Pinhead - DeeDee Ramone

gabba gabba we accept you we accept you

Gabba gabba we accept you, one of us

I don't wanna be a pinhead no more

I just met a nurse that I could go for

I don't wanna be a pinhead no more

I just met a nurse that I could go for

D.U.M.B everyone's accusing me

D.U.M.B. Everyone's accusing me

Gabba gabba hey

Gabba gabba hey

Gabba gabba hey

Gabba gabba hey

It's all you need to know, not a spare word nor comma of irrelevance. It can elude the greatest of poets.

I Don't Wanna be a Pinhead No More

What kind of monster have I become? Deep self loathing of the failure of my most basic qualification to be a man stripped away. A dieing, lieing, self denialist spinning yarns, building narratives of self deceit, critical of others yet blind to my metamorphosis in to some perverse monster. Blaming everyone but myself. Spouting moral judgement from ,my moral vacuum. Saving the worst of my bile for those loving me most. There is no nourishment of my better shrubs, just a garden of nettles, blackberry vines, undergrowth of spiky weeds designed to deflect people. Rather than work to improve my mental health I selectively fuel it, sculpt its deformed and ugly tumour with potions and powders. Self harming the self I hate. Faking to all. A fraudulent performance designed to disguise my horrible, monster like being. Conversations I use to promote my denial and deceit, communication comes second to presenting a fraudulent character, a child would laugh at the pathetic delusion that I'm fooling anyone. Any affection offered i leach on, greedy with my opportunity to steal. The worst, the vilest parts I save to insult the only person who cares. Saved my life more than once and I repay this with a systematic and gradual erosion of her self worth. To end my life would be my most valueable gift, yet this final act of evil, this damage, cruelest of blows in truth would be an act of vanity. I'm far too chicken to eliminate myself under the pretence that removing the monster could protect anyone fool.ish enough to love me so I hide in corners, darkened secret holes, bathrooms, hidden in vans. administering a poison to avoid the lack of bottle to do the noble thing with rope. Slurring, disoriented and paranoid I stumble from place to place, passersby witness my dereliction. Being too weak to tell people truths, my time is spent developing alaborate lies. Clearly visible I run the delusion that my faking and lies are believed. But pity prevents the decent from telling me I fool no one. Leave him to his poison and denial. A creature unworthy of pity, I chose to be this monster. In preference of being decent I chose to be a fraud, I alone selected this creature.

What took my capacity for love? What stole my right to call myself a man? Is it the prescriptions doctors have had me on these fifteen years? The experimental partial agonist bupronorphine initially saved my life, eliminating the possibility, removing the option to continue a heroin habit. Successful in preventing my return to heroin use, at first this seemed to answer my problem. But no long term studies had been done. Now I'm finding how it erodes a person. Many outsiders assume heroin is taken so the user feels stoned, sedated. In truth , though the sensual gouch is a joy of personal pleasure, a rejection of communal fun. Primary reason junkies use is it blocks the emotional responses to pain. Bupronorphine does the same. Removes emotion, or turns it down to a low level. This means the user can not love, can not react in a normal emotional manner. Over the years the user becomes distanced from society as this based on emotional interactivity. A deadness. A love free condition emerges and remains. I don't even know if once I manage to get off this drug if emotions will return. Perhaps that's it. No more love accepted or given. Just this tundra that subutex has made of my life. Sexuality goes. The mechanics remain functional but it ceases to have any reason. The touch of others feels an irritable intrusion. You can't love nor be loved. It has no role in that type of being. 

Attempting to withdraw after fifteen years behind this emotional shield is so frightening I canot put the depth of gear in to words. For a long time I thought I would stay in this emotional vacuum till I die. Interacting with others has always been traumatic. A single brief chat could leave me running it through for days, studying the emotional significance. That depth of emotional sensitivity needs medical adjustment if one is to operate in society. I believe, when science of neuro peptides and receptor sites developes, heroin addiction will prove to be akin to diabetes. An inate inability to emotionally process ones everyday interactions. A deficiency in endorphins, or an instability of endorphins meaning sufferers are unable to achieve a passable level of emotional negotiation of the world.

But I so dearly want to love again. Perhaps gods greatest gift, natures most precious human capacity. To share love. So I am withdrawing from subutex after some fifteen years. Reexposure to this is more than traumatic. I can not do this without help. Yes, it's my fault on that I took opiates but I didn't choose a predisposition necessitating a chemical shield. If you believe consiousness as emergent from matter then you believe emotions have a physical source. Some are born naturally buoyant and happy. Others born low in chemicals to keep happy. Some are born overloaded with whatever neurotransmitter makes one fall in love and must endure a constant barrage of rejections. My misfortune is a poor endorphin system.

Returning to society free of substitute opiates is constant fear, trauma, constant notions or revelations feel like enlightenments as significance hierarchies are distorted. A simple observation can feel like newtons Apple just fell. Interaction has to be minimal. It's intensity impossible to describe. You are reminded of when you were a baby and anything at all could pierce your defences and crying regularly necessary for releasing adrenaline.

I am not strong enough to do it alone. Benzos appeal and occasionally help yet trigger explosions of irrational anger. Regular meeting of final itics. A minor row is a relationship ending. Stepping on your dogs toes accidentally unleashes guilt vastly disproportionate. Inappropriate gestures abound as the awakening reveals bundles of errors overlooked and a seeming need to repair long forgotten minor disagreements. Everything is heightened, emotion knobs all cranked to eleven.

Another very real hazard is a slip, unwitting mostly, in to replacement drugs. Drink habits, speed habits, crack habits all able and willing to slip in to th vacuum you have left open. Despite my consious awareness it was pointed out, quite viciously I was slipping in to ethylphenidate and diclazepam not noticing these rising replacement addictions.

Drug withdrawal is a far bigger personal change most humans have to undergo. Equal, of course are the anorexic, the 30 stone obese where there addictions even more visibly than the junkie. These people too make similar changes. It isn't like refraining from beer for a I th, unless you're an alci, or giving up chocolate, shopping or other habits. It is deep realignment and few can do it. Most just change things round a bit. Find a fresh method to accommodate their addictions.

The change is one akin to rebirth as a fresh individual. For sure, I have done my fair share of heroin rattles. Even worse, a benzo cold turkey. It isn't the three weeks not sleeping, sweating, diarrhoea, overwhelming cravings, the utter pain as existence free of endorphins is. This intense illness of seven to twenty eight days offers genuine fingers to fight, opponents clear, a fixed target one can battle with.

The real bit is once that is over. Now the reinvention of the new self begins. Flooded with blocked out memories endlessly resurfacing in your guilt Ocean. No freinds to support you, they either remain on drugs or lack the knowledge to help. Relearning how to react to everyday sleights can find you in tears, fist fighting strangers, no end of stuff. To add to this malaise depression is constant and very intense for many months, often years. There is no respite. You have no defence. Nothing to keep out those buried memories of abuse. You are utterly naked, completely exposed.

I would be lieing to miss out a small benefit. As your brain circuitry reconnects it is similar to a trip. You marvel at snippets of beauty normally filtered out. I recall balling my eyes out at the raw beauty in a water rdroplet on a leaf. So strong was my response. Few get this second chance to look through a child's eyes. To see the new, not merely recognise known and catalogued details. I recall another time on a bus, reading about the demolition of Central Park, home of Wigan, rugby Leagues third most successful side, and as a Leeds fan, the foe. This small northern town that had risen up in sport and beaten the world. Their bricks and mortar, now rubble. I was that raw I cried for the pies. I have been very open in this posting but admitting that took guts.

Who knows? I might not make it, few do. But I've got a feeling a reason has arisen. Deedee Ramone wrote a song called Pinhead about his desire to return to an opiate free life. His simplicity sometimes captures what eludes the greatest poets. Sadly, having beaten his addictions he took a hit for old times sake and died, aged 50.

Pinhead - DeeDee

Gabba gabba we accept you, we accept you

Gabba, gabba we accept you, one of us

I don't wanna be a pinhead no more

I just met a nurse that I could go for

I don't wanna be a pinhead no more 

I

I just met a nurse that I could go for

D.U.M.B. everyone's accusing mD.U.M.B. e ergo e's accusin

The Frome Woodworkers Cooperative update

Just got home from the first meeting of the nucleus, or first seven. Our plan to create a coop grows increasingly exciting. We looked at a massive unit on Tuesday to work out costs and spaces needed.  A fair diversity of differing skills to create the go to place for any wood project needs doing in the area. An initial invitation process of selected people of known talent to be followed by our first press release to get local businesses located together splitting costs on overheads. I'm kean to seal off the machine shop full of new kit, up to date panel saw and CNC router and four sided cutter. finding and employing g a highly skilled machinist to operate the cNc router and maintain all stuff to perfection feeding us makers. Two lads make timber framed buildings, the scale of the premises permitting full size lay outs. Another guy does exhibition joinery, again assembly before site would fault find earlier. These bigger space users obviously paying relative rents. Teams could form for large one off projects then return to our private one off work. Designing a system of space division allowing privacy yet with the capacity for building stage sets. Having a machinist and up to date kit would easily double our income. Clearly each individuals vision differs and amassing a knobhead free crew is crucial. Once the originators are established and the offer to join goes public we will have to select the best. People who can bring the most to the project. The premises we veiwed lends itself to a mezzanine floor for clean work and office. Drawing area and computer room. A secretary may be a decent assert as would a cad expert.
A key factor for me personally is establishing a teaching component. Running courses may be supervised by someone but all of us could run courses in our specialist realms. Guest speakers coming in to inspire students plus the boon of them seeing professional businesses operating. Fine craft work coming together inspiring them to see how a business can run successfully.
An apprenticeship system whereby the apprentices spend time working with all the different businesses could deliver a fantastic grounding for youths attracted to woodwork.
Grants are available though seem invariably to require match funding. I have some personal fund raising ideas though you can hire professionals expert in grant and loan sourcing. Making it the finest kitted outfit on the area is crucial. A specialist machinist could supply cNc componentry to other businesses and a component solids for smaller set ups needing a cutting list done.
Early stages but eight people are now committed. The next stage of selected invite to establish the skill base is unsurpassed. Finally open application and interview to co plebe the greatest woodwork shop in our area.

Sleeping Rough

Skreeworlds joy in Entropy

Skreeworld Furniture Update

One of Paul Fryers and Buzzards

Peter Russell got me thinking

We know we are consious. Perhaps the only thing we really know for sure. We know too that our brain creates useable map to negotiate reality. It is a fact our perceptions are not real but constructs created by our brain. We are restricted to a limited range of colours and these colours we see are not true reality but a tool the brain uses to enable us to get about. This is accepted science.
In trying to see what we can not we design models, use metaphors. Particles when subjected to closer scrutiny turn out to not be particles at all. We try waves as an alternative metaphor yet this is not true either. Finally we agree there are but some kind of potentialities. By observing we bring about materiality yet know this is not accurate either. The further we look the less substance becomes truth.
It is only by being consious of something that it becomes existent.
My years spent in the speculation of how consiousness, something of no material substance, could arise from matter, how meat can think and feel revealed no one has a clue. A mind is none existent in space yet it appears to be able to move matter. There is no physics known that suggests how something not existent in space can move physical objects.
Peter Russell suggests we have it arse about tit. That consiousness does not emerge from matter. He suggests the opposite may be true. That time, space, matter, all our givens evaporate on close inspection. Consiousness is the only given. This being so, consiousness must create matter. The knowing, the awareness, the being, are all we can really call true. We are the universe become consious considering itself. Perhaps the universe is consiousness exploring what it is. We aspects of this. Is the universe pure consiousness?
This would be a paradigm shift. Much of what we assume has to be abandoned when a paradigm shift occurs. Caterers are built on old assumptions. To abandon these ammounts to admission ones Lifes work was wrong consequently they take time to become accepted. Often the deaths of the previous generation. Men faced execution for denying the earth was not the central point of the universe.
The twentieth century psychologists studied cognition, avoiding emotion as an awkward slippery problem. Yet emotion is what saves us when the tiger attacks, we can't reason our way of escape, it's too sklow. We don't rationaluse who we fancy, with who we would like to breathe. All major life decisions are emotionally driven.
Consiousness is where our brighter minds are now focused. Not particles or waves, unless they play a part. Without consiousness we can know nothing. It is primary. We must begin again, from here, from our sole definite.
This realisation, should I stick with it, runs against all I wrote before. My atheism, or my materialist outlook no longer makes sense. Whether God is the growing, consious universe, of which we are all parts, if we are one, if in becoming self aware the universe began, it need not disprove or contradict science. Those who have studied consiousness from within, yogis, shamen, Buddhists, then these are to who we should look for advice. Frequently light comes up. Enlightenment. Seeing the light. Light travels at its speed but if we were travelling with it time would dusappear, space would be irrelevant, were would be still. No one knows what light is. Photons, particles of light? No, sounds wrong to me. Light, love, awareness.

The New Beginning

 After Skreeworld spent a year on materialist approach to consiousness I find an idea that could invert my entire outlook and belief system. We only know one thing for sure. That we are aware. Consiousness. All other things we gather through this. Being. Our existence and our awareness of our existence is all that can be said to be true.
For all my speculation on how meat can think, how matter, physical, material, can create consiousness. Something immaterial. Despite our top neuroscientists still not having a clue how this can happen I kept believing it would be discovered.
The double slit experiment. Quantum mechanics. How a consious observer alters reality. A clue.
We don't know what the fuck time is yet regard it as a given. Space, what is the universe made of, we haven't a clue. The deeper we look the more it slips away. We imagine particles as a metaphor knowing these coppositional bits must have substance, then when this fails we imagine another metaphor, waves.
Isn't it wiser to begin again. We know we are consious. Is it not more likely that consiousness creates matter rather than matter creates consiousness? At least there exists a foundation of a truth, our knowing of our being. We know our senses show not reality, more a map or a workable model to enable us to negotiate physicality. Platos cave. We see a metaphor, not what is there.
Consiousness may be the essential. Not fantastical concepts beyond anyone's grasp like matter, time, space.
Isn't it more likely an awareness of self is a more likely starting point than a Big Bang? That the universe is developing consiousness. A growing awareness, creating matter as a map to explore itself? Whether consiousness is universal, and we, in our small ways, through experience, creating its growth. Because experience is the only thing we can say we know for sure. Materialism, my great experiment of some two years back, appears to be illusory. What is an atom? A molecule? An electron? All one can offer is a metaphor. A picture of spinning balls. Yet when we look closely it is nothing like that.
The paradigm I spoke of seems puny compared to this. To accept this you have to abandon ll materialist assumption and begin again with what we know. And all we know is we are aware.
Y This realisation is a total reversal of all I have previously advanced. The Skreeworld manifesto, to try find out, who, what and where I am starts here.

To be continued...

Death is a period, not a moment, it lingers, rises up and rests a while, returning. There is no centre point. Nothing to hang a coat on.

This hellish, sleepless week has been taxing. Midge lies dieing, nurses give estimates of how long she has. It seems somehow deciryful and disrespectful planning funeral stuff when someone is alive. So we wait for phone calls.
I read soldiers in Afghanistan would have to be prepared at all times when voyaging about for IEDs though very rare. Waiting for a parcel in the post. That constant raised condition, that heightened state of preparation leads to PTSD.
My partner, driven mad by preparation. Bursts periodically in to psychotic episodes. I try yet my patience can fail me. I had the thought today that she would just die so actions could be carried out. A horrible thought I am ashamed to confess.
Her son travelled up, timing his arrival for the nurses death moment. No visit in five years. First calls are of tracking down money and retributive violence.
She must have heald on for his arrival. Money.
This state of waiting is stopping sleep, stopping eating. Paused. Ready to do what it is you do.
Death and its leftover money bring out the lowest. Her shame, her guilt for being drunk, fear of maternal failings. He will get his money. Then disappear, satisfied.
Then it'll no doubt be us leaping up to gather the clan.
Plan the send off.
Every emotion, great bravery, anger, fear, tearful love, greed, envy. This week has had them all. We are so tired, so very tired.
And Dean lies awake. Alone from his dog who could too be on the way out. His last decade everyday spent together. He can't talk. Just wait, like us for a phone call.

Co op

We have known for some time that this workshop was to be knocked down to clear the land to build houses. Until this week neither me nor Mag had a fixed idea of where we would go. But in a stroke of genius, after the local woodies Christmas dinner I missed, mag has begun looking into forming a woodworkers cooperative of 8 or 10 people to rent a bigger place. The local council are already supportive. Individuals could pool resources to lower costs on bulk buying materials. We could offer teaching courses. Apprenticeships. These ideas make grants for new machinery a real possibility. We would also have the flexibility to work as normal, independent sole traders, yet if a big job turned up we could join forces to tackle sizeable schemes. The possibilities keep unfolding. Bringing employment to the area through such a facility makes grant applications far easier and more likely to find funding.
These ideas are still at a stage of testing the water regarding who may wish to be involved and to what degree. A CNC router could take us to another level.
From a personal point of view I am kean on teaching, passing on my skills. A legacy of objects indeed litter these isles but teaching some ideals and skills could provide a deeper legacy.
I must state this is not my idea nor am I the prime mover but I will give it my all.
This town is fortunate in having a number of outstanding wood craftsmen. Togethrer we could achieve great things.

Dream

Tonight I slept early then woke from a strong dream. A big old grey snow bear was preparing its bed for the night. Not sad or happy. Just tired, doing what bears do. I think it was Midge, preparing for sleep.

Midges Last Hours

Around boxing day Midge and her brother, for some reason beyond my grasp, conspired to tell the world she had passed away. She had 'died' once before. In her dementia and denial a belief grew that this lie was white and protective of those of us worrying about her final suffering. I used AL-LAD in sacrament and communed with her spirit.
This lie was unturned around new year. Since then her life has gradually evaporated. Two days ago the chief nurse estimated she had 72 hours to live. Last week me and my partner wrote her long letters explaining what she had given us, how her influence and ideas were like a stone thrown in to a still lake and the ripples would carry on eternally. Energy never goes, just alters form, matter particles of her will roam the universe. As an atheist I have none of the rituals nor processes that provide a plan of how to get on, no what to do. Lately my atheism has taken some beatings from spiritual aspects of the psychedelic experience. For a time we can see beyond the veil, an opening allowing us a peep out of the reality our naked senses permit. What is for sure our visible or accessible reality is a small portion of something much greater. Knowing how much my dog is not party to suggests our small view is not of a much greater awareness. None of us know the deeper details. We see shadows out of view that firelight permits us knowing what is there is so much more than a human mind can comprehend.
My partner has had the task of getting her accepting her deaths imminence. Midge has fought authorities from care homes as a child, through jail, and her trust in what the doctors told her was slim. Other responsibilities have been thrust on to my partners frail shoulders. Informing a fraternity of freinds, spread across the world. Most disturbing for her has been informing distant freinds Midges end was nigh whilst still talking to her on an evening. This split teality gave her a feeling of guilt, even deception she has been braver than I have ever known a human be.
Today she rang and at first the nurses wouldn't allow her to talk as Midge can no longer speak at all clearly, but they finally agree to hold the receiver to her ear. She was able to tell her she loved her. How her influence and outlook had given her a framework for her own morality and sense of right and wrong. My partner was kicked out of home at 15 and lived homeless until travellers tooth her under their wing and taught her how to live on no money. Then Midge stepped in. Became a surrogate mother to her. Each time she drifted in to wrong crowds or dangerous habits, Midge would hunt her down, with a posse of bikers and steal her away. There was no hiding from Midge.
I was lucky to meet her before alcohol had stolen her looks. Midge was a warrior queen, a highlander, ted auburn hair and magical green eyes. Her first love died in a motorcycle accident. Her second great love left himself suspended from a noose for her to find. Understandably Midge drank to accommodate the bad hand she had been dealt.
Theo's drinking was what shortened her life to 57 years but, by God, she lived. Some spend their life working solely to extend it, in doing so they forget life is to be lived. There is more than a joke in the george best tail of being found on a bed of money with a miss world and champagne bottles littering the room. "Where did it all go wrong,George?".
Who is to say George's life, the most naturally talented player of his generation, crammed with excess and adventure. A life worthy of many a book. Who is to say that taking that choice, to live life to the full is in anyway worse than the countless lives of limited events, lasting long, without a single tail to leave the world.
Midge is hours from death. I hope she is comfortable as possible. I,so glad my partner got toto say goodbye, to let her know how much she had learned from her, how much she was loved. This godsend, to be told your life was of value. And to be told they'd meet again. As an agnostic I can not say, but if there is a fraction of a chance, these two will find each other, perhaps as particles in space, perhaps in ways we know nothing of yet.
This is an early orbituary. We love you forever Midge.

1P-LSD Review

The excitement of a brand new UK legal lysergoid had the psychonaut community posting madly. Lizard Labs were first to have this new substance on the market, followed closely by Organic Synth and Research Blotz. In essence a work in process hence judgement on the fully developed product would be premature. Lizard Labs deserve great respect for so swiftly delivering joy to a depressed psychedelic scene.
AL-LAD also available from Lizard Labs is the best drug I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Powerful, euphoric, visually magnificent yet somehow free of the dark corridors that dog acid and mushroom trips. Very empathic and emotional. The window in time whilst it was legal in the UK was wonderful. Sadly on the 7th of January, along with LSZ and a whole bunch of tryptamines it was banned. The psychonauts in morning began to hear rumours. A new lysergoid was on the way. Just seven days after the ban, in poetic timing 1P-LSD arrived.
With hindsight I wish I had waited. Personal problems and a distracted mind meant my first trip was an introverted one. I took 200ug, a sufficiently strong dose for the experienced psychedelic explorer. Walking the night streets brought little in the way of visuals. Clouded by personal concerns my trip was educational more than pleasurable helping me through some issues . Very much like LSD it heald an impartial mirror revealing areas of self deception, angles of denial I had drifted in to.
I have never had a bad trip but on occasion have had a dressing down. Exposure to truth. It is the ultimate bullshit detector.
I will be retrying her out on calmer waters soon. Set and setting are as important to the trip as the drug. Looking forward to round two. After an hour or twos sleep I did visit the lads to bring a little colour to the fading 1P. AL-LAD is considerably shorter in duration, 5 or 6 hours. 1P-LSD-LSD nearer 10 to 12 hours. Tolerance is 100% the day after but I find, if trip traces remain, you can blow the embers back in to flame, these lads did just this.
The next synthesis is four weeks away so any faults should be resolved by then. How long it will be around before it's inevitable ban, who knows, but it's wise to enjoy this window of legality. Lizard Labs nobly are providing the only known cure for depression, cluster head aches, a compound able to allow the terminally ill accept their fate, and also the only real option we have in seeing teality from a fresh standpoint.
My life has been spoiled by some drugs whilst psychedelics have enhanced it spiritually to an extent I can not deny. Among the greatest things I have come across in life.

Beautiful Day

In savage fashion the police have attacked psychedelics like nothing else. The biggest police operation in british history involved twelve forces and over 500 officers. Was this effort to counter the heroin empires that destroyed my generation? Was it to destroy the vast paedophile network. No, it was Operation Julie. LSD, a physically harmless drug that leads some to religious experience, cures depression and just could possibly lead mankind to a higher spiritual condition. These chemists were not criminals driven by money but ideological men who believed in spreading good.
The emergent research chemical scene has produced some vicious products. Benzo addiction has grown. Yet the authorities saw fit to ban tryptamines and AL-LAD. It is apparent that transcendence is of greater worry than crime.
Yet in a master stroke of poetic beauty and timing, today 1P-LSD has emerged as the UKs new legal lysergic. Those who work to kill joy, to spread the dull, to destroy possibility and hope were given a massive 'fuck you'. Your pathetic attempts to remove beauty from the world are no match for our chemists working to spread a greater good. Psychedelics should be legal. They are not like drugs. They are man kinds key to other worlds. An evolutionary trigger for higher being.

Blaze it up

there are some unscrupulous people in the world

2015

AL-LAD, grief and loss of respect

Greif comes in strange and unpredictable ways. Since Midge passed away I don't think my partner has fully accepted it yet. They were much closer than I was to Midge but she meant a lot to me. We had one of those family relationships where we could get on each other's nerves yet still knew what was important.
I drove to Trowbridge to the paints and polish shop and had a couple of AL _LAD in my pocket. With the immininent law changes coming in i chewed them up and swallowed knowing I would be home before any effects took hold. The shaky transition of realities can be a little disorientating as patterns on Lino flooring warp and shift. Hallucinatory openings begin. Midge was there. My partner lay in bed, reading and sleeping. Midges smells permeated the flat. Her colours, the patterns of her drapery, her spirit, her presence was strong. Whether you take AL-LAD atheisticslly or believe in the spirits it can invoke one thing is for sure. While tripping they are real and that maybe all we can say of any truth. I have never felt the prescience of a dead person so strongly in m,y life. She was there.
This communication went on for some time. I went to lie next to my partner and floods of tears came from my eyes. I yearned to share this but I don't think I was able.
As darkness came I took Dook to lidl. Sparkling in his glory. Sharp his aesthetic with red harness he looked magnificent.
Some sad things have happened this year. I decided to come out regarding my past use of drugs, much like homosexuals do, so as not to live a lie. This proved to be my undoing.
I told My workshop partner who I shared a workshop with about my AL-LAD trip on my birthday.
Now our fifteen odd years of workshop sharing are coming to an end. His knowledge of drugs is slim and narrow based on his smoking cannabis and taking cocaine at Glastonbury. These are two drugs I hate and don't classify with the transcendent qualities of halucinogens.
The yearning for spiritual transcendence is deep in all of us. AL-LAD can deliver these sensations. It is not something to be taken often, more a sacrament to be used sparingly when needed.
So, coming out has lost my two closest or two of my closest freindships. But if they are built on ground that the admission of occasional psychedelic use can crumble one has to ask if they are important. For several years I have been needing to find a more creative working environment. My work tends to be solid timber, native hardwood furniture and the odd art piece. Magnus focuses more on MDF and commercial work. To develope one needs creative people to bounce ideas off.  Time to move to a working environment where a more artistic approach is evident.
This year has been tough. My psychotic episode resulted in this rejection from people close. Mental illness pushes people away. I felt a deep loss of respect from people close to me.
What I learned this year, and I had been warned by gay people, jews and blacks is that straight people may pretend, even to themselves that they are not raccsist. They will claim they accept homosexuals. They will claim to see equality in the mentally ill. But scratch that veneer, just a little, and they are still bigots underneath.