A dis­tant rel­a­tive of my father’s stepped in to take care of things, but it left my mother in an area of the world where she had no one else.

Had my mother stayed put in her home, or chose a nurs­ing home near there, she would have had a con­stant stream of vis­i­tors as she had many friends who lived locally, but instead she gave all that up on my evil auntie’s insistence.

For the few years my mother lived in the nurs­ing home, she would com­plain about my aunt, even telling us that my aunt wouldn’t let her see cur­rent bank state­ments. I can’t prove any­thing, but my mother said she was nick­ing dosh.

Nice.

Just about every rel­a­tive I have, stole some­thing from my mother. One of my half-brother’s took money from her account and never returned it, other’s took keep­sakes and any­thing of value.

My younger brother went to see my mother, once, while she was in the nurs­ing home and my evil aun­tie made cer­tain his trip was mis­er­able. She treated him badly, but worse, treated my mother badly and dis­re­spect­fully in front of him.

Old evil aun­tie made a point of telling my mother, in front of my brother, that she threw away every pho­to­graph she found in my mother’s house when she was clear­ing it out in prepa­ra­tion for the move to the nurs­ing home. Every photo from my child­hood, plus 8mm home movies from the 60’s and 70’s was casu­ally tossed into a skip.

Imag­ine if some­one did that to your child­hood. What would you do?

What could I do?

This evil fuck­ing cunt took over my mother’s life and made her mis­er­able, though the last time my brother spoke to my mother, she said my aunt had vis­ited and tried to make peace. How nice for evil cunt auntie.

I know I’m not the only one with a trag­i­cally fucked up fam­ily, but now that my mother is gone, so is my very last con­nec­tion to them. Its just my brother and I, a cou­ple of middle-aged orphans from a deeply dys­func­tional family.

The other bless­ing to come out of all this is my mother is now no longer a pris­oner of her dam­aged and with­ered body. For nearly 7 years she’s been trapped inside a phys­i­cal form that wouldn’t and couldn’t bend to her will.

The night after my mother had her mas­sive stroke, the hos­pi­tal phoned my father and told him my mother was in a coma and couldn’t breathe on her own. They needed to put her on life-support or she would die.

My mother had an up-to-date liv­ing will, that clearly stated in such cir­cum­stances, no heroic efforts should be made to sus­tain her life, if her prospects for a full recov­ery were nil.

My father, des­per­ately afraid and ill-prepared to live life with­out my mother, took the chicken-shit option and told them to go ahead and put tubes down her throat, for breath­ing and feed­ing. He went com­pletely against her wishes.

My father was in denial; at the point, he wouldn’t and couldn’t accept that my mother wasn’t going to recover. Instead his fear and inabil­ity to deal with the truth of the sit­u­a­tion, con­demned my mother to an exis­tence I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

He thought he was doing the right thing and for months, he con­tin­ued to insist that my mother walked into the hos­pi­tal on her own and dammit, she would walk back out.

She never took another unaided step in her life.

When I read my cousin’s first email, I’d been awake around 30 sec­onds. It was deliv­ered to my iPhone and I saw it just after I turned the alarm on it off. In my bleary-eyed first read­ing of it, an image imme­di­ately flashed into my head.

It was both of my par­ents, together. And they were smiling.

I don’t believe in the after­life, but I knew in that instant that my mother really had finally joined my father and if I could build a heaven for the two of them, I surely would.

Rest in sweet peace, Mom.