AFTERMATH: It's Hard Being Wise When You're Bored

Above is a song...

Hello, as you might know, the first 22 episodes of this blog are the text of the ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (from Jan to April 2013), which you can also buy on amazon, if you have three pounds to spare.  From then on, the blog is the frequent emissions of the servile blogger, who aims to please you daily, Benjamin of Turnham Green.  And here is today's attempt to please you...the above is an old song, but you might like it, if you believe in the link between love and garbage...

IT'S HARD BEING WISE WHEN YOU'RE BORED

Addiction's a social-life in itself.  You don't need a diary.  You can just be assured that every day, and any ensuing days, will be related somehow to drugs.  It may be a using day, or it may be a day after a using day, or a day before a using day, or a day where you just hide in bed, and wait for something to drop into your bank-account, counting down the hours and days with Time Team and Hitler documentaries chuntering away in the corner.  Odds on, even if you haven't used for a week or so, this is probably because you're broke, and so who needs a diary just to write in it 'remember to stay in'.

But today is a bank-holiday, which, in case you're reading this somewhere other than the UK, is a kind of extra Sunday, nailed on to the end of the week as a treat for those whose lives are impaled on the stake of the working week...or something like that.  Yes, just when you've got through a weekend, there's another day of semi-blankness to consider, confronting you with extra helpings of Time Team, and family-friendly films all through the day, messing with the schedule you'd got used to punctuating your day with.  Everything is set adrift, and all you can find, if you're lucky, is Jason and the Argonauts, toppling that giant, and slaying those skeletons and the like.

It can be as paralysing as any snake-venom, a bank-holiday, once its got its fangs into you.  You might rise with noble intent, hopes to write this letter, that poem, win that game of scrabble, ring that friend, write that song, do that exercise...and then, come four o'clock, with only a few Jaffa Cakes consumed, your mind strays towards that 'spare' £80 in the overdraft, which is already spoken for...but what the hey?  You stray a little further, picturing, as if in a cinematic dream sequence, your good self wandering down the road to the cashpoint, getting out forty, pottering along to your friends round the corner from the pawnshop.  Yes, ok, you're going to use, but at least you're also doing it because you want some company, some human contact, some stimulation, interaction...is that so bad?  Is it wrong to want a pick-me-up, the personal touch, a little pepper on your pasta?

Who wouldn't want when their life was so wanting?

It's so hard holding on with fingernails chipped and flimsy, rainwashed rockface...oops, I've gone again...

And that, as I splash down into ravenous rapids, is all I have to say today...