D

Back by the river

Jupiter, Venus and the Moon

I was staring at the skies last week. Venus and Jupiter have been the closest they have been for years. I took these pictures and zoomed in to see this red star. Anyone know what it is? Mars was right over the other side of the sky.

The Iron Lung 5+6

The Iron Lung 4

Reality is what you see

At college I used to talk to Philip Hussey, our course tutor about reality. This grew from a project we had. We were required to design and make a piece of furniture in homage to an artist of our choice. Of course most chose other furniture designers and did a piece in their style.

Seeing the crapness in this I decided to design a piece based on the work of the writer Philip K Dick.

Dick is perhaps best known by the uncultured as the guy who wrote the book that Blade Runner was developed from. If you have read the book you will know much of it could never be transfered in to a mainstream film. Mercerism, the empathic religion was dropped altogether and the script followed a line of questioning what is human. 

Philip K Dicks' two main questions were 'what is human?'and 'what is real?'. I followed the latter for my piece which was a cabinet that had a surface reality of wood that stripped away to reveal a robotic interior, like the bionic mans arm. Beneath this was a third depth of reality represented  by organic fur. Essentially I was trying to get at the sense of reality being tacky and veneer thin, that we could scratch at the surface of it and finds it was not real at all.

I have been a life long fan of his books and still return to reread one every so often. As time goes by the essence of future reality seems like it will be more like a Dick dystopia than any others sci fi dreams. Robotic rats scuttling about in the litter in the gutter, God available in an aerosol advertised on TV.

I put it to Phil that reality is what you perceive. My theory was based on experiments from my teens and early twenties with halucinogenic drugs. We all see the world in a different way and construct it ourselves. 

Phil was well versed in philosophy and heald the view, which I think was then the consensus that reality was fixed and we were party to the truth to a greater or lesser degree dependent on our inteligence and headstate.

Now, I agree we are all different but can't we both be right? If as we keep being told by followers of Einstein that time itself is not linear as we see it but somehow different altogether. That his theory that time and space bend when affected by gravity. That our perception is a relative one.

Or, as I am beginning to think, all this bunkum about black holes etc. is quite wrong. 

Either we are not sufficiently developed to see these things or they are wrong.

It is borderline heretic to question Einstein but I'm starting to.

Religion Receptor Sites - Crossbow Christ

Crossbow cruciform christ with a hyperdermic head shot in to your chest pumping your soul full of god!

The work of neurologist Candace Pert gave us the understanding we now have of peptides and receptor sites. She proved through looking at opioides how these and other drugs work. It was thought at first that these chemicals latched on to just receptor sites in the brain. Further research showed that there are receptor sites all over your body. So when our bodies release natural endorphins the sensation of joy is happening all over your body. Sex is probably the easiest to understand in these terms. We make love with our entire bodies. We experience all emotions all over ourselves. This neuro science ties in with yoga and also the Concept of Mind as spoken of by Gilbert Ryle. There is no mind body duality, no mind, body, soul triumvirate.

There are many different receptor sites mostly that we do not know of yet. Valium and other tranquilisers latch on to the same receptor sites as a natural chemical known as GABA does. After a hard days work, after a run when we sit down endorphins, natural pain killers are released. So too is GABA. This makes us drowsy.

As the user of artificial opiates and tranquilisers the body stops producing its' own. Finally the body stops producing any and the person becomes dependent.

Addicts who recover often find a spirituality that they didn't have before. Many recovery programmes use the twelve steps developed by Alcoholics Anonymous. This requires that the addict accept that they have no control over what they do and they must look to a higher power. It is often said that addiction is not an intelectual problem but a spiritual one. This may well be true. It would seem stupid to risk your life or damage yourself that badly if it was just for fun. It is only in cases of severe pain that society deems opiate use appropriate. It would seem that those who choose to use opiates are not enjoying life. The athlete, training each day takes a harder route to the same buzz.

We know of four different opiate receptors, and is one of these for spirituality triggered by ritual?

From the beginning of mans' history we have used religion. As a survival technique few are better. If you have no food or wealth the belief we are meant for better things, that God can help us makes go the extra mile. As a nation we have pursued our own interests safe in the knowledge that God is on our side. Even today we are still engaged in wars overseas that only our self justification with foundations in religion can support.

Given that we have practised ritualised religion down the centuries it would seem only natural to have some chemical to reward our endeavour. Just as the worker can build that stone wall knowing he will feel reward, a sense of achievment down to the release of opiates so too a spiritual 'buzz' can be found through prayer. Hallucinogens can mimic the sensation of enlightenment. All acid heads will have felt that sensation of having grasped the key to the universe, the meaning of life, god, yet may not be able to point to it. Unable to describe it. Essentially having the sensation of rewards without the source. Just as the junky has his warm rush of comfort with no 2o mile hike prior to it to trigger it.

The Iron Lung 3

The Riots of 2011

Another paper publishes its' findings regarding the reasons why rioting took place. Each enquiry is a journey from the truth. The Police shot Mark Duggan in the head to kill him when they could have easily restrained him. We knew that before the riots began.

Honesty

Stephen Gough is in jail in Scotland. He has campaigned for the right to walk about naked in public. His walk from Lands End to John O'Groats ended with his arrest. When he turned up for court naked he was jailed for 2 years for contempt. The next time he returned to court, presumably to see if the authorities could force him to dress, he was given a further 2 years. Now he is stuck in this cycle of two yearly chunks.

It seems a shame his life may be lost to his belief and wise to listen to what he says. Whilst in Canada it dawned on him that he was good. This meant his body must be good too.

We could all do with some of that, believing we are good. There are so many from church to government telling us otherwise.

Believing you are bad leads to lost lives. Criminals are told by courts they are bad. Many people go through their entire lives thinking they are bad.

I did too. It got me in to a right mess.

My hope from now is to stick to the truth. I shall try to never lie again.

The Iron Lung 2

The Iron Lung 1

It can be easy to become seduced by the gradual improvement of image quality.  Each day we see new breakthroughs in reproduction of reality. Looking back we can see that Jaws could fool us in to fear but if you sent Avatar back to the early seventies it would have appeared as if it were from God.

The cargo cults that the young David Attenborough covered are a good example. Looking at those films of native people making aircraft from bamboo and vine to encourage the bringers of gifts to land shows how easy we are fooled by technology. It demonstrates to us what how our primitive sciences are ill equipped to get to the truth. 

There is much that I find hard to grasp. I only have a basic understanding of Einstein. Once the jumps from his theories are made to black holes and other deep space phenomena, my mind crumbles in the futility of even trying to answer the big questions.

Yet, as most will agree, once you grasp a concept you are able to communicate it in many ways. A concept you only just get requires a repetition of the words . Any straying from this brings your inadequacy to light.

So, a concept that is true may be beautifully simple. Darwins natural selection, evolution, has a simplicity and beauty most of us are able to explain to a child.

Might this not suggest that Darwin was right but Einstein was wrong.

Most good ideas 'feel' right. We have a natural predisposition to act to intuitive laws that no ammount of reasoning can prove. As more understanding of our minds accrues it seems our subconscious works at immeasurable speeds whilst our conscious mind is methodical but slow.

6 mg

Leeds United

Computer Skills

Grey Squirel

Swift meditation on designing and making and religion

We can discuss a piece of furniture that does not exist once we have a design. The design need not be the piece itself, just a line drawing, a mock up even a toyist scale model. None of these are the piece but they are a product we can agree exists.

This is design.

Thinking about a piece, having an idea in your head is nothing. We would have nothing to discuss. We could draw with our hands in the air, do a dance to communicate its' proportions or describe it in words.

All these are the same as the drawing. All are design. The idea is not.

Being an artist or a writer may, after all be like being a christian or a muslim if we call a christian or muslim one who practices, not just thinks of themselves in the abstact as one. In he same way a writer is only a writer if they write on sufficient occassions to distinguish themselves. It isn't a trait like your gender, something you are at all times without returning to practice.

This is quite a breakthrough for me to see religion as a craft. A series of practised moves, rituals.

Is a man a thief because he steals your marbles once, twice or must he do it consistently enough for you not to leave your marbles out on the table when you go for a piss.

With god again there is nothing to see. Some take a flower, for example to be evidence of his existence in the same way the drawings are evidence of the idea, (another thing existing but not in space). But where we can prove a causal link between our idea and the drawing and finally the piece of furniture, there is no provable causal link between a flower and a supernatural god in the sky.

A designer maker is someone who makes things from their own drawings, not from drawings given to him or her. That is the design. If he or she goes dircetly from ideas to wood, as we go straight from ideas to paper, where can the design be said to be?

Do we say that exists only in the mind?

Yet we have agreed that only bodies, not minds are existent in space. The mind can not be said to be anywhere in space and nothing can be spacially in it. 

It is language that lets us down here. It tricks us in to thinking that there is a distinction between designing and making. Our pride takes this fault and developes it to satisfy our ego.We do not want to be rude mechanicals.

Only one thing is taking place. We are not doing two things. Designing seperate from making is an illusary piece of propaganda with routes in Descartes myth of the ghost in the machine, propelled by politicians and everyone else.

The seperation of mind and body and all the metaphor around this we often treat as facts; hearing music inside my head, I thought of you in my minds eye etc. are not factual statements.

And that is the simple reason why I prefer not to use the term designer maker.

More Threads

Nice Threads

English Disease

We look to the Germans to see a version of ourselves that we may be critical of. Every trait we berate is equally well applied to the English. These days it is us who stand alone, confused, trying to equate our sense of superiority  and entitlement with a diminishing global position.

Our god given right to police the world is looking psychotic even to most of us now. It isn't only the Scots who quietly giggle at our pomposity.

In 1906 the sociologist Max Scheler critisized his own people, 'Pure joy in work itself, without an aim, without a reason, without an end. Max Weber, his colleague coined the phrase, 'protestant work ethic' to highlight its' quasi religious nature.

This is something many have felt and the bullying all media give the unemployed, the disabled  is relentless. From Kyle in the morning; a man whose career seems dependent on unemployment and the suffering of others to the tory attacks at each news bulletin on the work shy. Where are these work shy? With nearly 3 million out of work it would seem to be of benefit having a few who would rather not work. Employers having the lazy pushed on to them must get pissed off with Camerons futile attacks.

And forcing people to work when none needs to be done is wildly stupid. As resources are clearly running out the endless talk of growth from both sides of the political divide is endemic of a blindness, a psychotic refusal to see that the world is hotting up. Victorian work ethics are no longer appropriate. Burning tomorrows fuel today just to be seen to be moving is idiotic.

It is true that having no purpose in life leads to depression. It is also true that some can not find purpose without work. Looking back to the recession my generation was spat out in to may be of help. The DIY post punk ethos. The art from poverty was huge. The effects of that creativity, from people who were largely unemployed is the foundation of much of todays culture from comedy to literature.

Placing less pressure on the young, helping them to feel self worth from their own actions is preferable to the constant erosion of their self worth. If I see another channel 4 report on a graduate failing in their applications for shelf stacking jobs I may self imolate.

Anders Breivik

Anders Breivik was formally charged with the massacre of 77 people in Norway. This horrendous crime shocked the world. During his trial I was shocked that the issue of his mental health arose. Paranoid Schizophrenia was the mental illness Peter Sutcliffe claimed to have during his trial for the murders of 13 women in Leeds, Bradford and other northern cities.
Perhaps due to the fact that I have some experience of mental illness it is quite clear to me the difference between a psychopath and someone in mental ill health. The psychopath does not suffer from halucinations or any of the other symptoms associated with schizophrenia. The psychopath is logical, often passes by through life unnoticed. Some are very successful. There are those that believe psychopaths are more successful in business and politics than those of us without personality disporders as they have little or no conscience.
Essentially that is the distinction. Psychopathy is not a mental illness it is a personality disorder. It doesn't come and go. It is the true nature of the incurable psychopath.
Having seen footage of Breivik talking it is clear he is quite without remorse. He believes he did no wrong. He will never 'get better'. He is not mentally ill.

Religion Again

I am sorry. I promised no more on religion. But it won't stop coming.

Just the other day the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland described same sex marriage as 'grotesque.'

This is clearly homophobic yet there is a point to be made. If same sex marriage is against the Catholic faith then you can hardly expect gay people to get married in church. It seems best to leave the church to do its' own backwards thing and get married elsewhere.

Despite this I had a thought that hasn't quite been nailed yet. As I have said earlier if you are debating the existence of god, atheists will win. They win most philosophical debates around religion. Yet there is still that niggle. What is that about?

A question I struggled with was about extremism. How can you be a 'slight' believer? You either believe something or you don't. Here Dawkins et al always triumph. If you are going to paradise when you die the response to a Christian who tells you he is fatally ill should be, 'brilliant! I am so glad for you. How long before you get to paradise'.

This would be daft. Here Dawkins would say that this is because the religious do not really believe. All but those who do. Those who become suicide bombers, safe in the knowledge they are going to heaven.

Try this, you religious folk. There are two kinds of knowing. Knowing how and knowing that. We know Leeds is in Yorkshire. There is no degree of knowing this. It is a yes or no.

Then there is knowing how. For example knowing how to play the violin. This sort of knowing is incremental and never ending.

Perhaps this is where the error lies. If the religious are learning a practice, and most religions involve ritual, you can get better at it. You could be more or less devout.

Religion is something people practice. It is something you do, not something you are.

And this is where most of the problems begin. Once you start saying 'I am a muslim' or 'I am a jew' but not practicing any ritual you are declaring yourself part of an exclusive tribe.

An exclusive tribe that believes they are the only ones party to a greater truth. It can be very dangerous and the first step in dehumanising those from another tribe. How does one respect someone walking around oblivious to the greater meanings of life? This must make them akin to animals.

So if you see religion through this lens. More like someone learning or not learning ballet for example. Perhaps this is a better argument for religious debaters to develop

I shouldn't have to think up the other sides arguments too! .

Bridge

Art Language

Why is the language used in conjunctin with some art the way it is? Catalogues seldom stray from the authodoxy. It has its' routes in french deconstructionist philosophy, Baudrillard, Barthes, Leotard etc. none of which translates very well. Essentially they play with language in a light hearted way. Applied to contemporary art it is used in as an evasionary tactic.

Who is to say that a more experimental approach may be more healthy. The use of poor language that hides its' meaning is reflective of arts insecurities.

Recently there has been a subtle but telling shift. Amongst less self conscious artists work we are seeing a new developement. A clarity that was not there in the 2000s. I hope the text that comes with the research on Skreeworld is helpful for those trying to understand the pictorial journey.

Another Den

Since I said the Golden Age of Den Building may be over I have found three. This tree house has seen better days but still stands proud to disproe y theory.

Emigrating

I am sure many people consider leaving this muddy isle for good at times. Turn ones back on the inbred, class ridden pit. I have been dragged away from my hometown. I should be more honest, from as old as I could I tried to get away. The South  West was where we went for our holidays so it appeared to make sense to move there.

After a while you meet someone, fall in love, find work there and the past drifts away.

I nostalgically consider returning home. Outsiders never fully understand a place they weren't born. The language, the accent and don't be fooled, accent is not just the shape of your vowels but language itself. A geordie thinks in Geordie, a Glaswegian in Glaswegian. Many things will not translate.

The tacit knowledge, the inbuilt understsanding of subtleties in seasonal change peculiar to each inch of land is hardwired in to our make up.

Though I live in the South West there are a myriad details that are beyond me.

Sadly, when I go back home time has moved on. The incremental developement of my city of birth has shifted. No longer can I find my feet there.

I am lost. A stranger at home and abroad. The routes others have I don't. No anchor holds me safe.

Within our hotch potch multicultural society all is eddy and flux. All is in shift and growth. Tribal allegiance shifts and flowers often for the briefest shared moment in a bus shelter. A comment with a stranger and a second of eye contact then you are gone, swept off in to societies river. Perhaps coalescing in football fandom at the game or a mutual love of art in a gallery.

Yet these moments of tribal communality can not hold up to the ties the town folk feel here. I can feel the rock solid fixtures of their foundations. Their children run among each other in play.

I am an outsider.

But then I always was an outsider, even when young.

Skreeworld plans

Well it seems like ages ago that Skreeworld went out on an adventure. Winter, illness and not least a lack of Church members have kept activities to a minimum. Sadly Kipper is no longer in the area and as followers of old will recall it was together with Kipper that the early assent of Moortown Warertower and the escalation of Bath gas silos.

This week has seen a change in the weather and a short reccy was undertaken to check out the possibilities for an adventure soon. During the reccy a further den was found. We know not who it was built by and it looked t be abandoned or between owners. No feral children were seen in the vicinity though, being on the approach to the huge piece of civil engineering we were looking at it would be a likely spot to build one. This all adds up to reassessment of the theory that the Golden Age of Den Building is over.

New Skreeworld

New Skreeworld. Bigger, bolder, brighter, better.

Cuter, crisper, cleverer.

Dirtier, darker, deeper.

Eeerier,  experimental, exponential.

Faster, further, flounder.

Greater, greener, grittier.

Happier, holier, hermetically sealed.

Irritating, irrational, Ipswich.

Jarrow Marchers, Jelly babies, jetlag.

Kretinous, king kong, kleptomaniac.

Luxurious, lepidoptery, Lulu.

Mysterious, mischievous, melancholy.

Naughty, nice, never.

Open, opulent, osric.

Piebald, pieeyed, poleaxed.

Questioning, quotidian, quintessant.

Regal, resplendent, rock and roll.

Safe, surgical, sellotape.

Topical, torturous, tremendous.

Umbilical, unassuming, ultimate.

Visual, vocal, variable.

Waveringly, weathered, welcoming.

Xenomorphic, xanthous, xylographic.

Yobbish, youthful, yom kippur.

Zarathustrian, zealous, zenith.

Giles Fraser and Occupy

Occupy is my kind of movement. They/we don't know exactly what we are for but we are sincere. Yes. You better believe it. We don't like rich bankers as they've taken all the money meaning that anyone born for the next five or six generations will have to live in poverty until we've paid i all back. There is a good chance that the capitalist generation will not only have spent all the money but have damaged the planet so badly earning and playing that the world won't be any fun to live in anyway. 

We went to London, or a city near you and camped out. Got on Newsnight and generally pointed out how fat and greedy the rich are. I honestly hope that, like me, people realise that collecting as much money as you can is spoiling the world for everyone. The money is not endless, we can't all be rich, each pound you take is a pound someone who is starving can't have.

This week when the police came in to move the protesters on was saddening though Occupy hadn't been in the news so much lately and new creative means of protest are necessary so maybe it had run its' course.

On a differnt angle it saddened me thinking of Giles Fraser. Clealy a noble and good man who got caught up in all this. Maybe it felt good to put his Christianity in to practice. So many christians appear unable to make the link between the outlook they promote and thier own lives. Christianity in the modern world has become a suburban passtime. I see the big cars pulling up outside churches on a sunday morning, advertising bring and but sales that raise a few pounds when you are driving a 20,000 pound car seems silly. If you are a Christian then act like one. Give your money to the poor. It is what Jesus would have done. He would be turning your tables over. 

Jesus is ace. I love all he said, just about and lived a good life waking many up to a higher morality. So how come his followers have gone so wrong? Christianity is so often a mask, a way to salve the conscience. Like Comic Relief, you know, that programme with all the rich comediens on mucking in to make a few pounds off the public before going home to their vast estates feeling all righteous about it.

So Giles Fraser did the brave thing. He pointed out that the protesters were right and would have no truck with those who sought their evciction. He has since been given the odd collemn in the Guardian but he has lost his job.

When he wakes up today, with St Pauls free of all the straggly tents will he feel that he had his life washed apart by a passing wave. His house stood strong till the wind came but no the wind has gone he has no house.

If his public profile that has developed due to the protest is strong enough he may make a new career in the media. He may help out future protests. His church career is gone though. I just pray he didn't preserve his moral integrity at the expense of his career and now the focus of the media moves on thgat he is not left a victim of forces beyond his control.

Regrets? I have a few, but then again..

How do you measure it? I have days where I regret choices I made. Days where I don't.

To understand the times you live in you need to jump in. How could you possibly begin to understand vast swathes of culture without having taken recreational drugs? Growing through my teens I experimented to the max with hallucinogens. I did some 100 acid trips, some 500 mushroom trips. Not just seventies wall paper and psychedelic music made sense but a huge history of fairy tales; the English history of Witchcraft, art stretching back through history. We thought we had found an evolutionary trigger to catapult us in to a new state of being. Music, literature, film , theatre, architecture even, virtually every aspect of culture has been informed and sculpted by the drugs of the day. Beginning in the late '80s with Acid House the shift in music, graphics, film all bore the mark of MDMA. It was a rebirth for my generation who were already seasoned acidheads, we were ready for ecstasy. There is no point in going to the disco if you stand at the side watching others dance, you need to jump in if you want to take part, to understand fully not through the detached eyes of an anthropologist.

But the horrific damage has been the characteristic of my later life. Virtually all the participants are scarred.

Heroin took the lives of many friends. Others have disfunctional relationships with alcohol. Here is not the place to list my personal damage other than to say I'm hard to trump in an NA meeting.

These days I don't drink or drug. No amount of cultural understanding, no depth of consciousness expansion can compensate for the death, insanity and addiction that has followed. With fried brains my generation sought solace in darker drugs and drink.

In complete mental breakdown, having tried every avenue of chemical thought and feeling enhancement, I finally learned that all drugs can damage you. You can use any drug to play games of self deception. Addiction is not about the macho recovery meeting bravado of how much you took, no, it is the degree of denial you were in, the amount of self deception, how lost you were, how much of a fool and characature of yourself you had become. There was a time when I thought addiction meant physical dependence. That if you injected anyone with heroin three times a day for three months then that was an addict. Now I know people can be addicts on very little.

 Maybe if you have a temperate moderate character, maybe then you could find a way. If you fully commit to things, if you give it your all in life then drugs will trip you up. For me life is now oppositional to what it once was. I don't want to bend and twist my consciousness to see how strange being can be. I want to see how straight thinking I can get. How clear can I make things. 

Recently I have been writing about Martin who I knew from age eight or so until he died in Richards kitchen a decade ago. Richard has since died too. Turps OD'd on heroin, Widd cut his wrists and bled in to a bathroom cabinet. I moved away but kept being called home for another funeral. In this town, where I hoped to escape from all this further friends died. At first I linked it to the earlier deaths of close friends Woody, John and Animal who all died coming off bikes. Death is death, after all, how it finds you may not matter.

This last year has changed my views. There is a sense that denial of drugs would be a denial of all we believed in. An admission that the way we chose, as a rejection of our backgrounds was wrong. I now conclude we made a dreadful mistake. I took it as an expected hazard that playing such an extreme game would inevitably incur casualties. Rock climbers have a similar attitude. Recently though it has not been in anyway a sieve for those too weak or crazy to fall through but a decxonstructon of the greatest minds of my generation.

As my mind was in tatters. Awash with hallucinations. Chemistry all to cock. Personality itself crumbling. Reality falling apart. I saw that it was deeper than I could have imagined. I had suffered depression, even schizoid episodes, yet through all that there had been a sense of 'me' inside it all. No one knows how it is inside anothers head but I had assumed it would be like it is inside mine. I knew you could become so down you did not want to live but somehow I never realised you could quash the self. That I, or anyone like me could be reduced to  a broken animal. A set of reactions with no pilot in charge. The end of self.

Around the time I became aware of how much the mind could crumble a close family member was sectioned. She suffers from schizophrenia periodically that is kept to a degree in check with drugs. Anyone with experience with anti psychotic drugs will know that the pay off is a slim one. If you are kept subdued by these chemical restraints life is a sluggish traipse through a muddy, dull world. You put on weight, nothing is interesting, your self esteem drops. Stop taking them, and your mind regains its' elasticity. Your sharp personality returns. You make brilliant connections, enthusiasm grows. Until you find yourself making the wrong brilliant connections.

Illness of the self is worse than illness of the body.

A friend who I have known for 30 or more years had become ill too. I talked to him one night as he stood by a tree in some woods in the rain with a noose. He got passed this and moved in with another friend. We talked and something has broken in his head. He has always lived the party life. He was my first dealer introducing me to the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley called them. His life had been one long party, an experiment in hedonism and friendship. Opiates had never been his tipple of choice but alcohol had become a daily feature. After stripping his brain of serotonin and other chemicals he ust have been raw and a modest alcohol habit was enough to strip him of self.

From his bedroom, the lad who had put him up heard a crash, his dog warned him something was a miss. Outside he found our friend in tears with a broken leather belt round his neck and a pile of blister strips of swallowed drugs.

Since then I have talked to him and am ashamed to say I find it unpleasent. He cannot seem to see any way out other than death. All thoughts of others have disappeared leaving him with a total desent in to his own mind. He was never like this before. How could someone so bright, so optimistic, someone so undependent on material goods become so crushed.

There is a part of me that hopes his condition is the result of alcoholism and that once his brain has dried out its' chemistry will return to normal. There is nothing you can say to give him perspective. He self harms and, if not for his being sectioned under the mental health act would undoubtedly be dead.

He was a hero of mine; he still is a great friend, seeing him broken is somehow worse than all the deaths. The loss of self is the worst fate that can befall anyone. If you are still aware you can face death. Stripped of personality there is no self from which to refer.

The ambulance took him away three weeks ago

Skreeworld Revamp

Regular followers will notice the new format. Don't worry, it is still the best online experience you are likely to find.
Self employment had led me in to some dodgy political beliefs; I had strayed from the path of righteousness. For example, the Sun ran an article in its' sunday launch issue showing a benefit claimant on a fair ground ride. A disablist. This led me to think about people I had met whilst mentally ill. One man I knew who suffered from depression was an easy touch. I knew I had seen him smiling so launched in to a performance of jokes to see if I could make him laugh. Unfortunately, a neighbour who reads the Sun saw the 'depressed' man laughing and reported him to the benefits office who took away his incapacity benefit. I thought this was bad. Before I had been self employed I never felt ripped off by depressed people. Now, talking to workers I had begun to see the disabled as scroungers. Making depressed people laugh is no real test of madness. Mad people often laugh. Everyone knows that. Look at the Joker, indeed any megalomaniac super criminal, they all laugh. But does this mean they deserve benefits?
Due to my illness I could no longer work in the way I had. I needed to find an ethical window of opportunity. A  way of not working without feeling guilty. All people I knew appeared to think that so long as you worked for it, you deserved all the money you got.
Something was wrong. Carlos Tevez earns much more than anyone I have ever met yet is a self serving toad of a man. No, I had got it wrong. I thought ruefully back to times I had questioned how people without jobs had achieved homes, families etc. where as through all my years of self employment I found myself still childless and homeless. This was wrong but karma is as none existent a force as the force, (from star wars). There is no to little play between your morality and your income.
Green politics are a bit passe in these days of economic meltdown. It was all very fashionable when everyone was really rich under Gordon Brown, till we learnt we had bought everything on tick. Now no one gives much thought to the environment anymore. Eco thoughts lie in the gutter along with Spice Girls merchandise, rotting away in to fly tip slurry. Wind farms are now being pushed so far out to see, so Jeremy Clarkson and Roger Scruton can't see them. Its over. The Green revolution was always a popular middle class idea routed around the Bath, Frome , Glastonbury area, spreading out through summer festival experiences to the suburbs of even northern cities. In Leeds it was always more Headingley than Morley, in Brum more Moseley than Sparkbrook. Still, I'm always up for out of fashion fashions. Note my organising of Glamfest 2010. A festival that would have seen a massive glam rock revival with Gary Glitter exonerated, Slade reinstated as the greatest rock band of the '70s and Bolan disintered; well perhaps not the first and last but certainly Slade back. Sadly the project never got off the ground. The site was arranged yet after contacting all glam rock survivors possible I found out that only a partial Glitter Band and Chicory Tip, of the major league glamsters were still in business. Sweet were split; Andy Scott was ill, Steve Priests Sweet were in the States. Noddy ruled out a Slade reunion, Dave and Don Powell were up for it but Jim Lea said no.
So Glamfest 2010 was a none festival. It ought to be done before we lose the chance. Sadly it would have been just me and Chicory Tip, in a muddy field behind the workshop.
But green politics has got me fired up. It matters not in these times whether you work or not. It is how much you burn. How much you cost the planet. Whether your existence is detremental to the future. Mine is ok. I can live with it. Sadly, going green means I cannot fulfill many of my working commitments. How can I justify making more flash furniture for those who already have loads? I can't find an ethical answer to this.
Consequently my search is now no longer a journey in to understanding the contemporary object and its' meaning but a search for truth.

I hope newcomers to Skreeworld and older followers all enjoy the new direction.