whew it was all a nightmare

"...let the wheels of evolution turn, let them crush the weak... that's what my boss said today..." Doc O says back from selling advertising... we're both in the business of creating and adding to media litter... it's been a fucking hot day...

Found by browsing: On gooder writing: an interdiction

Found by keeping eyes on ground: £1.70, 18 Superkings, half-gramme cocaine wrapped in Lotto ticket (looked just like rubbish and only an obsessive looking for messages from the universe on every scrap of paper on the ground would have found it) [and other curious and diverse things]

There was a kid rapping at the bus stop a white one this time (the last one was some fucker on the 254 to beats on his mp3 mobile phone did I write about that? should have it was good) weird looking kid with a ponytail, cannabis-leaf baseball cap and shades... he picked up some paper from the ground, I asked him what for, said he thought it was money... I told him about the messages from the universe and he wished me well... anyway... it was a fucking hot day...

And I finally googled "mikey delgado" and found some phrase on Guardian online about 'just emerged blinking into the daylight after a short prison sentence - a bit of a misunderstanding about banking etiquette'...
oh shit, this makes me momentarily worried with how utterly sinister 'banking etiquette' sounds to me in my present state...

"...we have some of the finest right-wing minds in North London gathered in this room..." Doc O is saying... choking sweet smoke drifts out through the blinds... it is a fucking hot day...

Life and all this war as seen from London (message to the um 4 or 5 confirmed people in London who like my writing: read this, I like this...)

And I've been catching up on all the political debate the malung has stirred up with the Scrutinator and Republican friends and throwing my two bits in... Like here and here and here...

The Evening Standard says the bomb on the 30 was meant for the Northern line... But the Northern line was shut, due to a "defective train"...

Good old Northern line... Feels good to be back in North London...

Life goes on

Whatever happens, no matter how crazy, it just does. Took the number 30 bus yesterday, the route that was blown up on Thursday next to Tavistock Square, where this statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Also the memorial to "those who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill". Also, I think, a Hiroshima monument and a Peace Tree. It's a real peace park. Junkies come to shoot up there and crack-dealers can rest their feet, sitting on the lush grass. So how ironic it should be the scene of such events. It's all sealed off now. (Later note: Londoners might want to take note you are almost certain to be searched in certain parts of central London, apprently a map of the exclusion zone has been published on the net now, I found it yesterday and can't find it again.)

The nearest eyewitness to the atrocities found by realgem (lazy journalism-wise, you should have realised by now) was about 200 yards away, just around the corner, where he was on his way to work in an unnamed august British institution in the very near vicinity.

There was the explosion, I saw holes and blood on the building beside the bus...

And suddenly police there... There was something strange about how rehearsed it all was... How well organised... Something unreal, wrong about it, about how smoothly they were suddenly there, cutting off the street and steering people away and not letting me past... "We don't see very much of you normally, do we?" I said to the woman copper...

[this comment should be understood in the context of how openly crack dealing goes on in the street in the vicinity, and the number of times our eyewitness has fruitlessly complained about it to the police and local authorities...]

I was happy to see Saturday's Times carried a two-page spread of excerpts from blogs reporting on the bombs and the mood in London... blogs have really come into their own...

And within a few hours of the bombs, you could find people's mobile phone footage of the attacks on the internet... The future is really almost here, the information-saturated Transmet future I'm waiting for...

My good friend the Malung, for example, finds his blog being referenced in the Italian daily La Stampa... See his post about it here and the article on La Stampa's web here... Scroll down to where it says Qualcuno saputo delle accuse ad Al Qaeda parla di Abu Hamza and you will notice it links malung-tv-news...

Targeting benefit fraud: We know when and where you commit benefit fraud. Yah right.

Mobile guerilla night-club

See my house through someone else's eyes: Paulette the psychedelic genius fascist bitch writes about Saturday's party on her new (English) blog voidwithme. By the grace of God, I avoided that one. My own party was on Thursday. Some went to sleep in hospital that night, others to bed with eyes swollen with tears and pain of loss - bodies still trapped under Kings Cross. Others wrapped in their very ordinary problems, perhaps stalking streets of East London at 5am in hellish insomnia, arriving home to find an unexpected party, new friends strangers, heaven-sent distraction, drugs that scare me.

midmorning the stupid disco is still jumping and I can hear the bulldozers over behind the high wall already starting to smash the block down and I am still bouncing like a happy idiot to all the silly pop tunes they didn't play on Saturday ... I knew things were going crazy in a bad malevolent way when it went to Wagner... almost everyone had left...

101st Air Cav: It scares the shit out of the gooks

Thank you for the waltz

Later bad thoughts come, images unbidden to mind.

The way she looked at me. The way some of them have started to look at me. Why certain doors and faces seem to have closed... And I can see so clearly certain ugly gossiping faces... "He's an alright guy and a real good friend but you know he's got problems..." - "Problems?" - "Heroin... We're so worried about him..." People recoil, whatever the real truth may be: the images are junk, syring, blood, HiV... Ugly, heavy images... This is a bad name to spread... something really evil to use against anyone, to influence with...

an encounter with disillusionment malevolence and betrayal... and a great night dancing...

War comes to London!

Terror comes to London :: Situation assessment of an armchair guerilla commander

Further advantages to working on freelance basis: Less likely to be somewhere like Aldgate station or Liverpool Street in morning rush hour when shit like this goes down.

I just started typing: I could so easily have been there when the bombs went off... But how often am I up and around in the morning rush hour, really? But those are places I know so well... Aldgate is just about my part of town... Could so easily have been at Kings Cross or Old Street...

Instead I woke up (on someone's sofa in Highgate, on the hill, far above the blot of London spreading beneath surly clouds), black coffee and valium and Marcio rolls a joint (It's early. I decline politely). Mobile phone beeps a news alert: fatalities in London explosions.

TV on just as it was becoming a news story and clearly not an "electric power surge" or a train collision... 7 bombs in London! (4, 8, whatever: I watched BBC, ITV and Channel 5 simultaneously and decided ITV definitely have the best cameramen...)

"Metropolitan Police suspect a co-ordinated terror attack on London!" (that's the Channel 5 news ticker). Ah, I feel safe now, they obviously have experts on the case. I was just thinking seven guys coincidentally just happened to be carrying bombs around central London in shopping bags, but then I realise why Sir Iain Blair has his job... Sharp guy...

Flick channels (Blair speaks... Scenes from central London... Bush speaks, Parliament jabbers... Interviewees with blood running down their faces, bodies covered in sheets, ambulances... More commentary... "Piles of bodies... Offices of British Medical Association literally sprayed with blood..." Take Marcio's joint after all. Remark it would be a good day to do something criminal as the police seem to be quite busy. Flick more channels. Who was it? Who was it? Finally... the terror expert talking heads: who is responsible? All the hall-marks of an al-Qaeda attack...

Get off the TV and onto the internet. Reuters:

The "Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" claimed responsibility for
the attack in a Web site posting and warned Italy and Denmark to withdraw their
troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Italian news agency ANSA and al-Quds
al-Arabi newspaper said.

The claim, also sent by email to the London-based daily, could not be
verified and did not appear on any of the main Web sites normally used by al
Qaeda.

I encourage you to familiarise yourself with Dave Bones's malung-tv-news... he has been documenting the story of so-called Islamist fanatics in London for a while now (for two years, to be precise...) And being an earlier riser, was at much greater genuine risk of being near one of those places at the time...

text message
From: Dave Bones
To: Mike H
Am heading south i called abdullah. Says he didnt do it

The armchair guerilla commander in me smiles. Maximum precision and efficiency with 7 small devices. Hit the Tube, hit the transport nerve centres. London grinds to a halt. Maximum chaos with minimum investment.

update and re-assessment :: 37 dead so far :: Londoners have something exciting to talk about for a day :: chaos localised and no mass panic

Evening already, death toll has climbed to 37 and will doubtless grow more. I'm assisting a Somali correspondent for some Somali news service on the next computer in the net place on B__ Rd (N7 again, for now...) attach the report he wrote about the bombs to an email... He is mildly infuriated his report doesn't carry his byline and is trying to put that to rights... Funny, that's happened to me as well...

Not reading Somali, I can't tell what his assessment is. The armchair guerilla commander's revised assessment: there may be 37 dead and thousands wounded but the transport links into and out of Central London seem to be running normally. Notes in the doors of social security and other government offices are shut "due to the security situation". Things look normal... Work selling advertising in Doc O's new job doesn't stop for a moment, he tells me, and that was right near one of them...

They hit the right targets, but not hard enough to cause real economic damage, even though the FTSE took an immediate -100 dip. London will be moving again tomorrow, and apart from for the grieving and wounded, by tomorrow everything will be more or less normal again.

Until they find the people who did it were [Pakistanis/Moroccans/Yemenis/____] who have lived here for years... Then people of whatever nation cower in their homes, in Bradford or Bethnal Green or wherever, waiting the racial backlash... Rivers of blood...

The clearest news report I could find from the general media on how things unfolded is from Channel 4 here.

Estranged

It looks like it's time to split from my tribe. In ancient days, this would have been the ultimate punishment, exile from the tribe; worse than death. These days most people don't even have a tribe.

C___ the editor is saying (flattering me)... "I like your writing, write me something, anything you want... Preferably about squatting, or about heroin..." Oh God. Are you sure?

I don't even know how to begin to describe this self-help housing solution life-style (unkindly known as squatting) to anyone who hasn't been there (you might want to check this). But once upon a time (when?) I thought of myself as a part of this group, as having the nearest thing I'd ever found to family, as being part of a band of pirates, a here comes chaos gutter-glamorous guerilla-night-club-cum-safehouse for society's rejects, people who I've loved, people without whom I'd never had made it in this cold city...

The slanging match (see this) ended something like this, me speaking in Italics: [redacted]

Can anyone lend ME a XXXXing camera?

Have the same problem as the malung did a while ago. I need a fucking camera. Can anyone in the London area get me a high-spec professional digital SLR? To sell cheap, to rent or to borrow? Then I might be able to wangle myself my second ever photography job, but my little Sony Cybershot won't convince anyone...

Mobile guerilla office cubicle

... offers career-destroying lee-way for procrastination. Maybe working in an office with a boss breathing down my back would be good for me?

The best thing about working on a freelance basis: You can carefully cultivate the imression copy/whatever else gets in late due to the other pressing freelance engagements or business projects of a dynamic go-getter, rather than sheer idleness...

And my God, I still can't do this shit... I am still getting sweats and shivers... So I delegate and pass the stuff on to the work-experience girl at the publishing company office in the States that we do the UK-side so-called guerilla publicity for... I decided a while back that manipulating journalists and the media is preferable to being a journalist or making the media... I decided long long before that that working for people you never see is preferable to working for ones who you do...

[Dreams or waking impressions? These are outdated manuals, the Bible, the Quran... People's brains were wired differently then... Our nervous systems have evolved (in no small part due to information and media technology?) God was talking to Muhammad (pbuh) 1400 years ago... I'm trying to find who he's talking to now, I am telling the Muslims in multi-colour mirrorshades, who occupy all the other terminals or fill all the other screens??...]

:: coming up on realgem ::

Slightly intimidated and greatly flattered by all the professional bloggers and writers whose writing I like/admire/respect who have somehow found their way here, designs are in the pipeline for a slick realgem logo and a corporate re-branding...

Also coming: a look at mirrorshades, featuring film-maker Dave Bones and Islamist extra-ordinaire, Abu Abdullah...

Who is Mike: Part II

The highest flattery of my recent weblog writing career came when I noticed mikey fatboy delgado had linked to realgem - and one of the relatively few blogs he links to... (some people have arm-length blogrolls... How can they possibly read and assimilate all that info?... see infomania health warning...) I don't know who he is, I am thinking a professional writer, but it is fair to say of all the writing I have come across in sleepless nights of trawling through blogs it has impressed me and gripped me most.

I wrote to him after he removed all the words from his blog. I had never wrote him before cause I thought I was completely out of his league. I received messages:

hallo mike h, well the words went only a couple of days ago. i got fed up with looking at them and wanted some colours for a bit.

good luck with it all, you've done some good writing on coming off gear lately.

and

you might be writing from the perspective of a narrator tho. it may not be you. good writing though, carries you down the page

Yes. Who are these narrators? Who is Mikey??

And what is the evolutionary advantage of this blogging behaviour? In a Richard Dawkins sense, how is it biologically justified, the considerable (in the circumstances) time and resources Mike (or someone comparable) puts into maintaining even realgem, this humble... node... or whatever it is... This question has troubled me lately, and mikey's comments gelled with my thinking about this...

I found a validation, or at least an explanation, that satisfied me and dispatched the intellectual problem. It is contained in the book of early Pynchon stories Slow Learner I recently acquired, in the story The Secret Integration (passage reproduced here under fair use - note it was written and is set in the 1950s)

Grover was a radio ham. He put together his own transceiver rigs and test equipment. Not only the sky but these mountains, too, made incoming signals capricious. Grover's room, certain nights when Tim stayed over, filled as the hour grew late with disembodied voices, sometimes even from as far away as the sea. Grover liked to listen but seldom transmitted to anyone... Tim had never seen him sleep. He'd still be up no matter what time Tim turned in, fooling with dials, pressing a huge pair of rubber earphones to his head... Drifting in and out of sleep... mixed with dreams, cops being called to investigate car wrecks or just noises and shadows that moved where everything should have been still... all these coming down, filtering through to populate his dreams, so that in the morning he'd never know which had been real, which he'd hallucinated.

Somehow we're networking our minds, an atavism, reaching through technology back to the deep mind (the collective unconscious) like the Neanderthals and their shared mind in Jean M. Auel's epic Stone Age novels... Like Paulette says, internet in the brain...

Realgem restaurant review

Lunch at Lahore Express

Mike H wakes on a sofa in New Cross Gate in time to keep the lunch appointment with internet entity Deek Deekster.

Never mind those sneaky Bengali rip-off restaurants in Brick Lane. Further down Bethnal Green Rd I found the place… The plate you are served is something like you’d find yourself being served in Rawalpindi or Lahore… To carry on with the racist theme I introduced, these people are Pakistanis which I approve of as they speak Urdu so I know I'm not being cussed behind my back (Bangla sounds, to any civilised person, like stones rattling around in a can.)


We both order karahi bindi gosht, that is, a beef karahi with lady's-fingers or okra, a great combination karahi to have on the menu, it struck me when I came here the first time. Mike H eats with tandoori naan, Deek orders pilau rice. The waiter plumps down the customary tiny little salad (the size salads are meant to be) and raita, which a Brick Lane restaurant would add £2 to your bill for.

two statistics gleaned from conversation with Deek over lunch

#1: 36 per cent (note: someone who spells out per cent rather than typing % has probably been to journalism school) of women enjoy anal sex (source: a study in the UK 10 years ago). (approximately one-third. another third said they don't particularly mind, another third that they hate it. Deek and Mike H agree that two-thirds odds is good)

#2: 5 million Britons watch Big Brother every night. why don't they read realgem for fuck's sake?

While I myself was already fond of the place, Deek provides an objective and unprejudiced assessment as to the quality of the food and the size of his appetite by finishing about half of the bleary Mike H's portion, which even at the best of times would have left him uncomfortably gorged.

Additional points were earned by the lotas in the toilet… this is for washing your ass after relieving yourself, hugely preferable to the uncivilised Western habit of using toilet paper.

Finally, the endearing ashtrays. Note the four different-sized slots, for whether one be smoking cheroot, cigarette, cigarillo, cigar or spliff.


The decor, too, recalls a modern, efficient restaurant in Pakistan. There is no decor as such, the walls are stark white-tiled with posters with Koran verses on them. The tabletops and chairs are pleasantly gaudy.

Deek and Mike concur in their thorough approval of this eating establishment. Look, you might not want to bring a girl here on a dinner date or anything, but for cheap, solid, well-cooked food from good ingredients in doesn't get better than Lahore Express, Bethnal Green Rd. - authentic Punjabi cuisine, just like it says on the window.

Night: Whitechapel to New Cross Gate

today on realgem
Lessons in photography :: Internet addiction :: Going to South London :: The art of Arofish

Lessons in photography: Walking through the London night… Talking to street people and people out on the Friday night, dispensing cigarettes, change, cider in uncharacteristic generosity to strangers blaggers bums I know what everyone's on and what their game is and FORGETTING TO TAKE A PORTRAIT PHOTO OF THEM IN REPAYMENT. (like this:)

or this:

Addicted to computers:

It was quite late - got the strange impulse suddenly to travel all the way to far South London to meet the malung and do web stuff and talk ideas. Made my way through Friday night East London, leaving the house standing empty despite premonitions detailed below. The malung was writing to dodgy people with strangely familiar Arabic names – Mr Abu Hamza, Belmarsh Prison – waiting for one of the TV channels to get back to him about his documentary proposal (see here)…

The East London line is my favourite Tube line – a short grimy afterthought on the Underground network that takes me from Whitechapel to far south New Cross Gate in 23 minutes, via Wapping and Shadwell and the docklands…

"Vill you go to partie with me?" (Uhhmmm can we skip all that and just do it here?)

NO! I won’t – I’m going to use the fucking internet at my friend’s place, hahahaaa! (What’s this? God it must be true I’m a faggot.) Or is this is the ugly face of my racism? – I’ve got a temporary aversion to east Euros… I’m living proof that intelligent, sensitive, enlightened young fellow like me can be total racist… (My main ire is still reserved for the Anglo-Saxon nation…)

It is such a long long time since I got the chance to sit down all night in front of a broadbanded computer, smoking dope and reading blogs… And writing all these entries and putting up photos and how nice they look on a good tft screen instead of my gypsy-ass skip monitor... Addicted to the net… Even those times when I’m penniless, strung out, right in the gutter, I still got to plug in… I need it… I don’t know what it’s about… one day I will understand everything…

The eerie art of Arofish:

We turn into a low tunnel under railway arches, and with pleasure and honour I encounter for the first time in first-person view the art of Arofish... whose strange surreal story about going to Iraq to graffiti US military installations and being arrested appeared on Socialist Wanker, from where you can follow links to his own web galleries and such. (all copyright belong to him etc etc)

("she walks in beauty like the night")

Reports from the front line

This terraced house belongs to a small block including a derelict boxing club, a warehouse, a shop and several houses. Slated to be demolished a.s.a.p. to make way for a multi-m £ development, and actually, the work has already started on the warehouse, can hear it in the day… could lounge on the sofa and watch the buildings being demolished around us… the Poison Club (cider-punks from hell) are a few houses down, in leathers and spikes and soaring dinosaur spines of hair… next door the dodgy squat party (“illegal rave” is what the newspapers say) crew… vans covered in scrawled graffiti pulled up in front and in the seedy side-alley with the sound system, bar, lights, all the accoutrements of a mobile guerilla night club…

loud discordant guitar noise from a punk band practicing further down… tomorrow it will be the scum tekno apocalypse of the hackney crusties, right in our back yard… our eviction must be very very imminent… our corner of C__ H___ Rd, doesn’t slumber exactly… waits apprehensively… forces are gathering… two waves of demolition coming: first the dawn of the living ketamine dead, then the bulldozers… police sirens scream down the road towards Whitechapel… the air tonight is brooding and heavy, like something’s building, something’s brewing… impending madness and destruction…

[i must like this or something. this is my observer-created universe? more, a user-created universe? see how easily everything falls into place? ]

fuck da police!

One of the strangest things I ever saw...

I gonna take a quick moment to remind you about the web magazine Socialist Wanker... With such exclusive video features as Martin Mubanga rapping [right-click link and "Save target as" if it won't stream...] with the Unpeople in Trafalgar Square soon after being released from Guantanamo Bay... "We got no love for the American government!"

My friend the malung knows these people personally... The story is documented on malung-tv-news... This is the fucking person who is sort of responsible for me being in London, associating with Abu Hamza... Read about it on the front cover of the Socialist Wanker...

Media pundits here in London reckon that despite the constant criticisms of loss of credibility and the occasional erratic management and chronic financial problems and several other problems too, the SW is still an influential media organ, although critics have blasted it as a "propaganda tool" of reactionary forces, as evidenced by this report and readers' reactions to it. Other critics accuse it of cheap nihilistic cynicism. But to me, it really shows promise...

New ideas, new blog to advertise, lots of new books

Well, I'm here... I suppose I'll have to find something to say, then...

Paulette has a new blog in English this time, you might want to look at that... She opens with a quote from Beyond Good and Evil: "Let he who fights with monsters see to it he does not himself become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you", the Nietschzean bitch... (oh don't be like that e Paula, fica na boa, you know I like you...)

The dealer-man foned me up as I was sitting here in my virtual office (the requirements are: internet cafe that really does good caffe, and must be free to smoke...)

provisional nerve centre of operations

a very nice one on Bethnal Green Rd here... Oh, there I go giving away my location again... He's saying he got some good new stuff in, cheap... I didn't even have a moment of struggle... Sorry man, I'm taking a break, I say, and it was so easy to say it's absurd... He hangs up quick, doesn't try to push it...
Respect for that, S___ my man...

Now that I solved all my problems I feel a great emptiness... What on earth will I be able to write about? What on earth will I live for?

Something funny did just happen though... I was looking wistfully through an estate agent's window at properties to let and sell as I walked past (like I seem to find myself doing these days)... The guy inside clocked me looking, made eye-contact, made as if he were half-thinking to come out the shop to invite me in to try and sell me a £200k leasehold...

Total astonishment from me as I walk on. Realised it was the more-or-less scruffy but elegant appearance, blazer paired with good jeans and nice slip-on leather shoes sort of thing... Looking, but more importantly, feeling less the homeless junkie... Which I never looked anyway, I've got pictures to prove it... Suddenly with the demeanour of someone who might actually have business at the estate agents... Hahahaaa!

What a funny and alien thought.

I also inherited part of a large book collection yesterday. I always had a dream to start a 2nd hand bookshop... Not that I have anywhere to put 1000s of books... I asked Dr Otter (who's gonna start a blog soon) if he knew Charles Shaar Murray... He said "Do I know Charles Shaar Murray? He asks me, do I know Charles Shaar Murray..." like I'm an idiot or something. So very good, I tell him... I just got part of his library which he is heart-wrenchingly having to downsize... Can I store some thousands of books here? (Not like Doc O has the space for it...) Hahahaa! So now I have a lot of books, and Doc O has about half the floor space he used to...

Ciao for now.

Why can't life be portentious and ominous and stormy all the time, like it is when you're fighting for your sanity and there's a voiceover in your head going "London, 2005. Strange things are afoot. Fear on the streets. Anomalies. As the storm clouds mass from the west, a..." [voice fades into background static] and whatever you do, you're doing the right thing, as long as you just keep heading for the true light?

In my beautiful neighbourhood

Add to that

Now I actually read what she published Jesuschrist. "Yeah you can publish anything you like from my blog, do whatever you want with it," I said! And there it fucking is, fuck. With all heroin references expurgated. Oh my God is anyone I know gonna see that? What did I agree to? And it should be the whole story with drugs and everything.

I asked my doctor for sedatives but he didn't give me any. The directory says his speciality is aviation medicine. "What exactly is that?" I asked him. "Oh... various things... fitness to fly... accident investigation..." Accident investigation: poking pieces of bodies smeared over miles of landscape hahahaa... So of course, his attitude would be: "It's just withdrawal. It's easy. It's better than being dead" with a and-what-else-do-you-want curtness. Yeah, that's about right.

Oh shit I can't believe that was printed under my Real Name (tm) in 5000 magazines. Why that one? And why couldn't you leave in the drugs? I'd have some great pictures for you...

I also saw a respected psycho-therapist today... I showed up at his door and sat talking to him for a while. I asked him if I should pay for that and he said: if you feel like, amused by the first patient ever in 23 years of practice to walk up to his door and introduce himself. He belongs to the story because of his connection to Pakistan - he runs a heroin treatment centre in Karachi, a 12 or 16 or whatever million people dusty concrete megacity rising from desert and salt marshes... The heroin there, to me or you, would seem comically cheap, yes it would. It's also one of the two places I've had a gun in my face. Internet entity Deek sent me to talk to this man... Perhaps more on this later...

On media

Somebody has started printing my ramblings in a magazine... really, it's true... so I suppose I'd better publicise this publication in my small way... If you live in the Shoreditch (derived from soer dyke - Anglo-Saxon for town sewer...) find this um Shoreditch-based um publication Ditched... but you, my faithful friends, you'll have read it all before... Start-up magazines are like rock bands or DJs in London... they come, they go... I'm not being motherfucking self-deprecatory... This publication has taken to publishing strange things from my blog which should maybe remain unpublished... The website is here, with pdfs of the first two issues...

Live lucky, friends... That's what I'm doing... The professional facade still hasn't crumbled... I have to arrange some photogs to take some author photos in Manchester, Reading, Surrey, as far apart in England as you can get, find some chimps in the US for a publicity stunt (chimps and typewriters and the works of Shakespeare?) ... and oh yes, I think I'm homeless or soon will be or something? Have to remember to stay sort of sane, that was one thing. Not sure... Let's see what's happening, perhaps I'd better take stock rather than sit here rambling...

I'M BACK!!!

and realgem photos back soon, too

A week ago I was injecting almost a gram of heroin every day. What am I here to write on the fourth day of withdrawal?

How many of you have been here? If you haven't, ah well... Better not ever visit... you're not missing anything... I am: my customary fluency for a turn of word...

What am I here to write? WAR. War interests me. What human experience pushes you to unimagined extremes? I've never been to war. I've been in a war's backyard. My humanitarian parents took me there to bring me up... I've seen a woman burned head to toe in napalm... She was all orange... Don't know if that was the scar tissue, or some sort of ointment... That was when the Soviets were still in Afghanistan. The Afghan women washing clothes in the canal by the refugee camps in the god-forsaken Waziristan desert ran alarmed when we drove up... The only Europeans they'd ever seen the Russians who burned raped machinegunned poisoned their villages?

[AND: I just found a third thing that DOES NOT exist on the internet! I will bring it for you! It is a poem written by a British colonial officer stationed in a remote North-West Frontier posting... "Months of boredom, days of blood... Months of drought, weeks of mud... That's Waziristan..." Don't remember... Let me find it for you... You have to forgive my occasional tendency for Raj nostalgia... It is part of this strange mosaic, as well... And it's also where the heroin comes from, which also makes it part of the story...]

[But surely I would have signed up to go and explore and rule and fight and adventure and learn strange languages and customs in far places if the Empire were still here? Lord Jim, Opium Jones... and KIM! I was Kim...]

And the blood-nails-tearing clawing fight from HEROID back to HUMAN. Heroin is the only real drug. The only one that turns you into a different life-form entirely, changes your cells, mutates you into something else entirely... Check your Burroughs on this one...

SO HOW MANY PEOPLE? How many people ever visit these extremes of mind? Perhaps you've all been here - how do I know? This stinking security. This stifling benevolence. This... this... [Ths is why I resent my (now gone) wife. She has never seen UGLY DEATH in the face, though she thinks she has. Spoiled only-child princess diva, but in my moments of weakness I still cry about her...]

Homeless? They shepherd you through their system of hostels and half-way houses. Addicted? Sent from councillor to detox to doctor to rehab centre. Unemployed? Join this queue, fill this form. AND ALL OF IT: to encourage you to think of yourself as a victim. Fuck them. I will fight them til I die.

To be continued, I must go...

On squatting

...internet cafe shuts in ten minutes, oh dear, not much time.

The best thing is the people you meet, like, over time and come to think of it, all the Brazilians who were all together today at the 93 Feet East - what is that name, by the way? - there is something really strange about that name. So I heard some good music today and there were beautiful chicks and the air is tropical.

Another good thing is the drugged-up cutting-edge underground music you hear.

A bad thing is all the underground music you have to listen to and the drugged-up idiots you wake up on a scorching day like this to find toddling destructively around on the roof, left-over dregs from the neighbours' squat party. No one takes you seriously if you're a squatter and you try and throw people out.

A bemusing thing is the 4-day parties listening to the same record.

On work

God this is giving me a headache. Stinging sweat drips into my eyes, columns of letters and numbers flicker through the fog of my migraine. Some people rob citizens or sell their ass to support their drug habit; me, I am trapped in this newest echoing Kafka-esque nightmare of a job I assured my boss would be simple.

Halt! I challenge you on this “Kafka-esque”! What the stink is it supposed to mean? You find yourself changed into some sort of monstrous vermin? Yes, it does feel like it. Some sort of insect slime pools under my chair. My shades slip from my slippery face carapace. My clicking mandibles feel sticky and fuzzy with congealed ichor and plaque, where's the Sensodyne? But wait, get this done first.

I am trying to create a mathematical formula to determine the ideal title for a best selling novel. The point of the exercise is to produce something like this (Scotsman story on the mathematics behind Murphy's Law) or this (formula to calculate the funniest sitcom) for the Daily Mail. These press items, you will of course note immediately being a media-savvy blogging type, is your typical spurious PR page-filler, plugging British Gas amd UKTV Gold respectively in this case.

I have been poring over the lists of New York Times best sellers over the last 50 years, converting the titles into numbers and manipulating the arrays in different ways and converting them back to letters again, like some sort of a sordid and fevered Cabbalist, in order to determine what is the single perfect book title that manifests all of the rules and patterns laid out.

I can't help but feel a sensation of "this is your life", spread out before me: a never-ending Excel spreadsheet stretched over a surrealist landscape, littered with empty syringes, a sprawling Jekyll-and-Hyde game where Jekyll classifies paper clips in an incomprehensible never-ending labyrinthocracy and Hyde rots in a pointless narcosis.

Alive and kicking...

...feebly, though. I am going to gratuitously antagonise some of the people around me to bring the fire of enmity and conflict into my life.

There are doorways to other worlds hidden all around us (we sink deeper and deeper in a happy world in the middle of the day) - some internet fool has even taken it upon themself to post some of them to the WWW (regularly updated catalogue of UK portals into hell).

[[cut cut cut snip snip snip]] bad new censored

And I just remembered that there are other characters in this story as well but they haven’t made an appearance in ages and ages.

Sometimes I am reminded of life going on somewhere, outside, like when the pretty brown waitress in the cafe across the road smiled deep into my eyes and enjoyed me enjoying staring not-quite-surreptitiously at her god-help-me beautiful tits! If she'd been a Spice Girl she'd've been GREEDY SPICE she said.

Realgem is getting... is it getting? Is it "boring"? ... Where did the pictures go? Where did the stories? Where the joie de vivre?

Only by inspiration! Only driven!

:: Back tomorrow with stories, from the frothing edge of lunacy, from a life fuckin damn right less ordinary, from where you will one day wish you had been right from the start!!!! ::

Interfering with natural selection

I walked into a centre for drug addicts - a few minutes’ walk further down my new street - for the first time in my life on Wednesday. I walked down the street in open shirt, beautiful scorching late afternoon sun bathing my skin in the delicious outdoors sensation of trickling sweat saturated in exhaust fumes.

The intercom by the door marked “Addaction” buzzed out a challenge. I identified myself as a new prospective customer and was let, through a double-door airlock security system, into the dark cool interior of the building. The staff of the centre were lounging around on sofas and smiled at me as I entered – there were no other clients present.

A ginger-haired social worker type put me through a brief interview, started a file on me, and we discussed what they could do for me. What I am really hoping is that they will help me obtain proper legal accomodation. I am depressed, you see - I have mental health problems, I am severely addicted to heroin, and it’s all because I need a place of my own. This is what I explained to them.

Paying market rents is still out of the question. If I stopped burning all my money on drugs I could afford it, yes, but I resent paying such ridiculous amounts of money to a greedy landlord. A great many people in London spend – what? Easily three-quarters? – of their income on a place to live, and this makes them, immediately, a slave to their employer and a slave to their landlord, unable to afford to fuck either of them off. I need to arrange myself something better. A council place or a housing association place, which I could eventually sub-let when I go traveling. As a single young male, this is practically impossible. Oh, but I’m still married, and hopefully I can plead mental health problems and hepatitis and thereby jump the queue.

Why has this never occurred to me before? The welfare state throws money at us scum. At the feeble and fucked up and unfit. The social Darwinist and cryptofascist in me screams. I know a girl who gets thousands of pounds, computer equipment, free furniture – a reward for being dyslexic. Call me insensitive or ignorant, but what’s that all about? Basically, a reward for being dumb. Aren’t they really fucking with the brutal process of natural selection, here? What sort of a nation are they breeding, this society that rewards and nurtures stupidity and weakness? Well, let’s see if I can play this game.

When I was a young and zealous anarchist I used to rinse the social system for all I was worth. I saw benefit fraud as a valid act of resistance to an irredeemably fucked up system. Then I went conservative for a while – proud to be self-sufficient, refusing to touch their welfare money and refusing to give them mine in taxes. But now it looks like I’m leaning back the opposite way again, due in no small part to a futile and impotent hatred for English culture and the society it has spawned.

The ginger-haired type set up an appointment with a doctor for me, who will be able to prescribe me methadone and sedatives. He outlined how the drug-care establishment here works. He promised to get me information about social housing. Then I spoke to a nurse, promised to come back for blood tests. Drank a plastic cup of instant coffee, ate some digestives and got up to leave.

On my way out, ginger-haired social worker loaded me up with drug paraphernalia. A choice of syringes and colour-coded needles of different sizes. Little satchets of citric acid, because brown heroin won’t dissolve in plain water. Pretty little clear ampoules of clean water. Antiseptic swabs, which I tear open and pull half out of their packets and light – the alcohol-saturated swab burns brightly to cook up the heroin solution, instead of a lighter which will burn your fingers before the solution boils. Makes shooting drugs such a convenient pleasure. Like a child impatient to play with a new toy I hurried home with my trove of goodies.

Ghost stories

The film which grows on the saucers of water left unattended in the séance room. We peel it off the surface of the water and grow ectoplasmic cultures in the warm cupboard under the sink. Globules can be used (must be kept carefully wrapped in wet newspaper, tin foil and plastic bags) to seed opponents’ dwellings with ghostlets. The quivering blobs of raw apparition generally develop to maturity in a couple of months at the most... A strange atmosphere can usually be sensed within a couple of weeks.

Paranoia is your laboratory for concocting strange beings. The "magically controlled paranoia" is a matrix for programming information structures that take on a life of their own.

Damn this central heating. It won’t stop rattling. I drum out a few patterns on the radiator to see if some intelligent entity wishing to establish communication is behind the noise. I can’t tell if we get some sort of an interaction going. Probably just the pipes.

Tucked in with all the ghosts and spirits. Sleep tight, my son, and don’t open your eyes until the sun is up again. I’m trying to find a place to live with like-minded people, who aren’t afraid of ghosts, or of breaking rules made by ghosts.

I’m scared of ghosts. I’m fucking terrified of them. I’ve spent a lifetime running away from them. I don’t fucking like ghosts.

"Call a priest, then."

So then we’d have a Christian ghost... and then what?

Where we're at

I'm sitting in a net cafe on Bethnal Green Road, plotting how to steal a sheaf of A4 printer paper from the printer so I can print out a load of stuff at home to send my boss. Things are so tight I can't even buy printer paper without feeling the hit... I don't see anyone, I sit at home (took the room by the front door so I can go in and out without running into anyone), I read and I contemplate beginning to write. I'm a writer but I've never written anything (this doesn't include articles and press releases which had financial incentives connected).

I pore over the endless pages of text I've produced and feel dirty... there's something spine-shiveringly squalid about it all... And I cringe painfully at the thought of teeth biting down on rough paper, sandals scraping paving-stones, washed hands rubbing on cardboard (for me, could as well be fingernails on blackboard; sliding down a banister which turns into a straight-razor).

I'm reading And the Ass Saw the Angel, by Nick Cave... Language of breath-taking beauty, describing a world of utter squalor... Oh, look! Here's a part of something I wrote and actually completed...

The Dice Man

Several inexplicable months after reading The Dice Man, I found myself living in Kathmandu, Nepal. By day I wore a suit and tie to work, teaching English at a prestigious private language institute. By night, I lived the life of a hustling street junkie with the gutter scum of an ancient, gloomy and crumbling city.

I realise that this may do little to advertise the life-changing potential of this novel. This sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde game is, however, entirely in the spirit of Dr Luke Rhinehart’s programme of deliberate destruction of the ego.

With his every act determined by a throw of the dice, he sets out to overthrow the tyranny of his own personality. He has a vision of a new man – a random man, unfettered by the normal human limitations of habit, routine and predictability. In this lunatic quest, he lurches from one outrage to the next. From respectable beginnings as a successful psychiatrist and happily married father, through uninhibited sexual experimentation and flirtations with madness and murder, he ends up a fugitive, a hunted enemy of the state.

A strange sort of a self-improvement manual, it may seem. 10 Habits of Highly Successful People it’s not. The Dice Man is a frightening, mocking book about destroying yourself to save yourself.

Right about now, if you are at all sensible, you will be wondering if perhaps I took it all just a little too seriously. It may be a very funny, extremely intelligent, sexy and subversive novel, but isn’t that all it is – a novel?

This is undoubtedly the sane approach. But as I read, a revolutionary thought wormed its way into my mind. You don’t have to be who they told you that you are: the teachers, the parents, the educators, the friends, the colleagues and associates whose expectations of you tie you down to your present self as surely as steel cables. Dare to believe that anybody can be anybody.

And so I embarked on my own deranged quest in the spirit of the dice. The book was not solely responsible, but it provided the rationale and the philosophy. My pilgrimage lasted three years. It transversed Europe and Asia, it encompassed drug addiction, smuggling, homelessness, hunger and possibly psychosis. Now sane, I look back with a feeling of unreality and slight disbelief.

It is thus that I arrived, ultimately, in London. I arrived in an unknown city with a shoulderbag and not a penny to my name and started a new life from scratch. Never before had felt the fierce joy of total freedom. And, paradoxically, never before had felt total responsibility for all I did and was.

Gleeful descent into incoherence

What if we all had periscopes? What if we spied on each other all the time, instead of watching TV?

Previous to the voyeurist revolution this sort of activity was highly frowned upon, but has become increasingly accepted in recent years.

Spying and counter-spying electronic equipment proliferate. Most people recognise some sort of limits, though…

The end times are coming, despite New Labour’s assurances to the contrary. Banks and credit systems will fail. Don’t be a fool! Rely on governments no longer! Your funds are safe with us.

A New Labour market researcher without numbers to call is like a camp guard without corpses to check for gold teeth… They got my number from somewhere and phoned me up for some opinions…

"Opinions? What sort of opinions?"

"Oh I don’t mind, any opinions."

Surreal as everything is getting, I look and I see that it is good. I’m God. I created it thus, and so it must be good. By very definition. I don’t know why, I don’t remember right now, but I must have had a good reason. I made it easier for my ex-girlfriend to get laid than me - I don’t know why - I created it thus and it must be good.

How do I know I’m God? When I take drugs, other people stop working.

I am God, smiling benignly on my creation as I walk down Mare Street, especially on the Turkish girl in the black dress.

What steps can be taken to increase mental alertness and decrease the amount of stupidity?

(Pranayama: good for all things! Acne, addiction to internet porn, homelessness, unemployment, self-loathing, puritanism, shyness, earwax, bad breath, genocidal rage and airplane hijackings! The warm endorphin glow after sex (also yoga or exercise) is conducive to intelligence. Eating well is absolutely necessary to intelligence.)

Input-output

I am not writing much but this does not matter. I am in an input rather than output phase. I'm reading a lot, feeding my head. This began on holiday, when I read, and realised the reason I don't read in London is not because I don't have enough time, but because I feel like I don't have enough time.

Does quantum physics recognise such a thing as the "speed of time"? The speed of time is by no means constant. Time runs at different speeds in different places. Runs differently in different places. Rushes or meanders, rolls inexorably or starts and stops fitfully. In most of London (epicentre of measured time, straddling the GMT zero-meridian; historical home of time-is-money capitalism and rationalist mechanical materialism) time flows fast, at a high but constant velocity. But there seem to be regions of turbulence, places where eddies and whirlpools result in unpredictable time effects, extreme subjective time-distortions. Possibly related to drugs, it occurs to me ("I'm waitin' for my man... He's never early, he's always late..."). Some sort of quantum time effect which ensures that dealers are always wherever they are a good quarter-hour after they actually were. Reading, too, seems to slow down the frightening rush of the clock, and so I lounge in a comfortable stasis while the city hurries and scurries all around.

Aaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhh!!!!

Sucked down by the roaring whirlpool, thrashed around, head flopping, slammed into the walls of the wormhole or water-ever this is... Flail blindly in black mud, the water recedes... Stagger to my feet, a swamp-thing encrusted in seaweed... Wipe algae from my eyes, grope for my shades... Yes, they're still safe...

I have emerged in the twilight netherworld of primitive squat-dwelling lifeforms in East London and I am not sure this is my place any more...

Is realgem dying? I think of the newsagent next door from the last time I lived in the East End...

Somehow, every time over the course of two years when we spoke, the conversation died a confusing and grisly death. Every single time either of us opened our mouths, a misheard phrase or an interruption from a bystander lead to a bizarre non-sequitur lead to both of us gaping at each other in embarassed astonishment, neither of us prepared to risk enmiring ourselves further in the situation by attempting to clarify what he just said and the reason for saying it.

This, come to think of it, must have been one of the most extra-ordinary relationships I have ever had with another human. How can it be that on more than 700 consecutive days, my "How are you?" was met with "No, we don't stock that" or his "That's £1.98, thanks" earned the response "Yeah much better, quite good actually" or when we bumped heads bending over to pick up a dropped 50p: "Oops sorry about that" - "That's okay" - "No, I said sorry about that, I was just apologising" - "Yeah, that's okay, don't worry about it" - "I wasn't going on about it, I was just being polite". Until eventually, we conducted all our transactions in an awkward and strained silence.

Roger of the fearsomely rolling eyeballs accosted me on the top deck of the N253 late last night, demanding: "WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

I badly needed someone to do this. Often it is difficult to know what you think about any given subject unless you have tried to articulate it to someone. I made a fair attempt to answer honestly. I summarise:

No, I don't. I will. Or I won't. Come back and read later. I am knocked out of stride by the blinking of the cursor on the computer screen; it is not regular. Like the Chinese water torture, the chaotic period of the cursor flashing is driving spikes into my head. I want the cursor to blink with some sort of a regular rhythm.

What do I want?

Knowing what you want is 99 per cent of the race run. Once you know, no matter how impossible or implausible it is, you can throw yourself into getting it. Happy is he who knows what he wants. Or then again, perhaps not.

You can check-out any time you like but you can never ever leave

A week ago I am still in Milan when this email drops into my inbox:

From: xxx
To: Mike H
Subject: bad news..

Hi mike,

Sorry to trash your holiday vibe but...

Eviction papers arrived for 11th May. Council has registered themselves.
Looks like the end of the road. Any ideas?

The big old house at C___ Rd (ref to this) was previously still registered as the property of the non-existent Greater London Council, dissolved in the 80s by Margaret Thatcher. But it seems there is a light at the end of every legal limbo, and the light at the end of the tunnel, famously, is always the head-lamp of an oncoming train.

Any ideas? No. Back to London. Jump the Stanstead Express, jump out at Tottenham Hale, take the train to Finsbury Park, emerge into a warm night and the grime of Seven Sisters Road. Coming back to London feels like returning home, a warm breeze caresses, but I am soon enveloped by loathing and depression again. I let myself into the house surreptitiously and creep up the stairs. I cannot put words to it, the contempt and ill-will I bear towards my squatting friends, these people who have been my family for five years. (Are you reading this? Don’t sneer yet: you might be one of the exceptions.)

Someone breaks another house in the night when I am in a deep narcotic slumber. Thank goodness I don’t have to look after myself; disaster might result. I am told to choose a room. The squatters thereby display a degree of loyalty I suppose that I admire. This is no small thing in London, free real-estate, but I am surprised these people still want to live with me. Dr Otter tells me (approximately): “They want you, Mike, they need you. Having someone like you around, someone of your level of umm… someone of your level, it validates their whole thing, their whole way of living. It makes them feel like real people.” Whatever that means.

Why am I so contemptuous towards so many of the people I see daily? No one radiates energy… No one is beautiful… Empty, ugly, greedy faces… They sit there, looking, waiting for someone to feed them something… Black holes in the astronomy of inter-personal energy dynamics… But maybe all just a reflection of my own depressed state…

Dried blossoms from the pink trees blow down the street in desultory rustling little whirl-winds… seems like autumn already… the wind blows dry little blossoms (pink when they’re on the trees, the first colour of spring) through the open window to carpet my floor which I don’t bother to sweep any more… maybe I should be packing and arranging some transport…

Juggling with samurai swords… my waking life is a chemical balancing act, the goal a psychopharmacological equilibrium between narcosis and withdrawal which would empower me to maintain normal functioning… my heroin consumption has reached ridiculous proportions, my poverty will soon be dire and absolute, my situation no longer viable. Wednesday ten am the bailiffs attend this big old house, probably to brick it up and leave it empty for the crack-whores and junkies. By then I need to be moved, and then I cure myself of this addiction…

Meanwhile, Mike H continues to meet deadlines on time and maintains, yet, the appearance of professionalism. No one who didn’t know would look at him and think this was his story…

Memo to self (2003, recovered)

1. Maintain the appearance of professionalism at all times.
2. Be generous with the truth on your invoices.

What’s next for realgem? Who knows… Stay tuned…

Obscure content

Here is a poem called Inkaar-e-Iblees, by Pakistani poet Allama Iqbal, in which Satan/Iblees the rebellious angel addresses God/Allah.

This is part 2 in the series of things Mike Camel can't find anywhere on the internet.

This version, by an unknown translator, was published in the Peshawar-based English-language daily newspaper Frontier Post in 1999.

The Frontier Post is running again, after being burned down by a mob of extremists in 2001, after inadvertently publishing a letter to the editor which was seen as insulting the Prophet (SAW) and therefore blasphemous. (BBC story)

The Post maintain it was part of a conspiracy against the independent newspaper and the Pakistani people. The former editor of the paper, Rehmat Shah Afridi, remains in prison after being framed by police for the possession of large quantities of drugs in 1999. This relates to his investigations into cooperation between Pakistani anti-narcotics forces and drug barons.

Some Frontier Post staff were arrested on charges of blasphemy (a capital offence) over the letter. Mohsin, the sub-editor on the letters to the editor pages that day, explained the fatal slip as being due to the fact he was recovering from heroin addiction at the time. From the pages of Jang (Urdu daily with English pages), blackly comical:

After hearing 24 witnesses and examining the record the inquiry judge observed, "There was mismanagement in the newspaper and a single individual has to perform the duties of five to six persons." In addition, he noted, the staff of the daily was not paid "for the last four to five months". The judge's statement further said: "Mehmud Shah Afridi, who was not a professional (journalist), took charge (as) the Editor and thus the state of affairs (went) from bad to worse."

The tribunal was able to establish that Munawar Mohsin was "a drug addict for the last ten years" who escaped from the heroin ward of the Government Mental Hospital Peshawar a couple of days before he was assigned the op-ed pages of the Frontier Post. This naturally had to "result in blunders".

The report concludes that the publication of the letter was a result of personal negligence on Mohsin's part and the general negligence of Aftab Ahmad and Mehmud Afridi.

The Peshawar court awarded a life sentence and ordered Rs50,000 in fine to Munawar Mohsin in a blasphemy case over the printing of the blasphemous letter in the daily Frontier Post. The additional district and session's judge, however, acquitted other co-accused, Aftab Ahmad and Wajihul Hassan.

Using email reduces IQ more than smoking dope

... according to the London Insitute of Psychiatry (story here), as seen on many news sites. A more accurate headline might be: "Information overload reduces IQ more than smoking cannabis." Beware unchecked infomania.

More about morphine

"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as Morphiumsuchtig. The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine-seeking'. I prefer 'seeky' because it means you have an inclination to seek morphine."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.

"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time - even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict', because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."

-conversation between Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe in the novel Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson 1999)

There's one in Bologna as well

Why?

Why is Mike H writing about all of this? Logically, I suppose there can only be a limited number of reasons:

-some sort of exhibitionism

-Mike H believes his writing is really good and will entertain people, or

-he is in pathetic desperation waiting for the chance email that will save his life to drop into his inbox.


Realgem photography: many good pictures but realgem regrets that at the moment the resources are not available to publish them.

Dreams and the street outside

I am lost in India... I am lost in this dream... incomprehensibly vast, vastly incomprehensible... A mad network of Goan train stations with Portuguese names... Potholed highways cutting through jungle forest... I am searching for something in an incomprehensibly huge place...

Emerge blinking into the sunshine in the street... Scummy, half-way elegant but wearing 5-day-old clothes... Drug-dealing here is an incomprehensible business, a game of glances and strange little gestures down the street... I don't understand anything... Walk up and down the street looking for the man... Weird Maroccies hiss at me from shadows, call me il Portoghese for some reason... Why can't this be easy like in London?

Mikey Camel flees South; agents of the Invisible U'lema follow

Profound respect to any nation that takes coffee and ice-cream this seriously.

This is finally really, really it

April 5 - abandon the book project, with a sigh of relief if truth be told. In no state for this: nodding off over my computer keyboard, addressing potential sources in a funereal narcotic slur. Clarence House controls too tightly anyone connected in any way to the royal wedding ceremony. The major newspapers are paying thousands of pounds for interviews. We can't do anything. We tried - it's like detective work, trying to unearth sources. Fun while it lasted. Made a little money.

April 9 - Lazy enters his 26th year a peeled ball of exposed nerves. Pain returns; laughter returns; feeling returns; lust returns - a whirlpool violently churned as they pour back in. I laugh while my skin crawls and the cold burns and that awful twitchy electric sensation spread. This is easy. It's almost comical, how easy it is. I freeze inside and shiver, and then I pour with sweat; me and the gypsy princess are gonna go and visit S___, so I get my coat ready and giggle hysterically and wait for a hot wave to hit before emerging into the cold outside. How can a mere drug do all of this?

[Interlude]

In a city far away, a city with minarets and hazy yellow sunsets and dust hanging in the air, a city that smells of sewage, opium and jasmine... (This is a highly romanticized way to describe Peshawar, for that is where we are...)

Zeb owns the cigarette shop by the cemetary, sells me charas from Kabul, and is a dirty old bastard. ‘Hey Michael, can your friends in England send us some blue videos? Here the copies are always shit.’ - ‘Hey Michael, do you fuck that girl, whats-her-name? Can I have a turn one time?’ - ‘Hey Michael, we’re going to get a girl - only 50 rupees each. What do you mean, no? Don’t like fucking? Everything is possible...’ - ‘Hey Michael, look at my dick, it’s covered in sores. I caught something from a dirty whore. Your father’s a doctor, you know about these things, you look at it and tell me what’s wrong.’

Today, it's ‘Hey Michael, are you a Muslim?’ I shake my head. ‘Repeat after me,’ Zeb says. "La-illaha-illalah..." He recites the creed with Mike H repeating, stumbling over the Arabic lams and ‘ains. Zeb nods his head, satisfied. ‘That’s it?’ Mike H asks. - ‘That’s it.’

Zeb fixes a carefully packed cigarette laced with Afghani black into a magnificent wooden cigarette holder and lights it. He sits there like a fat, greasy Buddha and clouds of blue smoke rise around him. His features relax into an expression of profound peace and tranquility.

‘Sometimes, Michael, give also thanks to God,’ he says, smokes with great relish, passes the joint.

[end of interlude]

April 11 - Sometimes, give also thanks to God. I thank God for the soft and warm figure of la gitana to hold me through the first difficult nights. I thank God I still have friends. I thank God for my job (no regular hours; I remain absolute master of my own time and cannot imagine the regimented hell of a real 9-to-5 life) and that it is one thing I haven't lunched out. I thank God I still have money and am credit-worthy and for the £1000 cheque that arrived in the mail today; I thank God for the bottles of vodka I can easily afford, the eighths of skunk, the diazepam, temazepam, tramadol and methadone that I need to knock myself out. I thank God, for all that I have been a junkie and border-line insane, that I have been self-contained and self-sustaining and that I don't lay my trip on others.

I'm going away soon... I feel... I feel... stretched...

Giving something back to the internet

There are some things I just haven't been able to find on the internet. I am in possession of at least three such things. Here is the first of them: the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, in a version which is ostensibly a translation by Aleister Crowley of the verses as recorded by Lysias who was a follower of Pythagoras. It is right:::here:::

Notes from the underground

What is happening to realgem?

Astonishment of astonishments. Lazy has been commissioned to research and write a book (a short one, albeit). By Thursday lunchtime. This probably implies some 18-hour working days ahead.

So the boss phoned me up and asked me to write a book by the end of next week. He says to find myself a female assistant, as interviewees (yeah, we have to do all that as well as write it) are often less threatened when approached by a woman. So I arrange to fly the lovely female assistant here from Milan at extremely short notice. This is nice. Feel like an international player, here. "Hi Z__, got a job for you, I'm buying you a ticket to London, how long do you need to get ready?"

This was the first clean day after another relapse. Truth is: Lazy never did stop taking opiate chemicals, whatever he told you. Well, for a few days maybe. So, the story is: write a book in one week, while withdrawing from heroin. Does this remind me of William Burroughs and a famous book he wrote? Illustrious precedents...

But shit, this one is to do with the Charles and Camilla royal wedding thing... We will have Charles having sex with giant millipedes and Camilla selling her body for Dr Benway to use it as a laboratory.

The going is definitely getting weird, here. Time for the weird to get pro. Concentrate.

postscript to the note - Why take heroin?
I am profoundly sick, sick, sick of stunningly beautiful women (spoiled self-satisfied bitches) who have become accustomed to instant obedience by a life-time of adulation by men who eagerly ask "Off what?" when commanded to jump. Heroin grants me freedom from beautiful women. Sometimes, help me God, I need that freedom... just for a bit of breathing space... You can call me a junkie and some people do. But why does no one make disapproving remarks about my dependency on beautiful women? I wish I were homosexual, really I do. I tried it once but I didn't like it. But I suppose these people have their own problems, too...

But you cannot separate the sexual drive from the creative drive, the force of anti-entropy that drives to write, to create, to push things forward... Kill the sex drive and you kill the primary motive force... Energy is energy and you cannot so easily split it into categories... It is maybe a misnomer to call it the sex drive; all these energies are manifestations of the same primal life-energy...

An allegorical photo-essay

The decision is made once again ("Even if you have broken your vows a thousand times - come, come, yet again come/For ours is not a caravan of despair")... the monkey shall be cast into the depths of Hades once more... the ritual deleting of dealer numbers over breakfast in a cafe some of you will find familiar...

Escape is not so easy... Circumstance conspires... Come evening, and somehow we find ourselves in possession once again... It is almost as if there were a conscious agency at work, engineering ghastly mocking coincidences...

Ext: night. Detail

Ext: night. Detail.

On a Lovecraft tip... unholy brain chemistries... reveal non-Euclidian angles which should not be... which reveal the supra-dimensional path to an unholy church...

Trapped! Herr Otter commandeers a vehicle

But there is no escape from the ghastly pagan puppet-god