Saturday, 17 April 2010
STUFF – THE CONFESSIONS OF A HOARDER
Compulsive, pathological pack-rat? I prefer collector, or possibly even ‘keeper of stuff’. "Stuff"is a word aimed derogatorily at the things I cherish by people who don’t understand. I, however, find the word amicable, even affectionate. Junk, on the other hand!
Recently I moved flat. This was actually a joyous occasion ruined by four flights of stairs. Preparatory work included the "keep/bin" game my girlfriend and I play at regular intervals involving books (always "keep"), old newspapers (glance through, always "keep") and old receipts or pieces of scrawled upon paper (is it a health and safety hazard? Well…"keep")
So the corks travel. With Weather Boy 2 (don’t ask) no less.
When deciding what to keep or bin, it is important to hold your nerve. Don’t be fooled into believing a Jeff Buckley video, which hasn’t worked in years, should be tossed away. It shouldn’t. This may appear unreasonable, but reason shouldn’t play a part in these decisions. They are purely emotional.
Broken keyring? Present from Naples. Empty Tindersticks case? It’s my favourite album.
Bibliomania is the term psychologists would use for people who gather books. I have hundreds if not thousands of them, and once calculated, in a moment of clarity that it would take me 16 years to read them at a rate of 50 a year. Suddenly my own mortality was at the fore of my thoughts so I bought more and read faster.
Another drawer is filled with notepads loitering at various degrees of completion. Most of them contain ideas for songs that will probably never be completed or lists of things which will never be fulfilled. Normally these scribbles capture a moment of innocent optimism, which will be crushed by a second glance only days later. The idea is now a bad one, and only by consigning bad notebook to drawer and replacing with clean slate, can I ever redeem myself.
Something to remember about notebooks is that if used, they will inevitably run out. This is a fate I can’t bear to contemplate and again appears to serve as a reminder of my own mortality. It’s better to have many notebooks with the continual optimism of a fresh start.
None of the odd things I acquire have any sellable value. That never enters my mind. I’m also aware that many of them have little or no function. I just like looking at them, or even better finding them. I have somewhere a stone from Kirkcaldy beach, a napkin from a restaurant in Texas I can no longer remember the name of, and a Cat in the Hat postcard from whom I’ve never learned. Just when these things turn up, I don’t know, but I do know they undoubtedly will.
THE CAULDRON
This City of Beauty and Vanity
This City of the Burrell and Bearsden
This City of Paddy's Market, the Barras
and "How's it gaun Hen?"
This City of Raucousness and Violence
This City of Gentleness and Silence
This City of Papes and Proddi-dogs with a
sprinlking of, and
This City of Generous Heart and Smiling Face
regardless of religion or ethnic race.
This City of Culture and Degradation
This City, This Nation within a Nation.
This no Mean City.
THIS GLASGOW!
John Stewart Wood 1993
THE SHRIVELLED APPLE
It was August in the summer of 2004 and I was staying in a sleepy little town called Kobarid, set deep in the lush green valleys of north-western Slovenia. I had spent the day travelling by bus to the town via the spectacular Vrsic Pass in the Julian Alps, a steep and rocky mountain road that was once the scene of heavy fighting during the 1st World War. The road climbed up the mountain, and upon reaching the top I had two hours to walk around, admire the spectacular view and survey old bullet-ridden outposts that once guarded against any German advance upon the front line of the Allied Italians. On our descent on the other side of the pass the bus meandered down the mountain side through a series of hell-raising hair pin bends, before finally the terrain changed from rocks to stunning green forest and the road followed the path of the crystal clear Soca River, made turquoise green in appearance due to the colour of the unique rock beneath its path.
I had read about Kobarid in Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and upon arrival I was struck by the town’s likeness to his description in that magnificent book. The quaint little town square with picturesque church bell tower was surrounded by whitewashed old-style buildings that gleamed brightly in the hot summer sunshine. I made my way on foot to a campsite located just outside the town and ordered a beer at the reception before setting up my small tent and venturing out to visit a variety of places including old 1st World War trenches, a huge memorial monument and the town’s enthralling war museum. In the evening I found a friendly little bar called Cinca Marinca in the town square and had some food before pulling up a stool at the bar and ordering a couple of beers. I got speaking to a Dutch guy called Fritz who was also staying in the town and whose 36th birthday it happened to be. We talked for a few hours with the barman, as the beer flowed freely. Fritz was having marital problems and seemed to be on a mission to get as drunk as possible whilst he rambled on about his wife, who was back at the hotel room. They’d had some kind of argument and he had stormed out of the hotel and decided to get a few beers in the bar to think things over.
The evening wore on and we became merrier from the beer. After an hour or two a man entered the bar with a dog on a lead. He was of medium height and build, looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a while and had long black hair down to his shoulders that was unkempt. He seemed to be a bit wasted and was speaking to some of the other drinkers in quite a loud voice. “Who is that guy?” I asked the barman. He laughed and said, “He is a special guy.” After a while the newcomer started speaking to us at the bar and became involved in our conversation, although he seemed to speak very little English. His name was Daniel and he was a local guy who lived in Kobarid. When the bar closed at the end of the night the barman said that the three of us could continue drinking out on the terrace overlooking the town square. Fritz was extremely drunk and soon vomited all over the wooden floor of the small terrace. He then started arguing over something with Daniel and I was suddenly aware that the conversation had become quite heated. Daniel started speaking in Slovenian to Fritz, who obviously had no idea what was being said to him. When Fritz ignored him and continued talking to me, Daniel fell silent and only spoke the occasional word in English. The conversation was still focused on Fritz’s relationship with his wife and I was saying that he should just sit down and talk to her so that they could sort out their problems. I told him not to worry about it too much. After a while Fritz made some comments about Daniel, obviously thinking that Daniel didn’t know enough English to understand him. “This guy’s a bit of a nutcase, don’t you think?” he said. He was very drunk and was speaking much louder than I think he meant to. I could see that Daniel understood what he was saying and watched his eyes narrow as he butted into the conversation, this time more aggressively. The hostility was clearly directed at Fritz and not me but the look in the Daniel’s eyes told me that he might lash out and attack the Dutchman at any second. Fritz didn’t seem aware of any danger and continued talking in his drunken slurs, but I was becoming more and more concerned that this might end in an outburst of violence. As Daniel’s anger was clearly directed at Fritz, I thought that if I could take the Dutchman out of the equation then I would be able to talk Daniel down and we could all go home without any lasting trauma. “Fritz” I said. “I really think you should go back to your hotel now and chat with your wife. It would be a good time to get all that stuff off your chest, sort it out once and for all.” Fritz, glancing over at Daniel, suddenly seemed aware of the danger facing him, and taking my hint stood up and took the opportunity being offered to him. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” he asked. “Yeah, I’ll be fine man. Just go on and speak to your wife and get some sleep” I replied. He looked at me in the eye and said, “You are wise beyond your years”, before mumbling a drunken goodbye and stumbling off towards his hotel. The tension had been defused, a savage brawl averted.
Daniel seemed much calmer now that Fritz had gone. We finished our beers and I said I’d better be off back to my tent as I had to catch the bus to Postonja in the morning. “Why don’t you come back to my house for a smoke? I have marijuana”, he said. “I’d better not, I have to be up early” I replied. “Oh come on, just one joint!” he protested. At this I agreed. What harm could it do? If I kept him happy by having a joint with him then there would be no problems and I would get a smoke into the bargain! “Yeah okay” I conceded. “But just one as I really have to get the bus tomorrow and there’s only one a day to Postonja”. We walked the short distance to his home, Daniel leading his dog who had been waiting patiently throughout the entire drinking session. From the outside the house appeared derelict, with boards covering some of the windows and the walls in various states of disrepair. He opened the front door which took us into a small passageway. A staircase led up to the next floor, and as we ascended I noticed a huge amount of junk. There was random stuff lying all around, seemingly with no organization at all. The place looked as if it had never been cleaned. There seemed to be no order whatsoever with old books, clothes, unopened tins of food and all manner of strange things scattered everywhere. We entered a room which seemed to be the main living area. There was an old piano in one corner, an antique clock, stacks of old books and newspapers, a large wooden table and chairs, and everywhere, over all the available surface space was a huge amount of disorderly junk.
Daniel pulled up two chairs at the big table and offered me a seat, which I took. He reached over to the piano and lifted a small plant pot from the top of it. Clearing a space in the mess of stuff on the table, he set it down. “Here. Marijuana”, he said. I looked at the small plant, and sure enough it was a weed plant, but it was in such a stage of infancy that it would be no good whatsoever for smoking. He started to rip leaves off it and began to prepare a joint. “It’s too young. You can’t smoke that. It needs to be dry as well”, I said. “No. No. its fine”, he said back in an agitated voice. I was very, very drunk and the fact that this random guy wanted to smoke a tiny, totally unprepared weed plant made me suddenly realize that he might be completely crazy. Just at that moment and as if from a scene in a horror movie, with the light from the candle flickering in the room full of junk, a huge crackle of thunder boomed from the night sky outside and the room was lit up by a flash of lightning. I saw Daniel’s face illuminated over the table, staring back at me with a strange and crazy look on it. I suddenly felt that I might be in real danger and decided that I had to get out of there immediately. “I have to go”, I stammered. “What about the joint?” his surprised voice replied. “No, I have to go now. I’m really drunk and it’s starting to rain heavily out there” I explained. When I stood up to leave his behavior seemed to become more threatening. I asked how to get back outside and he pointed to a door on the other side of the room. This confused me because we had come up a flight of stairs from the ground floor which was level with the road outside. Thoughts of panic began running through my head. Was he trying to trick me or lead me into a trap? He opened the door and to my relief, it did lead outside. There was an uncovered metal staircase leading down to the road.
It was raining heavily outside and there was another burst of thunder and lightning. Then Daniel turned to me and said, “I’m not going to let you leave”. By now I was absolutely terrified. There was no way I was going back into the disorderly house again. “No. I’m going. I really have to get back to my tent”, I said in a strong voice. A kind of stand-off commenced whereby he said that he would stop me from going if I tried to leave and I told him that I was definitely leaving. Finally, seeing no other way out of the situation and being totally against the idea of going back into the house, I told him that he would have to physically stop me from leaving because I was definitely going. “I really don’t want to have to fight with you out here in the pouring rain, but I’m going now”. I said goodbye and began walking down the steps to the road, half expecting Daniel to jump on me and attack me as I left. He didn’t though and went back into his house, closing the door behind him. I walked back to the campsite in the driving rain, fearing that he might follow me down the dark, unlit winding road. I got back to my tent, unzipped the door and got inside. I looked at my watch and it was after 4am! I had to catch the bus in just over 3 hours! How was I going to wake up in time to make it back to the town for the bus? I was totally wasted and had no alarm clock with me. I just lay down and hoped that somehow I would wake up. I closed my eyes and was out for the count immediately.
The next thing I knew I had woken up and there was a noise coming from outside the tent. Suddenly the tent was shaking. Someone was shaking it from the outside! I unzipped the door and peered out. The rain had stopped and Daniel was standing in front of my tent staring back at me. “Wake up. It’s time to get your bus”, he said. He had cycled all the way from the town to the campsite and had somehow found my tent in order to make sure I didn’t miss the bus! Still half drunk and half asleep I started to pack up my things and get ready as quickly as I could. “This is for you”, he said, “Breakfast”. He held out his hand and in it was a small piece of cake which he said contained weed, and an old shrivelled apple. I looked at him to see if he was serious and when I realized that he was, I took the provisions from him. “I’m not hungry just now but I’ll save them for later and have them for lunch. Thanks very much”, I said. I packed up my wet tent with great speed and we both walked back to the town centre as quickly as possible, Daniel pushing his bike along as we went. We got to the bus stop just in time and I said thanks and goodbye to Daniel before jumping onto the bus. I sat down on the back seat, and as the bus pulled out of Kobarid I looked out of the back window to see him cycling off into the rain. I looked down at my hand which still held the shrivelled apple and thought how strange and unexpected life can sometimes be. I remembered the words of the barman from the Cinca Marinca the night before: “He is a special guy”. Yes, I thought, there is definitely something special about Daniel.Drug War
Drugs. Just reading the word is enough to elicit a jerk of even the most resilient of knees. Talking sense about drugs is rare. It shouldn’t be this way. It is actually very easy to talk sense about drugs. The problem isn’t the logic. The arguments are so simple and straightforward that it’s hard not to feel patronising putting them forward. The arguments are well-rehearsed. It’s very difficult to come up with new ones. I think that most people already know them, but don’t face up to the logical consequences. The problem is historical. We happen to live in a society in which some drugs have become socially sanctioned whilst others are socially vilified. The result of this is a set of drug laws that make no sense in the slightest no matter what twisted logic is applied to them.
In the current context, drugs are substances that are absorbed into the body for the purpose of the effect that they have on the central nervous system. In most cases, this effect will be an alteration of some aspect(s) of experience. Alcohol gets you drunk, LSD produces hallucinations and a shift of normal conscious experience. Both are drugs, and this isn’t debated. All the available evidence suggests that humans have always been keen to alter their consciousness in some way or other. Most primitive cultures still existing do this with a combination of techniques, with the ingestion of mind-altering substances having been long ago integrated into various other cultural traditions (or, perhaps just as likely, vice versa).
In most developed countries, we have the situation in which governments have attempted to control the use of drugs. Some drugs are sanctioned by the state, who tax them and make money from them, whilst others are outlawed, criminalising those who use them. What is the basis for this distinction, and what is the most sensible, logical and socially responsible course of action to take with respect to drugs?
As far as I can see, there are three options: 1. Ban all drugs. We decide that changing our natural conscious experience is a bad thing and people shouldn't be allowed to do it, so we make it a criminal offence to take any substance that alters your experience. That would include alcohol and caffeine. Anyone who is caught using any mind-altering substance is deemed a law-breaker….Obviously, this doesn’t appear to be a realistic option. If this was ever to happen, it should have happened before some drugs became widespread in society. Even if they had been banned from an early stage, a black market is inevitable.....as the American prohibition experiment demonstrated so clearly, and the illegal global drug trade continues to. Given the natural urge to alter our consciousness, it follows that banning all substances that did that would be ignoring what it is to be human.
2. Ban some drugs, but allow others. This is the situation we've got at the moment. However, if you go back to first principles, then you have to have sensible criteria for how to draw the line between legal and illegal. How do you decide that X is legal and Y is illegal? It would seem to me that the most sensible way to do this is to base the decision on the evidence concerning the harmfulness of drugs. The drugs that cause the most harm should be banned, the ones that are fairly harmless should be legal. There are still problems with this, as there has to be a line drawn (which will necessarily be arbitrary) between the "harmful" and the "less harmful”. Although this is problematic, it could be done by scientists specialising in toxicology and pharmacology. In 2007, a paper was published in the Lancet that aimed to provide an informed means by which drugs could be classified in terms of the harm that they do, based on the available evidence at the time. The authors of the paper, all distinguished experts, advise that the process by which drugs are classified is “ill-defined, opaque and seemingly arbitrary” (Nutt et al, 2007, p. 1047). Based on a variety of factors (including their physical effects, social effects and addictive properties), they offer a revised list that classifies drugs in terms of the harm that they do. They examined 20 drugs, some of which are legal, some of which are illegal. Here is their list, starting with the most dangerous and going down to the least dangerous:
1. Heroin
2. Cocaine
3. Barbituates
4. Street methadone
5. Alcohol
6. Ketamine
7. Benzodiazepines
8. Amphetamine
9. Tobacco
10. Buphrenophine
11. Cannabis
12. Solvents
13. 4-MTA (aka Flatliners)
14. LSD
15. Methylphenidate (e.g. Ritalin)
16. Anabolic steroids
17. GHB
18. Ecstasy
19. Amyl Nitrates
20. Khat
So, take your pick at where the line should be drawn. Even if you arbitrarily opt for a 50-50 split, you’ve still got to ban alcohol and tobacco whilst making LSD and ecstasy legal. Nobody is saying that this list is definitive. It may turn out that long term ecstasy use has serious neurological effects that we don’t currently know about. What we can be certain of, however, is that alcohol and tobacco aren’t going to get any safer. One person a day dies of acute alcohol poisoning. That’s not long-term use, that’s just someone dying from drinking too much in one session. When you look at the effects of chronic alcohol use, the effects are beyond comprehension, not just in terms of deaths, but in terms of the other burdens that alcohol use places on society. 10 people a year die from using ecstasy. Even when considered proportionately, this isn’t something we should be getting to worked up about (notwithstanding any unknown long-term effects).
The reason why alcohol is legal is a historical accident. When religious puritanity lost its grip on society, certain things became tolerable. The Dry Law was repealed, and the population rejoiced. However, the population at the turn of the last century only really knew about alcohol, and so that's what they demanded. As a result of the demand for alcohol, it was legalised and made widely available. As the population didn't have any knowledge of any other drugs, everything else remained illegal. If this situation had been just slightly different, we might now be in a position when buying a spliff in Tesco’s was no big deal. That's how the decision was made in the first place. It wasn't based on what was most dangerous, but on what there was most demand for at the time. It's not a good way to make a decision like this, so if we really want to be sensible, we need new criteria for what is legal and illegal.
I don't think there's anything really controversial about the logic used here. I’d love to hear of any flaws in the logic (think with your head, not with your knee). But there would certainly be controversy were this to be implemented. It seems obvious that the reason people use alcohol and condemn other drugs is based solely on the fact that alcohol is legal and other things aren't. But that is a historical accident and is not based on any sensible, evidence-based criteria. As such, there is no logical reason for thinking that alcohol is "OK" whilst LSD is not, because, by all sensible criteria, alcohol is by far the most damaging of the two.
3. The third option is to legalise all drugs. Although the most sensible approach is to have evidence based criteria about what is legal or illegal, this is never going to happen. Given that this is the case, the only remaining sensible position is to legalise all drugs. People are rightly scared about this prospect. However, if we can control the sale of and access to alcohol and tobacco (both strong psychoactive substances) then there's nothing stopping us controlling and limiting access to other drugs. Legalising them would wipe out the illegal trade, thus dealing a hammer blow to organised crime. They would be heavily taxed (and highly priced), of course, which would pay for education and healthcare (which are both currently massively underfunded, especially in relation to drugs and alcohol).
Legalisation would also save billions of pounds that are currently being spent in the so-called "drug war" - a war that is being lost on every front by the prohibitionists. These billions of pounds could be better spent.
Most people recoil at the suggestion of legalising all drugs. It's a hard thing to get your head around. However, if you think it's a bad idea, then tell me why......many people use the argument that soft drugs lead to hard drugs. All evidence says this is not the case. There will be some instances of this, but the evidence suggests that there is no direct and inevitable trajectory from soft drugs to hard drugs. Anyway, even if this was the case, the link is probably only due to the “illegal” status of some drugs. Nobody ever suggests that alcohol and tobacco lead to “harder” drugs, even though this logic says that this would be the case.
I didn’t think I’d end up with this conclusion when I started to think about these things. I thought that the most sensible thing would be re-classification, with certain things remaining illegal. But when you look at the effects of the “legal” drugs, then any sensible re-classification becomes impossible. Legalisation is the only thing that makes sense.
Now, if your knee has stopped jerking, have a lovely glass of wine. Just stay off that evil LSD.
INSTALEMENT 1
Jamieson sat in a café at the train station, stirring his coffee. The last few drops a thick tar on the bottom of the cup. He played with the syrup of sugar and thick, bitter coffee with his spoon. The newspaper was turned to the sports pages; he wondered whether they would even reach the end of the season before call ups, call offs and rationing put paid to thoughts of sport. He was going to London. The train was due to leave at midnight, the overnight sleeper. There were a lot of people in uniform, bound for barracks up and down the country. There was a feeling of inevitability hanging in the air, of an unstoppable chain of events having already been set in action and with nothing he nor a million others could ever do. Against this intractable reality he felt compelled to accept whatever fate threw at him, with at least a quiet dignity. He owed himself that much. He didn't feel he was very long for this earth anymore. He looked around the room as a waitress dropped something, a clang jolting him from his dream and he shook his head awake. Everyone around him laughed and he felt compelled to do the same, a small smile curled across his lips.
He thought back to his childhood, those seemingly interminable skies, always stretching as far as their imaginations could take them, to stac pollaidh and beyond, the scree covered mountain's peak mysterious and yet tangible; they would climb it sometimes, in the summer. But like most around the coast of the west of scotland they turned away from the mountains as children, towards the sea, where the wide atlantic ocean crashed in on everyone's lives with vengeful force one day and calm, still beauty the next. The villagers would swim to the islands, or play in the rockpools, mermaid's purses, crabs and smashed up shellfish. The sand was clean, yet it was here that Jamieson first encountered the horrible possibilities of life, amongst the cool waves of their hopes a local shepherd, John MacLeod, was drowned as he got caught up in a swarm of jellyfish as he made his way across to the summer isles.
The kids knew then that not everything in life was going to be innocent. Funny the things you remember, he said to himself, stubbing out another cigarette in the ashtray. He made to play with the cigarette butt in much the same way he did his coffee, the granulated sugar replaced by thick ash, but instead pushed it away and looked up.
He was hit with a sudden sense of deja vu; the feeling overwhelming him, stripping back the years like wallpaper, the dusty, bubbled and torn memories peeling back, leaving him staring at the wall. He remembered he had been here before, an 18 year old, idealistic, off to join the army. His bag containing all that was dear to him, the brown label on his case had borne the address of his parents farm, a paper tag his only link to home, his mother's writing neat and precise, proud. The string tied around the handle, tied tightly, a last act of parenthood before he was lost to his home. There had been no going back. He snapped his head back again and stared again at the wall. The drooping poster on the wall reminded him of the call ups and he'd forgotten about home already. No point in getting himself lost in a reverie when there were more important things to resign himself to. He chuckled again and called the waitress over for another coffee
The swirling high pitched scream of metal against metal smashed the reverie and the train pulled into the station. Time to go.
Finite Time to Meet the Infinite
‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put eternity in the hearts of man’ Ecclesiastes 3:11
Is this why we feel like we will live forever? We recently discussed Rosenbaum's defence of Epicurus, "How to be dead and not care" in a philosophy group. The article assumed no eternal life and attempted to put across that we shouldn’t fear death as it is nothingness, almost like the state before we were born. However, many of us agreed that thinking in this way wasn’t that easy as it was difficult to imagine not existing in some way. Is that because of what is in our hearts?
‘All the rivers run into the sea Yet the sea is not full…the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing ’ Ecclesiastes 1:7, 8
Always planning for the next thing and hoping it will be better than the last. parties, drugs, extreme sports, business. I wonder which point in the cycle is satisfying, just before, during or just after? It’s strange to see how some of these things can eat away in our lives whilst we still thirst for them. Often they start easy with big returns but slowly can consume us and the return gets lower. Of course it’s great to use our talents and achieve but sometimes we allow blessings to become idols. Tolstoy, writer of the classic war and peace said he wished that someone had told him that when he reached the top there would be nothing there. He saw life as meaningless and observed four ways as to how people respond. 1. Ignorance - not seeing the absurdity of life and therefore not questioning it. 2. Aware of the hopelessness but making do with what they have. 3. Aware and are strong enough to escape so commit suicide and 4. too weak to escape despite wanting too. Tolstoy questioned "What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space? What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?. With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: "None." Later in His life he did find an answer to his question, “What meaning has life that death does not destroy? - Union with the eternal God: heaven “ and as C.S. Lewis wrote ‘where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?
About 2000 years ago Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by a well, during their conversation he tells her ‘whoever drinks of this water will thirst again but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.’ John 4:13,14
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