The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘philosophy’ Category

I have to say, I was more than a bit miffed at being excluded from the Observer Newspaper’s top 50 list of most pow­er­ful blogs. I guess this is just another main­stream media plot to keep my mes­sage from reach­ing a wider audi­ence, but I will not be silenced!

And there’s always next year! Make sure you write your MP or con­gressper­son and point out this hor­ri­ble injustice.

Ah-hem.

The real rea­son I’m here is because the pope clearly must read my blog and he doesn’t like it and he doesn’t like me. Well, matey, the feel­ing is very mutual.

A while back, I con­firmed the exis­tence of my band, “the seven deadly sins” when I announced the upcom­ing release of my album. It seems the pope didn’t like this move and he’s try­ing to sti­fle my cre­ativ­ity by updat­ing the 7 deadly sins for our mod­ern age. I guess god has finally made an appear­ance in the 21st cen­tury and about time!

The new top seven sins accord­ing to the pope are as follows:

1) Envi­ron­men­tal pol­lu­tion
2) Genetic manip­u­la­tion
3) Accu­mu­lat­ing exces­sive wealth
4) Inflict­ing poverty
5) Drug traf­fick­ing and con­sump­tion
6) Morally debat­able exper­i­ments
7) Vio­la­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights of human nature

Ok, there’s one on that list that wouldn’t be there, if it weren’t for his hatred of me and that’s num­ber 5…drug con­sump­tion. The pope’s get­ting his revenge on me with that one, but it’s not the only one…

Genetic manip­u­la­tion! My pub­lished work in recom­bi­nant DNA research is well known and I only missed out on a Nobel sci­ence prize because of some ill con­ceived pub­lic com­ments I made while drunk on power, fame and 151 proof Bacardi!

And yes, I’ve vio­lated the rights of human nature, for accord­ing to the catholic church, that’s an easy one as its their def­i­n­i­tion of sodomy. Oh and before you think I am some sort of ass ban­dit, sodomy at its most basic def­i­n­i­tion includes oral-genital sex­ual con­tact. Guilty!

The pope is out to get me! He knows my lib­eral ideas and secular-humanist val­ues threaten his exis­tence as a silly old white man in a white dress!

But never mind him! What about my band?

The drum­mer, wrath, doesn’t want to change his stage name to “genetic manip­u­la­tion” and sloth, who never makes it to rehearsals, would have to start show­ing up…

I’m sure glad I’m an athe­ist and I don’t believe in any of this non­sense. I mean, come on, eter­nal damna­tion? Give me a fuck­ing break!

Sin is far too much fun, any­way. I don’t see any­one stop­ping, do you?

My easy month is fin­ished now, it was really around 4 and 1/2 weeks of min­i­mal work and max­i­mum hip­py­time. So how’d I fare?

About as expected, I got most of the things I need to do com­pleted, but there a a hand­ful of sig­nif­i­cant goals yet to be accom­plished. As we all know, there’s no such thing as “enough time”.

From tomor­row, I’m back on the tread­mill; that ham­ster wheel that wage slaves every­where under­stand. You gotta keep it spin­ning, no mat­ter what.

For the next six weeks or so, I am bloody busy, then I have a gap to catch my breath. After that, its anybody’s guess, and I mean that quite literally.

No mat­ter how much I try to get a bit ahead, it never works. With my erratic and unpre­dictable life, find­ing time to do sim­ple things can be impossible.

You can only do, what you can do, and there’s no point wor­ry­ing about it either way. Words to live by.

When I work lots, I fall into a rut, a rou­tine exis­tence of work, sleep and more work with pre­cious lit­tle else in between. I become a robot; an automa­ton; I trans­form into a shift-machine. For me, that’s nor­mal, but I’ve always been a closet work-aholic.

OK, there have been no clos­ets involved. My hunger for work has never been a secret, I’ve always been keen.

My prob­lem is I crave struc­ture and para­me­ters, I am sus­tained by being part of an organ­i­sa­tion. When left to my own devices, while capa­ble of sus­tained effort on a project, I strug­gle with moti­vat­ing myself. I work bet­ter with clearly defined goals, dead­lines and rewards, much like a lab rat learn­ing a maze, know­ing there’s a bit cheese await­ing me when I com­plete it.

I’m not get­ting enough cheese.

What’s worse, is I enjoy work­ing on my own stuff, very much, but the dis­trac­tions of daily life seem to be the main thing get­ting in the way. I should make an effort to work less, so I can work more on my own things.

Eas­ier said than done.

Most things are.

Hey ho.

We all pre­tend we’re in con­trol of our own lives and des­tinies, but its an illu­sion. Our pro­gram­ming and sub­con­scious hold more sway over our behav­iour than fate or free will. Free will is another one of those illu­sory ideas that we all sub­scribe to.

The Amer­i­can come­dian, George Car­lin once said some­thing along the lines of “that today, free­dom means being able to choose between Coke and Pepsi”.

Gosh, I’m sud­denly thirsty!

The United Nations wants to jail Amy Wine­house. Oh, and Kate Moss too. They want to see celebri­ties pun­ished more harshly for drug offences, to send a mes­sage to the rest of us.

What the fuck?

Don’t they have more impor­tant things to do at the United Nations? Like bring­ing about world peace, feed­ing the starv­ing, solv­ing cli­mate change? I’d cer­tainly put those three issues ahead of a few spoiled rich peo­ple enjoy­ing a toot or two.

Do peo­ple really think that any­one takes drugs because celebri­ties do? You know, that Pete Doherty smokes crack, maybe I should too? He looks so good on it!

I’m not mak­ing this up, it’s in all the news­pa­pers today and I’ve seen the story on TV too. What a waste of breath, print and air­time! My favourite ver­sion is in today’s SUN NEWSPAPER.

The UN is far too involved in global drug pol­icy and the UN is effec­tively a global spe­cial inter­est group directed by the world’s most pow­er­ful nations.

Peo­ple take drugs because they make them feel good, not because some celebrity enjoys them. No one should be pun­ished for drug use, unless that use causes other prob­lems. I’d have no issues with arrest­ing some­one on smack for run­ning some­one over with their car. If you’re high on H, you shouldn’t be dri­ving, but if you’re high on H at home, it’s nobody’s busi­ness but your own!

If any one organ­i­sa­tion should be advo­cat­ing the full inter­na­tional legal­i­sa­tion of drugs, its the United Nations. They have the sta­tis­tics, they know what a large part of the inter­na­tional econ­omy the drug trade is and they know how it could ben­e­fit from sen­si­ble inter­na­tional con­trols. But will they? Will they, fuck!

No, the UN will remain a largely irrel­e­vant body, unless you believe the con­spir­acy the­o­ries about black heli­copters and world dom­i­na­tion! Trust me, the United Nations could barely organ­ise lunch for 6 peo­ple, I don’t think we have to worry about them try­ing to take over the planet, though if they did, at least we wouldn’t have to worry about career crim­i­nals like Amy Wine­house and Kate Moss roam­ing free!

Yo homies, what up?

Besides the cost of petrol and your cholesterol!

I wouldn’t worry about your cho­les­terol all that much, mat­ter of fact, I’d advise you to have the whipped cream on everything!

I’d actu­ally advise indulging your­self in every con­ceiv­able way at every pos­si­ble oppor­tu­nity. I know, that’s what I usu­ally endorse, but this time its with good reason.

James Love­lock, the man who dreamt up GAIA THEORY and a host of other envi­ron­men­tal mod­els, says that we’re way beyond the tip­ping point as far as the envi­ron­ment is con­cerned and only have until around 2020 before the seri­ous shit hits the seri­ous fan and most of us croak.

Here, check it out for your own badass self by read­ing this inter­view with him from the Guardian a cou­ple of days ago. Go on, CLICK HERE, it’s inter­est­ing reading…

What’dya think?

I thought, make mine a dou­ble vodka and I’ll have the 2 girl exec­u­tive spe­cial, please!

Reject his assess­ment if you wish, that’s what hap­pened with many of Lovelock’s pre­vi­ous claims…until they were accepted uni­ver­sally as fact. The guy’s a vision­ary, I’d heed his words.

The truth is, no one seems that both­ered. This story is only cur­rently run­ning 2nd most pop­u­lar on the Guardian web­site, after the lat­est in the US pres­i­den­tial cam­paign in first place.

Quite frankly, even though this is sin­gu­larly the most impor­tant issue fac­ing the planet today, most of us would just rather not know. Oh yeah, we say, cli­mate change, isn’t that a bitch?

I don’t think any of us truly grasp the enor­mity of what may be com­ing, if we indeed believe the experts…and our own eyes!

I’m not exactly Mr. Nature, but even I can see the plants and ani­mals react­ing to the changes in cli­mate. For fuck’s sake, I have some weird pur­ple flow­ers bloom­ing in my gar­den today! I’ve seen hon­ey­bees buzzing about! None of that can be good!

So what does all this really mean? I don’t know…higher temps, more heat related deaths, the seas rise, Lon­don floods, trop­i­cal dis­eases and pests move fur­ther north, the food runs out, oil runs out, money becomes use­less, soci­ety degen­er­ates into some post apoc­a­lyp­tic night­mare and then we all die.

Well, all except the rich and the pow­er­ful, they flee to their secret bunkers at the north and south poles, where they hun­ker down for gen­er­a­tions, until the planet calms itself down again and sur­face life becomes pos­si­ble again.

Pleas­ant dreams…

All this stuff leaves me think­ing one thing: I need a gun. No, not for self-preservation, but pre­cisely the oppo­site. If it all really does go as bad as they’re sug­gest­ing, I want a sure fire method of spar­ing myself all this non­sense and a bul­let through the skull is the only guar­an­teed method I know.

In the mean time, order the steak, can­cel your pen­sion and smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, there’s not all that much more time left, so enjoy!

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?

Richard Made­ley and Judy Finni­gan, or “Richard and Judy” as they are known to their legions of fans in the UK are very pop­u­lar and influ­en­tial celebri­ties in this coun­try. When they rec­om­mend a book or a wine, it becomes a big seller overnight. What they say to the nation, can change the course of the nation. They hold a lot of sway.

For those of you not resid­ing here in Blighty, I should explain a bit. The cou­ple I’m talk­ing about have been fix­tures on our day­time TV screens for many, many years. They are mar­ried and after start­ing out in regional telly, moved on to host­ing a national day­time chat show in the morn­ings on ITV. After many years on ITV and in a well pub­li­cised and expen­sive net­work coup, made a high pro­file jump to Chan­nel 4. That’s where theyre­main, host­ing a pro­gramme that goes out week­days 5pm-6pm.

Nor­mally, I find their views on the con­ser­v­a­tive­side and in some instances extremely so, which meant I was quite sur­prised when some­one I know drew my atten­tion to a recent Richard Madeley’s col­umn in the Daily Express newspaper.

Yes, the Daily Express of all places!

Rather than tease you with this, I’ll just cut to the chase with the salient quotes:

“RICHARD: How awk­ward it is to have to begin the new year defend­ing the appar­ently inde­fen­si­ble… in the form of eccen­tric police chief Richard Brunstrom’s lat­est headline-grabbing “gaffe”. I refer, of course, to his call this week on Radio 4’s Today pro­gramme for the legal­is­ing of drugs.



He may be a ridicu­lous hon­orary druid with an irri­tat­ing pen­chant for speed cam­eras and absurdly sen­si­tive to weak jokes about the Welsh, but he’s doing some­thing rarely seen in our chief constables.

He is think­ing out of the box. That is brave and bold and deserves thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, not calumny.”

Please do click this link to the orig­i­nal arti­cle, it starts about 1/2 way down the page.

I was stunned.

I was flabbergasted!

I’m never flabbergasted.

I’m not cer­tain what flab­ber­gasted even means!

Some­times, com­mon sense comes from very unlikely sources and I must say there was no more unlikely source of these sagely words than Richard Madeley.

I’d like to applaud Mr. Madeley’s brav­ery and gen­uine courage for com­ing out in sup­port of Richard Brun­stom and the Police Author­ity in the pur­suit of truth and hon­esty about drugs.

The next time you’re dis­cussing legal­is­ing drugs with some­one, quote Richard. Seri­ously, even to your par­ents. Peo­ple really dig Richard and Judy, if you quote him, they will think twice about their beliefs and per­haps even start to ques­tion them. Try it and you’ll see what I mean, attach­ing his name to the cause will give it a new level of respect.

If Richard Made­ley sup­ports a com­plete re-think on drug pol­icy, per­haps there IS some­thing to it!

If more peo­ple were will­ing to stand up and speak out, per­haps things would be bet­ter for respon­si­ble adults like myself and those of you out there who choose to indulge in the use of unsanc­tioned sub­stances. There are so so SO many of us out there, who lead pro­duc­tive, nor­mal lives, yet enjoy things other than alco­hol and tobacco.

We have too much to lose. That’s the prob­lem, our nor­malcy and respon­si­ble lives don’t meet society’s stereo­types of what a drug user is. If we did step out of the closet and pro­claim proudly that we smoke weed, or snort a bit of char­lie, or neck a few pills every week­end and it wasn’t destroy­ing our lives, peo­ple who dis­ap­proved would find a way of destroy­ing our lives for us.

Next week is the pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on reclas­si­fy­ing weed. I’m sure peo­ple braver than me will attend and speak out elo­quently on the sub­ject, before they’re ignored com­pletely and the gov­ern­ment just reclas­si­fies it any­way. But that’s not why I’m not going.

I’m not going, because I have too much to lose. As open as I am about my drug use to friends, fam­ily, work col­leagues, strangers I sit next to on the bus, I don’t know how I’d feel about my name and address being on record with this gov­ern­ment in rela­tion to the sta­tus of weed and specif­i­cally my con­stant intake of it.

And with this gov­ern­ment, how long would it take them before they lost the list and it ended up in the hands of, oh I don’t know, the police maybe! Mak­ing cannabis class B means the penal­ties are worse for the end user; what if they decide to ‘round us all up? They’re build­ing an awful lot of new prisons!

Oh and by the way, the penal­ties for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis, ie grow­ing and deal­ing, are exactly the same under class B as class C, so it’s really only those of us who might get caught with a small amount who are see­ing the penal­ties change. Thanks, Gor­don. Thanks, Jacqui.

What’s worse is that it will only drive those of us who wish to speak out, fur­ther under­ground, while allow­ing the crim­i­nal ele­ment to con­tinue rul­ing the trade, with no addi­tional risks. Who really ben­e­fits from this change in status?

That’s an easy ques­tion to answer. Who ben­e­fits from the reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis?

No one at all.

A few days ago, I learned of a pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion that’s to be held on the sub­ject of the “pos­si­ble” reclas­si­fi­ca­tion of cannabis. It takes place in Lon­don on the 5th of February.

This gov­ern­ment has appar­ently decided the out­come of this con­sul­ta­tion and Jacqui Smith has already leaked their deci­sion to put cannabis back into Class B from its cur­rent sta­tus of Class C.

It widely known that the gov­ern­ment has cho­sen this path for one sim­ple rea­son, to appear “tough on drugs.” They iden­ti­fied this issue as one which Tony Blair and David Blun­kett left them vul­ner­a­ble to crit­i­cism that could be eas­ily changed with­out much pub­lic outcry.

They’re cor­rect on that score. How many dope smok­ers do you know that would attend a government-held, pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion on cannabis, and con­fess to reg­u­larly break­ing a law, which is about to become a lot harder on peo­ple who enjoy weed?

Let’s not bull­shit around this…a change in clas­si­fi­ca­tion from C to B means only one thing and that is to fur­ther crim­i­nalise peo­ple who smoke a bit of dope. The penal­ties for pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion of cannabis are exactly the same under class B and C — exactly the same! The dif­fer­ence is on the oth­er­wise law abid­ing cit­i­zen, who par­takes of this plant — the penal­ties for sim­ple pos­ses­sion are sig­nif­i­cantly harsher.

Why would the gov­ern­ment wish to crim­i­nalise so many peo­ple? Could it have to do with build­ing new pris­ons and need­ing peo­ple to fill those places? Dope­heads aren’t dan­ger­ous or vio­lent, you would have a prison pop­u­la­tion that was cheap and easy to manage!

Think that’s a bit “con­spir­acy the­ory” even for me? Ok, have you got a bet­ter explanation?

Just about every think tank, pol­icy group and gen­uine expert feels it should be left class C, decrim­i­nalised or legalised com­pletely. Many cops believe this too, and so do a fair few MPs and min­is­ters, but many are afraid to voice their opin­ions for fear of the wrath of the Mail/Express/Telegraph set.

I con­sid­ered attend­ing that con­sul­ta­tion on the 5th of Feb. I thought long and hard about going, stat­ing my real name and read­ing a selec­tion of entries I’ve writ­ten on this sub­ject so near and dear to my heart. And then I pussied out.

Look, either we all go, or none of us go! That’s right, all 6 mil­lion (esti­mated) reg­u­lar cannabis smok­ers have to reg­is­ter to attend. Every last one of us. I’ll go, if you’ll all go. They can’t put us all in jail, can they? If they try, we can just seek asy­lum in the Netherlands!

Here are a few inter­est­ing and related links:

This is from the can­nazine and talks about the 5th Feb con­sul­ta­tion and how they are ignor­ing the experts in the deci­sion to regrade
Click Me.

This one is from the Inde­pen­dent, it’s the same story, only with some ques­tion­able men­tal health details thrown in to con­fuse the issue
Click Me.

This is from the Times and talks about how the gov­ern­ment should base its poli­cies on sci­ence, not emo­tion. It sites the cannabis “debate” as an exam­ple
Click Me.

And here again is my cannabis truth series, which is worth read­ing if you want to know the real story and not the twisted shit they want you to believe!
Click Me.

Ho hum.

As much as I dig being the northlon­don­hippy and believe me, I do, some­times I strug­gle to force myself to sit down in front of my com­puter to pro­duce high qual­ity, web-based con­tent that both informs and entertains.

In other words, some­times I just can’t be arsed.

I’ve always got ideas and a run­ning list of a dozen top­ics which would daz­zle the aver­age hip­py­fan. Of course, you are above aver­age and require a higher stan­dard from this hippy. Don’t worry, I’ll dis­ap­point you all today.

I’m actu­ally in a rea­son­able mood this week as I took deliv­ery of my fancy new cof­fee set up. I’ll do a proper post on it in the near future, but I am pleased to report that I am already pulling rea­son­able shots and pro­duc­ing quite drink­able cap­puc­ci­nos and lattes.

I’m sure its not help­ing that my birth­day is immi­nent. I think that’s why Jan­u­ary sucks so badly, because right off the back of the stu­pid hol­i­days comes my dumb birthday.

Get­ting old sucks. Yes, highly orig­i­nal and thought pro­vok­ing, wouldn’t you agree?

I don’t really mind get­ting older, not that I have a choice or would pre­fer the alter­na­tive, but that’s because I don’t look my age. How much longer can peo­ple still see me as youth­ful? I’m forty-fucking-five years old for fucks sake!

My birth­day brings out my age­ing obses­sion, but don’t despair, it peaks every year around Jan­u­ary and fades into the back­ground soon after that. Then I can move onto other obses­sions, like my utter fail­ure at life.

Haha.

I don’t really feel like a fail­ure, but it’s amus­ing to make jokes about it.

Con­sid­er­ing all my faults, its amaz­ing I’ve done as well as I have out of life and I thank Satan every day for doing that deal with me back when I was a teenager. Eter­nal souls are over­rated any­way, or at least that’s what my mas­ter, er beast­mas­ter tells me. If only I thought to ask him to make me taller! Being short sucks more than get­ting old, any day!

We’re already over a week into 2008 and I haven’t posted a thing. In that case, belated New Year greet­ings and sea­sonal wishes to you. I hope that this brand new year brings you every­thing you’ve ever hoped and dreamed for.

This is a shitty time of year for me, as I am not a fan of the hol­i­day sea­son, cold, grey weather, or my birth­day which is also falls this month. Another year down the drain is all I can think.

I’m going to be 45 this month, which is unde­ni­ably middle-age, or at least how we define it. The real­ity of me actu­ally mak­ing it to 90 is laugh­ably ludi­crous, which makes the term middle-aged a total sham in my case.

I don’t feel 45, not that I even know what 45 should feel like. I still feel 15, which could say more about my stunted emo­tional growth than any­thing else. Age­ing is the phys­i­cal process, matu­rity refers to your men­tal age. Maybe I am 15?

Some­times I think I am obsessed with age­ing and grow­ing old; it’s even a cat­e­gory on my blog. I do think about it too much. It’s the pas­sage of time that really gets me, not the grow­ing old.

My life is finite. I only have so much time and with each day that slips by, I have less. If I am really hop­ing to accom­plish any­thing with my life, I bet­ter get my skates on or come to terms with the real­ity that my dreams will never come true. I’m not sure which one is worse.

The change in the cal­en­dar, com­bined with a mile­stone birth­day is really bum­ming me out. You see, even hip­pies get the blues. Forty-five years of under­achieve­ment and fail­ure can have that effect on even the cheeri­est of souls and trust me fuck­ers, the last thing I am is cheery!

What’s a poor hippy to do?

The usual, just keep plod­ding along, doing what­ever it is I do and dis­tract­ing myself as best I can. If it weren’t for soft drugs and con­sumer pur­chases, my life would be as empty as a void in deep space!

Oh and don’t for­get my exer­cises in cre­ative futil­ity! I am going to record that album of orig­i­nal northlon­don­hippy music!

And I am going to work on my novel. My real novel, the one I have been plan­ning for over a decade. I did knock out 2 other nov­els in the last few years, the sec­ond one will be pub­lished soon I hope. They’re not under my real name, they’re not even under my hippy ban­ner. I don’t really count them, but they were fun to write.

My real novel will actu­ally be done under my REAL NAME. I don’t do any­thing under my real name, so that should tell you how seri­ous I’m tak­ing it. It’s also why I’ve been tak­ing so long with it, I want to get this one 100% right. I want it to be a lit­er­ary mas­ter­work, which per­fectly cap­tures the human condition.

I want a lot of things.

Like right now, what I want is a high-end, pump dri­ven, espresso machine and this has become my lat­est obses­sion. I’ve been hang­ing out on a cou­ple of coffee-obsessive web­sites, Cof­feeGeek and Home­Barista are my two cur­rent favourites. If you’re seri­ous about cof­fee, you should really have a look.

Don’t laugh. The pur­suit of the per­fect espresso is right up this hippy’s street. After all, caf­feine is a drug and we all know I dig drugs and I also adore a good rit­ual as pre­req­ui­site to enjoy­ing any drug. Espresso extrac­tion is a skill and at the hob­bi­est level and beyond, it becomes a religion.

There are some seri­ously seri­ous peo­ple out there mak­ing some amaz­ing cof­fee at home and I want to be one of them. I’ve been doing research online for the last month or so and am now ready to take the plunge.

The first thing I learned is that the grinder you buy is every bit as impor­tant as the espresso machine you choose. And if you’re seri­ous about cof­fee, you will only want beans freshly roasted, they start to go stale after around 2 weeks. You need to spend at least 50% of what you spend on the espresso machine, on a decent grinder.

Pulling the per­fect shot of espresso isn’t sim­ple, it requires knowl­edge, prac­tise and skill, but if you can mas­ter this, you will be rewarded with excep­tional cof­fee every time.

The home espresso scene is nowhere near as big in the UK as it is in north Amer­ica, but there are sev­eral com­pa­nies spe­cial­is­ing in high-end kit. After a lot of research and care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion, I’ve decided to go with the Ran­cilio Sil­via espresso machine, paired with Rancilio’s Rocky grinder — the doser­less model. It has quite a good rep­u­ta­tion with afi­ciona­dos online, but is not an easy machine to mas­ter. I think that’s part of the appeal, that I will have to work hard to get the best results.

That’s what hob­bies are; dis­trac­tions from real­ity. My new found cof­fee obses­sion is a healthy diver­sion from the things that bring me down. Once I have per­fected my extrac­tion tech­nique and I am reg­u­larly fuelled with the finest cap­puc­ci­nos, expertly crafted, I will be buzzing with caf­feine. That in turn should inspire me to spend more of my increas­ing lim­ited free time, writ­ing. Every­one wins!

I’ll be order­ing my new machine hope­fully this week, as soon as they come back in stock fol­low­ing a rush on them for xmas. I’m hop­ing that by next week, I’ll be brew­ing my own, right here in my north Lon­don lair. How fuck­ing cool with that be!

My life might not be per­fect, but at least my cof­fee soon will be!

I’ve read a bit about Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. Ron Paul and his rather sen­si­ble, if con­tro­ver­sial views, but see­ing him effort­lessly field ques­tions about drugs with ratio­nal, intel­li­gent, informed replies is a won­der to behold.

My brother sent me this YouTube clip of Mr. Paul being inter­viewed by Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion net­work, ABC’s John Stos­sel and the first two min­utes are well worth your valu­able surf­ing time:

I hate to say it, but this guy hasn’t got a hope in hell of win­ning. I know he’s got loads of sup­port, I know he makes sense, but the pow­ers that be will never allow any­one who talks that straight any­where near the White House! If it looked like he had a chance, they would cook the elec­tion again. Any­way, the chances of him get­ting the nom­i­na­tion from the heavy christian-fundamentalist-ruled Repub­li­can party are slim to none.

It’s a real shame, because it sounds like Ron Paul could make a real dif­fer­ence and Amer­ica would never let some­one with that capa­bil­ity to run the show. Maybe we should all just elect him pres­i­dent of the world instead?