Found on Newsweek: PR tips from Hezbollah's publicity consultant.
(Also note the images of the front covers of the four separate Newsweek issues. Asia: "Losing Afghanistan". Latin America: "Losing Afghanistan". Europe: "Losing Afghanistan". US: "My life in pictures".)
Then we have videos from Afghanistan, from the communications department of Dadullah Akhund. I liked the music in the first one, but the second one is the fascinating one, where he's handing out slips of paper to suicide bomb volunteers. Look at that first boy, so pretty, and how he can't keep a straight face at the martyrdom video bit at the end where he's meant to be gesticulating at the camera angrily. Can you peer through someone's face into their mind?
Via MoorishGirl, Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan (YouTube) plugging his memoir on the Daily Show in the US. Interesting short interview. If you're interested in that sort of thing.
And something more lighthearted, from susiebright - magic striptease act from Ursula Martinez.
28.9.06
Addiction: a metaphor for everything
Is it time to expand our definition of "addiction"?
Scientific evidence suggests that we should. Apparently, illegal drugs only crudely imitate the more natural "highs" that most of us get from wholesome habits -- using internal chemistry to reinforce love of family, music, skill, beauty or country.
Is this why so many find it easy to "just say no" to drugs? Because we already know how to press the same buttons... inside our minds?
What follows is an open letter to scientists who could answer such questions. Especially the following:
Might some addictive mental states be doing as much harm to society as all the heroin, cocaine and crack on our streets, combined?
Scientific evidence suggests that we should. Apparently, illegal drugs only crudely imitate the more natural "highs" that most of us get from wholesome habits -- using internal chemistry to reinforce love of family, music, skill, beauty or country.
Is this why so many find it easy to "just say no" to drugs? Because we already know how to press the same buttons... inside our minds?
What follows is an open letter to scientists who could answer such questions. Especially the following:
Might some addictive mental states be doing as much harm to society as all the heroin, cocaine and crack on our streets, combined?
[...]
I want to zoom down to a particular emotional and psychological pathology. The phenomenon known as self-righteous indignation.
We all know self-righteous people. (And, if we are honest, many of us will admit having wallowed in this state ourselves, either occasionally or in frequent rhythm.) It is a familiar and rather normal human condition, supported -- even promulgated -- by messages in mass media.
While there are many drawbacks, self-righteousness can also be heady, seductive, and even... well... addictive. Any truly honest person will admit that the state feels good. The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.
Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again. Moreover, as Westin et.al. have found, this trait crosses all boundaries of ideology.
Indeed, one could look at our present-day political landscape and argue that a relentless addiction to indignation may be one of the chief drivers of obstinate dogmatism and an inability to negotiate pragmatic solutions to a myriad modern problems. It may be the ultimate propellant behind the current "culture war."
If there is any underlying truth to such an assertion, then acquiring a deeper understanding of this one issue may help our civilization deal with countless others.
[full text here; An Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology from David Brin, Ph.D.]
25.9.06
10.9.06
Hello seeking searching world
People end up here in various ways as is the wont with blogs and other gypsy-ass websites like this... Someone did a search on "ho [sic] much is heroin in Karachi" and sadly left without an answer (about £1 a gramme sort of thing). Some people have Googled "Rodney Anyanwu", and left disappointed that my two-part tale of the serial killer and the haunted house never got its concluding chapter (see archives if you're that interested... or easier is to Google the man's name, and I think realgem will be one of the first results.)
An interesting recent one is "putting crushed valium in a drink". Whoever you are, think hard about whatever it is you're planning to do (rohypnol or temazepam might do the trick better, but valium doesn't taste of much anything)... and do drop by again sometime...
An interesting recent one is "putting crushed valium in a drink". Whoever you are, think hard about whatever it is you're planning to do (rohypnol or temazepam might do the trick better, but valium doesn't taste of much anything)... and do drop by again sometime...
7.9.06
English architecture
Consider: always baths and no showers. Consider floor to floor carpeting in bathrooms and kitchens. Consider not rinsing when washing dishes and letting them dry with soapy water on them. Yes, it's England. Consider tramping around inside with your shitty outside shoes on. These people are disgusting barbarians.
House-building has not advanced since the Victorian era. The Victorians were quiet people who were not into fat bass and therefore the sound insulation is atrocious. The drains or plumbing invariably have some sort of problems, and houses are poorly insulated against heat or more importantly, cold.
Apparently, through some accident of architectural acoustics, it is possible for the upstairs neighbours to hear everything that goes on in this room, and for me to sit in the bathroom and hear what is going on upstairs. Apparently this is so, as I received another late-night knock asking to keep the noise down. I wasn't making a noise and nor was anyone else. Or maybe my typing now is keeping them awake in bed.
I couldn't decide whether to be belligerent about it or sympathetic, so I asked: "Is it really that bad? Is the sound insulation seriously that bad?" The answer I got of yes seemed sincere. So did the "We can hear everything you're saying, we can hear the music as if it was in our room. We're trying to sleep, the kids have to get up at 7 - 7! - in the morning..." Shit, I've been waking at 5...
If that is literally true: that it is really possible to hear everything that is said in here in a normal voice... Goodness... You have been witness to some really scandalous stuff... You might as well have been reading realgem... No, better even...
If that is literally true... Well... I'm not saying anything illegal ever took place or was ever discussed, you dig? What, everything? You've heard... what exactly? Interesting proposition. You know about... that thing? and... that thing? and...
God. I wish I had such interesting neighbours. We'd have a lot in common.
Well, I do, but neighbours horizontally rather than vertically. They are wonderful people. All I ever hear from upstairs is some kid being told off. Repeatedly and at length.
I don't have curtains on my windows either, so I can always see the sky.
House-building has not advanced since the Victorian era. The Victorians were quiet people who were not into fat bass and therefore the sound insulation is atrocious. The drains or plumbing invariably have some sort of problems, and houses are poorly insulated against heat or more importantly, cold.
Apparently, through some accident of architectural acoustics, it is possible for the upstairs neighbours to hear everything that goes on in this room, and for me to sit in the bathroom and hear what is going on upstairs. Apparently this is so, as I received another late-night knock asking to keep the noise down. I wasn't making a noise and nor was anyone else. Or maybe my typing now is keeping them awake in bed.
I couldn't decide whether to be belligerent about it or sympathetic, so I asked: "Is it really that bad? Is the sound insulation seriously that bad?" The answer I got of yes seemed sincere. So did the "We can hear everything you're saying, we can hear the music as if it was in our room. We're trying to sleep, the kids have to get up at 7 - 7! - in the morning..." Shit, I've been waking at 5...
If that is literally true: that it is really possible to hear everything that is said in here in a normal voice... Goodness... You have been witness to some really scandalous stuff... You might as well have been reading realgem... No, better even...
If that is literally true... Well... I'm not saying anything illegal ever took place or was ever discussed, you dig? What, everything? You've heard... what exactly? Interesting proposition. You know about... that thing? and... that thing? and...
God. I wish I had such interesting neighbours. We'd have a lot in common.
Well, I do, but neighbours horizontally rather than vertically. They are wonderful people. All I ever hear from upstairs is some kid being told off. Repeatedly and at length.
I don't have curtains on my windows either, so I can always see the sky.
Tom Thumb's Tales
realgem likes. free travel stories! entertaining stories of interest to any adventurous writer or discerning blog-reader by a true gypsy-ass motherfucker... someone who is surely no stranger to the sensation of waking in a strange city in an alien land without anything but the clothes he wears and the blue flip-flops on his feet... (nor to cringing at the old writing he finds himself to have inexplicably done...)
click here or new link in the sidebar
writes better stories than i ever did of skulduggery heroin and squalor on the streets of delhi ('Jail story' here)... another from among the malung's weird gallery of acquaintances...
in practice it demonstrates that you have to be lucky to make a living as a writer, or then you have to live lucky and be a writer... and you probably still won't know why you keep doing it...
click here or new link in the sidebar
writes better stories than i ever did of skulduggery heroin and squalor on the streets of delhi ('Jail story' here)... another from among the malung's weird gallery of acquaintances...
in practice it demonstrates that you have to be lucky to make a living as a writer, or then you have to live lucky and be a writer... and you probably still won't know why you keep doing it...
5.9.06
Khudi
blogger doesn't seem to support persian characters yet. this might have been better done with the scanner rather than the camera. hope you can read it.
this is a link to Khudi, Allama Iqbal's poem as adapted by Junoon and set to their "Sufi-rock". (I know people have criticised this version but you don't have to listen. It doesn't stream very well anyway.)
The first two powerful and often quoted lines can be rendered into English in many ways. like:
Endow thy will with such power
That at every turn of fate so it be
That God himself asks of his slave
"Tell me, what is it that pleases thee?" or my own loose:
Strengthen thy will with such power
That at every twist of fate
God himself asks of his slave
"Tell me: what is thy will?"
[And here I found another English-language rendering with:
Make yourself so strong that before writing your destiny, even God asks you “tell me, what is your desire?” (from here)]
Allama Iqbal is undisputedly considered the greatest poet of Pakistan / Muslim British India, writing in Urdu, Persian and English. His magnum opus was the Asrar-e-Khudi (Secrets of Self). Remaining firmly within the Muslim tradition, tending to the Sufi, his philosophy of khudi - self - or Will (in the Crowleyan sense) has echoes of Nietzsche and Goethe. He preferred writing in Persian and considered Rumi his greatest inspiration (the Persian/Afghan poet appears in some of his poems as some sort of muse or presence)...
4.9.06
Fantastico: Ayahuasca
Reportagem sobre a religao do Santo Daime, a igreja que usa a ayahuasca como uma bebida sagrada [[clique aqui para YouTube]]. O assiste aqui:
Eu tava muito satisfeito poder entender quasi tudo que o narrador falou, mas quando o cara da amazonia (o daimista de 43 anos) falou, nao entendi uma palavra exceto alguma coisa sobre divinidade universal. Nao sei se tem a ver com seu sotaque, o com os 43 anos da ayahuasca.
Tambem no Fantastico, o Barquinho e a estranha Uniao de Vegetal, [[aqui]] o aqui:
(Brazilian prime-time Globo broadcasts about the Church of Santo Daime and ayahuasca and other religious groups that use it. Scan through it even if you can't understand.)
Eu tava muito satisfeito poder entender quasi tudo que o narrador falou, mas quando o cara da amazonia (o daimista de 43 anos) falou, nao entendi uma palavra exceto alguma coisa sobre divinidade universal. Nao sei se tem a ver com seu sotaque, o com os 43 anos da ayahuasca.
Tambem no Fantastico, o Barquinho e a estranha Uniao de Vegetal, [[aqui]] o aqui:
(Brazilian prime-time Globo broadcasts about the Church of Santo Daime and ayahuasca and other religious groups that use it. Scan through it even if you can't understand.)
3.9.06
And in the news...
An old friend of Dave's and mine from down Finsbury Park has been arrested on terrorism charges... See here at News of the World (NOTW doesn't maintain an article archive, so it's now linked to a blog that quotes the whole article, minus pictures) or see the man speak on SocialistWanker.com featured videos...
Some friends have been raving in a millionaire mansion and got themselves on the front page of the Standard... Good reporting from The Times, contrasted to the cheap sensationalism of "littered with broken glass and used syringes and needles" (there were none) of the Evening Standard...
And here is a local newspaper report of the house I knocked down with the power of my will (see scaling north face) , in the Islington Gazette...
FOUR men were lucky to escape with their lives when a former crackhouse and squatters' den collapsed without warning.
(Earlier on realgem, stories from the old house, when it was still standing: Squatting stories, or, the alchemist of Camden Road, a photo of the house, Squatting stories 2, or, sexual problems of the disabled, which has some of the house's history. Between the story of SPOD and our arrival there, the house had indeed been a crack house, in case you thought the people mentioned in the Islington Gazette article were us... Needles, crackpipes, condoms thick on the floor, with little junkie nests, filthy mattresses surrounded by drug detritus, in the corners of the rooms... That was a fuck of a cleaning job... Oh, it was civilised enough there, for a "squatter's den", and when we left, only my room was littered with the odd needle... Jan-May 2005, realgem was published from the nicest, most comfortable apartment on the top floor of that old house... I almost miss it, if it weren't for the people and the memories... The office furniture manager is hopefully referring to the previous occupants in the article, who were bad crack niggers who had taken it over from some homeless working girls... They were removed by armed police and the place bricked up to rot...
Yes, I do believe buildings pick up energies, and once you've pieced the story of the Camden Rd house together, you will understand when I say its aura was tainted... Paulette blames that house for how things fucked up between us, and to me, it meant this...)
Some friends have been raving in a millionaire mansion and got themselves on the front page of the Standard... Good reporting from The Times, contrasted to the cheap sensationalism of "littered with broken glass and used syringes and needles" (there were none) of the Evening Standard...
And here is a local newspaper report of the house I knocked down with the power of my will (see scaling north face) , in the Islington Gazette...
FOUR men were lucky to escape with their lives when a former crackhouse and squatters' den collapsed without warning.
A thunder-like boom was heard and clouds of dust filled the air when the floors in the four-storey house suddenly came crashing down.
(Earlier on realgem, stories from the old house, when it was still standing: Squatting stories, or, the alchemist of Camden Road, a photo of the house, Squatting stories 2, or, sexual problems of the disabled, which has some of the house's history. Between the story of SPOD and our arrival there, the house had indeed been a crack house, in case you thought the people mentioned in the Islington Gazette article were us... Needles, crackpipes, condoms thick on the floor, with little junkie nests, filthy mattresses surrounded by drug detritus, in the corners of the rooms... That was a fuck of a cleaning job... Oh, it was civilised enough there, for a "squatter's den", and when we left, only my room was littered with the odd needle... Jan-May 2005, realgem was published from the nicest, most comfortable apartment on the top floor of that old house... I almost miss it, if it weren't for the people and the memories... The office furniture manager is hopefully referring to the previous occupants in the article, who were bad crack niggers who had taken it over from some homeless working girls... They were removed by armed police and the place bricked up to rot...Yes, I do believe buildings pick up energies, and once you've pieced the story of the Camden Rd house together, you will understand when I say its aura was tainted... Paulette blames that house for how things fucked up between us, and to me, it meant this...)
2.9.06
New
I have improved and updated scaling the north face of reality, the ibogaine story...
doc o has a blog, finally... and i've added a few more blog links, plus a new publication...
temporary aversion to sitting at the keyboard... i'll be around...
I have improved and updated scaling the north face of reality, the ibogaine story...
doc o has a blog, finally... and i've added a few more blog links, plus a new publication...
temporary aversion to sitting at the keyboard... i'll be around...
29.8.06
The in-between states
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, so called, is known as the Bardo Thodol in Tibetan. An alternate translation of the title gives us something like the Book of Instructions for the In-between States.
Generally, that means death. Traditionally, 49 days pass between death and reincarnation in a new body, and the Bardo Thodol gives instructions on how to handle the in-between state and not be tempted by the illusory beautiful and hideous deities and visions.
But bardo need not occur at death. Other events may trigger it. At certain points in life, too, one may enter a bardo, an in-between state, when the linearity of consciousness slips, when the record jumps, when you have the opportunity to catch the right wave to a new level of frequency. To peel away one more layer from prime reality. (The alternative, then... is to drop back into the same programmed pattern.)
Emerging stripped clean, zeroed, nulled, emerging once more into physical reality and time and the surprising sensation of being alive and existing in time, I feel I may be in a bardo state. May Avalokiteshvara the Buddha of Compassion help me keep my mind on the true light, and bless all of you beautiful people. Aum Mani Padme Hum.
Generally, that means death. Traditionally, 49 days pass between death and reincarnation in a new body, and the Bardo Thodol gives instructions on how to handle the in-between state and not be tempted by the illusory beautiful and hideous deities and visions.
But bardo need not occur at death. Other events may trigger it. At certain points in life, too, one may enter a bardo, an in-between state, when the linearity of consciousness slips, when the record jumps, when you have the opportunity to catch the right wave to a new level of frequency. To peel away one more layer from prime reality. (The alternative, then... is to drop back into the same programmed pattern.)
Emerging stripped clean, zeroed, nulled, emerging once more into physical reality and time and the surprising sensation of being alive and existing in time, I feel I may be in a bardo state. May Avalokiteshvara the Buddha of Compassion help me keep my mind on the true light, and bless all of you beautiful people. Aum Mani Padme Hum.
28.8.06
27.8.06
ummm.... what was the reason for doing this blogging thing again... ah... you see, i am learning everything anew, having only been alive a few days. but i have a hazy memory of it from a previous life and these things will hopefully come back to me.
ah yes, that was it, the words that started it all: If you are idle, be not solitary, and if you are solitary, be not idle, as dr j said.
i will be, hopefully, insh'allah, be publishing lots of writing soon. i may get another blogspot address for it. you people, whoever you are, who still keep checking here to see if there has been any movement, will doubtless be able to track it down... you clever people, you beautiful people, you who will never grow old...
ah yes, that was it, the words that started it all: If you are idle, be not solitary, and if you are solitary, be not idle, as dr j said.
i will be, hopefully, insh'allah, be publishing lots of writing soon. i may get another blogspot address for it. you people, whoever you are, who still keep checking here to see if there has been any movement, will doubtless be able to track it down... you clever people, you beautiful people, you who will never grow old...
24.8.06
scaling the north face of reality
this account may be added to and improved check back. for another account of ibogaine withdrawal, see here.
the professionals among you will know that acute heroin withdrawal, 100-0mph in 0 secs howling bloody nails-tearing screaming cold turkey, goes something like this: Day 1 is uncomfortable, the first night don't expect to sleep. Day 2 is approaching howling bloody nails-tearing dope sickness and it's only getting worse. The second and then god forbid the third night will be pure fucking hell on earth. If you are lucky and aren't too far advanced in your addiction by the fourth night you will be getting your first patches of delirious sleep, waking from nightmares to more twisting in reeking sweatsoaked sheets. And it goes on... And the craving, the god-awful cellular scream ("a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones..." naked lunch)...
when i did my kick, i was on over 300mg morphine sulphate (approx. equiv. to some 100 ml methadone), plus anywhere between 0.25-1 gramme of street heroin per day on top (cheap, powerful, plentiful and pure in London since the US and Brits joined the interminable war in Afghanistan and bombed the fuck out of the Taliban...)
what happened to me was this:
sometime around the time of the last post i took 1400mg ibogaine hcl and lay down on my bed, preparing for whatever was to come.
several hours later there is a vague humming in my ears. my thoughts are a little disjointed, i feel tranquilised as if by one of those horrible psychiatric tranquilisers but still able to communicate normally. i feel a little disassociated and underneath that i can feel the junk sickness kicking in. then colours are starting to blur, and objects are tinged with strange colours. it becomes more difficult to hold onto a thought for more than two seconds. the music is playing upside down.
the delirious paranoia running through my mind is that it's not working. that i've been cheated. that there's something wrong with the stuff, cause i stored it for so long. panic building up. horrible sickness. wasn't this supposed to be painless? that i toss and turn in the grip of some ketamine-like delirium while the sickness cures itself?
where is the powerful psychotropic effect i expected from the drug? instead, there is a mocking emptiness, laughing, laughing at stupid me who wanted something for free. ("pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back, every moment you have stolen...") it is only afterwards i realise how truly powerful this drug is. it's a very low-level reprogramming drug in computer programming language terms...
i am lucky to have at the other end of a telephone a man who we'll call ed i've never met with a remarkable knowledge of ibogaine. the consultant. otherwise who knows what would have happened to me.
the next 48 hours are delirious. flashes: i'm just going in. ed is on the telephone: "i have a feel for ibogaine. i can reach out and connect to you now. i can hear you are in an ibogaine space." i feel i am in acute withdrawal space and abandoned by this supposed wonder cure. "it's a remarkable drug. have trust. trust in it. now settle down in your bed and stay there. you'll be there for at least 48 hours." i laugh and drop the phone. at the time it seemed the most blood-curdlingly terrifying idea i'd ever heard.
delirium of torture. no hope no hope for one second's comfort. nerves peeled and exposed, lying twisting and twiching in a stench of toxic sweat. how much longer? someone else is talking calmly: "... in some gestapo prison... having lights shined in your eyes, getting slapped every time you tried to sleep. then when you've been sitting tied to a chair in your own piss and shit for 48 hours, when any little slap hurts, they fix your hands to a table and out come the pliers for your fingernails... if you pass out, they'll chuck some cold water on you to wake you up before carrying on..." it's the funniest thing anyone's ever told me in this infinity of pain. how petty my situation really is. i am coherent enough to answer that some sophisticated modern tortures are completely chemical in nature... inject you with this to make you feel like you're drowning in pain, inject you with that so that you're immobile and put you in an immersion tank so that you're alone in the dark with your own screaming nervous system... (like this)...
a synchronicity too delicious to miss, or how i destroyed a house with the power of my will:
sometime as i lie twisting and in delirium on day 2, just around the time i find and lock my will on what i'm doing and laugh at how easy it really is, the old house in Camden Rd collapses into the street. builders are trapped inside. the road is blocked. people in intensive care.
the old house where all this begun. where realgem began. the old house that... some people didn't like. paulette, for example. and some other sensitives. they didn't like that house, didn't come there. well. it had a fucked up old history. long-time readers will remember... see archives Jan-May 2005...
the only reason i don't leave on day two and get heroin is because there are people there to restrain me by force if necessary and i am too weak and confused for any sort of subterfuge. "give it 24 hours" ed says. "trust."
visions of evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, a million generations of teeming slashing tearing bundles of will to live and pain, a million years of bloodsoaked evolution on the primordial plains of africa. i see smoke from the witch-pyres of the middle ages rising into the skies of europe. then reeking mud and barbed wire and cutting jagged steel across the mindless battlefields of the great war. all moving towards something... moving towards something... but where did intelligence first come from? the brutal fight of evolution, the generations before us over the eons clawing forward - i owe them more than this, i owe them greater tribute than to be caught by this stupid-trap of nature and to destroy myself...
by night 2 (don't get the idea it was pleasant...) i was actually improving, just when it should have been getting worse... by the morning of day 3 i am cheerful and smiling even if i still haven't slept and feel frazzled. eating handfuls of valium and smoking dope, giving me some respite. i do not look like someone on the third day of cold turkey withdrawal. by the morning of day 3 i have a bath by my own power and dress in a suit ready to go out to eat breakfast, feeling fine in my mind, and then promptly collapse like a skeleton.
doc o had said the day before this all, the last day of my junkie life: "i don't know why you're putting yourself through this psychedelic hell when you could so easily just gently reduce on methadone." look through the realgem archives and count the number of times... gradually reduce, relapse, force the dose down again, start scoring again... count the number of times... i was in a position and with the resources to maintain my life like this indefinitely. i just couldn't quit. couldn't, couldn't couldn't.
"it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it," he said when he dropped by on the morning of day 3. yes, in his very professional opinion, i looked nothing like someone in day 3 of acute junk sickness.
INTO THE INFERNO!
it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it.
ibogaine lets you face the dragon or the monkey and fight it head on in one ferocious test of wills. into the inferno!
people ask me what it was like, what was the trip like: it's a shamanic psychedelic, isn't it? but no, i had no visions of african gods or strange other worlds... some people perhaps do...
as i can now limitedly comprehend it, ibogaine works on a much lower level... near the metabolic, cellular, maybe genetic level... the theory has been put forward that psychedelic chemicals played a part in the evolution of intelligence, language in some sort of proto-human apes... after ibogaine, i have a strong intuitive feeling that this may be so...
this experimental medication does merit the description miraculous. within several days i am out and about, in the street... like a window has been cleaned, and the light is painfully intense, painfully intense is the world... but it's the world... once again swimming in the world of the senses, talking to people... throwing away money at people, talking to a homeless junkie and giving him a note to score, just cause i don't need that money for my habit any more... sitting on the street in camden one of the crack-niggers comes and waves rock in my face... the pusher-man... he won't leave us alone... so i ask him if he's got brown... yeah... so i tell him to get the fuck out of my face, hoping for violence, ready for violence... but it's sunlit high street and the day it's beautiful and it's just childish bravado in the face of "powder power..."
the ibogaine's psychotropic effect, which i initially was so disappointed with, manifests itself in the next few days, and in a much more subtle way than any mere psychedelic... my mind is sharp inside my worn-out body that i push to exhaustion... and still don't sleep, no, i don't sleep... god, sometimes i want to...
and all the synchronicities... the crazy coincidences, the chance meetings, the way everything is falling into place as if the universe was in synch with me again, the new opportunities that drop into my path, the people i need to meet there just when i turn the corner... but this is some effect on a more subtle level of reality... something, something beyond words or chemistry or pharmacology...
don't think it's the painless cure. there's only one painless cure and that's death.
i hope this is of interest to anyone who struggles with this strange sickness... anyone who is finding lady heroin too demanding a mistress...
the professionals among you will know that acute heroin withdrawal, 100-0mph in 0 secs howling bloody nails-tearing screaming cold turkey, goes something like this: Day 1 is uncomfortable, the first night don't expect to sleep. Day 2 is approaching howling bloody nails-tearing dope sickness and it's only getting worse. The second and then god forbid the third night will be pure fucking hell on earth. If you are lucky and aren't too far advanced in your addiction by the fourth night you will be getting your first patches of delirious sleep, waking from nightmares to more twisting in reeking sweatsoaked sheets. And it goes on... And the craving, the god-awful cellular scream ("a yen comes on him like a great black wind through the bones..." naked lunch)...
when i did my kick, i was on over 300mg morphine sulphate (approx. equiv. to some 100 ml methadone), plus anywhere between 0.25-1 gramme of street heroin per day on top (cheap, powerful, plentiful and pure in London since the US and Brits joined the interminable war in Afghanistan and bombed the fuck out of the Taliban...)
what happened to me was this:
sometime around the time of the last post i took 1400mg ibogaine hcl and lay down on my bed, preparing for whatever was to come.
several hours later there is a vague humming in my ears. my thoughts are a little disjointed, i feel tranquilised as if by one of those horrible psychiatric tranquilisers but still able to communicate normally. i feel a little disassociated and underneath that i can feel the junk sickness kicking in. then colours are starting to blur, and objects are tinged with strange colours. it becomes more difficult to hold onto a thought for more than two seconds. the music is playing upside down.
the delirious paranoia running through my mind is that it's not working. that i've been cheated. that there's something wrong with the stuff, cause i stored it for so long. panic building up. horrible sickness. wasn't this supposed to be painless? that i toss and turn in the grip of some ketamine-like delirium while the sickness cures itself?
where is the powerful psychotropic effect i expected from the drug? instead, there is a mocking emptiness, laughing, laughing at stupid me who wanted something for free. ("pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back, every moment you have stolen...") it is only afterwards i realise how truly powerful this drug is. it's a very low-level reprogramming drug in computer programming language terms...
i am lucky to have at the other end of a telephone a man who we'll call ed i've never met with a remarkable knowledge of ibogaine. the consultant. otherwise who knows what would have happened to me.
the next 48 hours are delirious. flashes: i'm just going in. ed is on the telephone: "i have a feel for ibogaine. i can reach out and connect to you now. i can hear you are in an ibogaine space." i feel i am in acute withdrawal space and abandoned by this supposed wonder cure. "it's a remarkable drug. have trust. trust in it. now settle down in your bed and stay there. you'll be there for at least 48 hours." i laugh and drop the phone. at the time it seemed the most blood-curdlingly terrifying idea i'd ever heard.
delirium of torture. no hope no hope for one second's comfort. nerves peeled and exposed, lying twisting and twiching in a stench of toxic sweat. how much longer? someone else is talking calmly: "... in some gestapo prison... having lights shined in your eyes, getting slapped every time you tried to sleep. then when you've been sitting tied to a chair in your own piss and shit for 48 hours, when any little slap hurts, they fix your hands to a table and out come the pliers for your fingernails... if you pass out, they'll chuck some cold water on you to wake you up before carrying on..." it's the funniest thing anyone's ever told me in this infinity of pain. how petty my situation really is. i am coherent enough to answer that some sophisticated modern tortures are completely chemical in nature... inject you with this to make you feel like you're drowning in pain, inject you with that so that you're immobile and put you in an immersion tank so that you're alone in the dark with your own screaming nervous system... (like this)...
a synchronicity too delicious to miss, or how i destroyed a house with the power of my will:
sometime as i lie twisting and in delirium on day 2, just around the time i find and lock my will on what i'm doing and laugh at how easy it really is, the old house in Camden Rd collapses into the street. builders are trapped inside. the road is blocked. people in intensive care.
the old house where all this begun. where realgem began. the old house that... some people didn't like. paulette, for example. and some other sensitives. they didn't like that house, didn't come there. well. it had a fucked up old history. long-time readers will remember... see archives Jan-May 2005...
the only reason i don't leave on day two and get heroin is because there are people there to restrain me by force if necessary and i am too weak and confused for any sort of subterfuge. "give it 24 hours" ed says. "trust."
visions of evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, a million generations of teeming slashing tearing bundles of will to live and pain, a million years of bloodsoaked evolution on the primordial plains of africa. i see smoke from the witch-pyres of the middle ages rising into the skies of europe. then reeking mud and barbed wire and cutting jagged steel across the mindless battlefields of the great war. all moving towards something... moving towards something... but where did intelligence first come from? the brutal fight of evolution, the generations before us over the eons clawing forward - i owe them more than this, i owe them greater tribute than to be caught by this stupid-trap of nature and to destroy myself...
by night 2 (don't get the idea it was pleasant...) i was actually improving, just when it should have been getting worse... by the morning of day 3 i am cheerful and smiling even if i still haven't slept and feel frazzled. eating handfuls of valium and smoking dope, giving me some respite. i do not look like someone on the third day of cold turkey withdrawal. by the morning of day 3 i have a bath by my own power and dress in a suit ready to go out to eat breakfast, feeling fine in my mind, and then promptly collapse like a skeleton.
doc o had said the day before this all, the last day of my junkie life: "i don't know why you're putting yourself through this psychedelic hell when you could so easily just gently reduce on methadone." look through the realgem archives and count the number of times... gradually reduce, relapse, force the dose down again, start scoring again... count the number of times... i was in a position and with the resources to maintain my life like this indefinitely. i just couldn't quit. couldn't, couldn't couldn't.
"it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it," he said when he dropped by on the morning of day 3. yes, in his very professional opinion, i looked nothing like someone in day 3 of acute junk sickness.
INTO THE INFERNO!
it all comes down to how thinly you want to spread it.
ibogaine lets you face the dragon or the monkey and fight it head on in one ferocious test of wills. into the inferno!
people ask me what it was like, what was the trip like: it's a shamanic psychedelic, isn't it? but no, i had no visions of african gods or strange other worlds... some people perhaps do...
as i can now limitedly comprehend it, ibogaine works on a much lower level... near the metabolic, cellular, maybe genetic level... the theory has been put forward that psychedelic chemicals played a part in the evolution of intelligence, language in some sort of proto-human apes... after ibogaine, i have a strong intuitive feeling that this may be so...
this experimental medication does merit the description miraculous. within several days i am out and about, in the street... like a window has been cleaned, and the light is painfully intense, painfully intense is the world... but it's the world... once again swimming in the world of the senses, talking to people... throwing away money at people, talking to a homeless junkie and giving him a note to score, just cause i don't need that money for my habit any more... sitting on the street in camden one of the crack-niggers comes and waves rock in my face... the pusher-man... he won't leave us alone... so i ask him if he's got brown... yeah... so i tell him to get the fuck out of my face, hoping for violence, ready for violence... but it's sunlit high street and the day it's beautiful and it's just childish bravado in the face of "powder power..."
the ibogaine's psychotropic effect, which i initially was so disappointed with, manifests itself in the next few days, and in a much more subtle way than any mere psychedelic... my mind is sharp inside my worn-out body that i push to exhaustion... and still don't sleep, no, i don't sleep... god, sometimes i want to...
and all the synchronicities... the crazy coincidences, the chance meetings, the way everything is falling into place as if the universe was in synch with me again, the new opportunities that drop into my path, the people i need to meet there just when i turn the corner... but this is some effect on a more subtle level of reality... something, something beyond words or chemistry or pharmacology...
don't think it's the painless cure. there's only one painless cure and that's death.
i hope this is of interest to anyone who struggles with this strange sickness... anyone who is finding lady heroin too demanding a mistress...
21.8.06
13.00 Aug 21 2006
2 years of solid opiate abuse behind (this time around. i was here before, too. so make that 5 years in total.)
withdrawals are starting now
first dose of ibogaine hcl down 13.00 hours
recording of nusrat fateh ali khan playing in the background
the sun has just broken through the clouds
i'm going away to a strange place now, i don't know where
hope to see you all when i get back
("if you find the door that allows you to leave this life, you must not take it. it will be destructive for everyone involved.")
bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim
KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
2 years of solid opiate abuse behind (this time around. i was here before, too. so make that 5 years in total.)
withdrawals are starting now
first dose of ibogaine hcl down 13.00 hours
recording of nusrat fateh ali khan playing in the background
the sun has just broken through the clouds
i'm going away to a strange place now, i don't know where
hope to see you all when i get back
("if you find the door that allows you to leave this life, you must not take it. it will be destructive for everyone involved.")
bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim
KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
19.8.06
Dublin post-dated
happened in a past life quite recently... paulette calls and says has two tickets to eddie izzard show in dublin on friday, how do we get there? (i don't think she realised it was a different country) it was the day i'd originally planned to take my cure but with a pocketful of morphines left to use up i thought it would be good. oh it was so kind of her to remember me with only two tickets left for the show, how could i not have gone with her?
irish sea, pulling out of holyhead, the isle of anglesey (the ancient isle of Ynys Môn)
christchurch cathedral
club, outside and inside
(paulette had researched the trip and has a tourist streetmap of dublin printed from the internet. attraction number 23 is the james joyce museum... "captain clark welcomes you aboard...")
then on sunday evening she called me to bid farewell to this mike and hope to see the next mike soon.
while we're on ireland, here's a rousing old rebel song...
irish sea, pulling out of holyhead, the isle of anglesey (the ancient isle of Ynys Môn)
christchurch cathedral
club, outside and inside
number 23 of?
dublin, rain
(paulette had researched the trip and has a tourist streetmap of dublin printed from the internet. attraction number 23 is the james joyce museum... "captain clark welcomes you aboard...")
then on sunday evening she called me to bid farewell to this mike and hope to see the next mike soon.
while we're on ireland, here's a rousing old rebel song...
26.7.06
13.7.06
A vindication, should you need one
In the words of that glib Oscar Wilde:
Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry they cannot write.