BLIND MAN RADICALISED ON CRACK: Episode 4

Here is Episode 4 of the Earth-based adventure...

 

'Blind Man On Crack'

 



I only hope you enjoy it as much as I didn't. 

Chapter 4

 

Lambs To The Laughter

 

Veering down Great Portland Street, I got to work, still feeling like a spectre expelled.  I was first in and made a beeline for the kettle.  I guzzled my coffee like a desperate crow, reflecting at my desk upon this living dusk I’d stumbled on.  Then, I imagine, I must have set about doing whatever menial tasks were on the menu for the day.  Probably more mailings, more telephone-enquiries, the answers to which would be same inadequate rote rubbish, which was good enough to make the caller go away, but rarely enlightening.  How was I meant to describe the difference between psychoanalysis and humanistic psychotherapy in the space of five minutes.  Even the therapists squabbled about that kind of thing.  And that was the nature of my job, dishing out inadequacies to a needy public.  But I didn’t resent the callers.  They were just doing what they needed to do.  But this day, not that I remember too much about it, I was not at the height of my person-centred powers.  I felt more like Dracula working, due to a CRB mix-up, in a crèche, pale as sin, without a grain of goodwill left for anyone.

 

I was due to meet George and Emma the following Monday, having booked myself in to do a bit of stand-up comedy at a pub in Islington.  Monday night was open-mic night, as run by the world-weary Percy.  His jowls were hamster-like and the rings around his eyes panda-like, and these are just two of the symptoms of overexposure to the lower echelons of the comedy hierarchy he displayed.  Week after week, he’d introduce the acts with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, which was quite a lot considering most of them were painfully ordinary.  Lambs to the slaughter, you might think, but these lambs rang ahead.  To get a spot on open-mic night, you had to ring up a few weeks in advance, book yourself in and turn up at the appointed time.  Many of them were people who just thought they were funny, or hadn’t had a girlfriend in a long time.  Funnily enough, I fitted nicely into both categories.

 

So around came Monday.  Even though my life was on the brink of freefall, I’d somehow managed to write some new material, learn it, practice it, if only in my mind, and cling on to just enough self-belief to stay the course.  Bottling out was not an option.  I had my script at work, and read it through the day to avoid any possibility of a forgotten link or a fluffed line.  Then it was off for something to eat with George, and on to the comedy-club for eight.  I think I was the first of the acts to arrive, which meant I could book in with Percy and, more importantly, choose where to come in the line-up.  There were usually eight acts, split into two sets of four.  It was my view that the best place to come in the running-order was first up in the second half.  This way, you’re saved the fairly onerous task of starting things up, you’ve seen the standard of four of the other acts, and if things have got a bit rowdy, or the audience has lost interest, Percy, ever the professional, will quieten them down for the beginning of the second half.  Suddenly, you have the full attention of a slightly drunk audience who are probably as ready to laugh as they’ll ever be.

 

Then, gradually over the next hour, my entourage arrived.  Emma, with sister and boyfriend, my best mate Jon, who I think was staying with me at the time.  He was a friend from school, and my quality-control consultant.  I could run ideas past him, and if he found them funny, they were good enough for public consumption.

 

So, at nine o’clock, Percy welcomed the punters to open-mic night, did a bit of banter, then resorted to one of his Monday night staples, pulling back the curtain at the back of the stage to expose a fairly ordinary bus-shelter outside, waved to the unsuspecting travellers at the ‘comedy bus-stop’, and encouraged the audience to do the same.  Well what with the little stage actually backing onto the front-window of the pub, why not?  Any mirth extracted from this stunt was always of a visual nature, so lost on me, but it’s ok for the mainstream world to have a laugh on its own once in a while.  A bit more banter, and Paddy introduced the first act.  Onto the low, small stage they’d spring, usually a single bloke with some lame observations and a lone wank-joke, which he’d fumble.

 

I was still going through my routine in my head as the first four people plied their wares.  I could barely talk to my friends, fearing that any distraction might render me unfocussed.  Then Percy rounded off the first half and bad us get more drinks.  I, by now, was knocking back my cider with a keen anxiety.  Then, ten minutes later, he retook the stage to whip the audience into a frenzy suitable to welcome the second batch of would-bes.  One more look at the bus-stop, which was empty, and it was me.  I was coming out of the loo when he introduced me, which meant I had to make my way through a fairly dense crowd of punters to reach the stage.  For a moment, I felt like the Fonz, and I hadn’t even been cool yet.

 

Up I sprung, feigning assuredness, removed the microphone from its stand, and retreated into that part of my brain where my script was stored.  I did the same ‘character’ I’d done on previous occasions, a kind of naïve Londoner called Brian Brown, who worked at Catford Leisure Centre, for no particular reason.  It seemed to go down pretty well.  The audience remained fairly attentive, I spoke clearly, didn’t rush, left pauses for laughter, most of which were filled, and when I got back to my seat, Emma seemed quite animated.  She’d been at my first gig, another Brian Brown exposé, and called me a ‘dark horse’.  This time, I surpassed even this smouldering accolade.  Tonight, I was ‘the best’, and it seemed my bestness was beginning to spill out beyond the parameters of my act.  For a while, Emma and I were sitting not with the others, but at the next table, holding hands, chatting away to the exclusion of even her boyfriend.  Things felt different – we didn’t work together anymore, so our getting together was no longer ‘prohibited under the country code’.  I felt a bit awkward though, wondering what her boyfriend might be thinking…was he scowling, throwing disapproving glances in our direction?  I couldn’t tell, but I convinced myself they had a loose sort of relationship, or had maybe recently finished.  Either way, as for holding hands, I was the grabbee, not the grabber, so I at least I could plea passivity if it came to court.

 

I don’t know how long you’ve ever gone without touching another person in an affectionate, let alone an intimate way.  At this point, bar a string of soul-destroying encounters with prostitutes, I’d spent about eight years in a state of lamination, unable to touch, or be touched.  I was beginning to feel almost equal, to my peers, and to the challenges I was setting myself.  But I knew I had the capacity to ruin anything.  When shatterproof rulers came out, some time in the late 70s, I couldn’t help but bend them to the point where they did indeed shatter.

 

My conversation with Emma seemed to press quite a lot of pre-relationship buttons.  She said girls don’t like dumping someone if they’ve got no one new to go to.  I liked hearing this, and it reminded me of Spiderman.  Even he wouldn’t leap from one rooftop if there wasn’t another rooftop to land on, or at least a wall to cling to, so why should a mortal office-clerk such as Emma?  She asked me if I wanted to meet up on Friday - apparently her boyfriend was going away for a stag-weekend.  I leapt at the offer as Spiderman might from bridge to speeding train.  No doubt I hounded my friend Jon about it all as we travelled back to mine.  I had a bad habit of deconstructing all the ifs and maybes of my non-existent love-life before him, like a mechanic in a Happy Days style garage pulling a Cadillac to pieces and expecting his colleague to put it back together, or at least tell him that all the components look sound.  I was on a kind of natural high, a healthy high, one of those highs without a grotesque comedown, one of those highs that doesn’t cost £200, one of those highs you get through doing normal things like meeting people, facing a fear, excelling - one of those highs you earn.  I had good reason to feel good about myself.  But sometimes good reason isn’t good enough.

 

And, as ever, here is a song to spoil your day.

 

It's a disco-storm discordant 4-tracker, linking ye to my little youtube channel, Reader:

 

Paedophile In The Palace

 

Maybe tomorrow?

 

 

BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Episode 3

Well, here is episode 3 of the swashbuckling saga, Blind Man On Crack, in which our protagonist loiters around the concourse of a London railway-station, to little or no avail...

Chapter 3

 

Meet Me At St Pancras

 

Between that first encounter at Debbie’s and my planned meeting with Sandra, life plodded along as normal.  I continued going to work, unwillingly, resentfully, and then it was back to Josie and the medievalists, with all the disillusionment and jealousy that entailed.  Not a happy existence, but perhaps not untenable, with a tweak here, bit more therapy there, some good fortune elsewhere.  But my mind was filled with thoughts of Sandra, and a second attempt at crack’s giddying summit.

 

Then, on an icy January night, there I was at the appointed place, waiting for Sandra on the concourse of St Pancras station.  I wasn’t exactly sure where I was meant to stand, so I wandered around, trying to make myself obvious – she was far more likely to spot me than I her.  The rush-hour thinned out, and a man in a fluorescent jacket asked if I was ok - I told him I was waiting for a friend.  A woman with a Burger King bag wanted to know if I was looking for some company – I think she might have been in the same line of business as Sandra – I said I was fine, and she wandered off.  Various foggy figures came into view, and I was hopeful that one of them would be Sandra, but no gruff tones greeted me as they neared.  The fun you can have with partial sight is endless.  So much is known, yet unknown.  Most people make a judgment of someone from twenty, thirty yards away, a woman, youngish, with luggage, a man, silver-haired, with briefcase.  But when an approaching figure is little more than a blurred figment, it’s hard to know what to prepare for, a threat, a friendly greeting, or just a fleeting encounter with a passing stranger.  Things as well can seem what they’re not.  Every so often you can find yourself reaching down to stroke a cat that turns out to be a discarded jumper, or a bin-bag, an embarrassment that’s heightened if you take the trouble to say ‘hello’ as you earnestly stoop to greet it.  Yes, the fun you can have with partial sight is endless - so endless it’s without beginning.  But in such situations, I’d developed a knack of not worrying what people might be thinking.  If I couldn’t see them, it was as if I, too, couldn’t be seen, at least not in a suspicious way.  I must have lingered there an hour, with a handful of well-wishers enquiring as to my welfare, doing their bit for the marginalised.  A blind man’s cane seems to be seen as a declaration of no intent at all, the opposite of a threat.  I find even ruffians go soft when they’re dealing with me.  After all, what harm is a hapless-looking bloke with a white stick going to do - steal your glasses?

 

For a while, I wandered up and down outside the precincts of the station, but the world felt semi-populated, post-trauma, like a scene from Day Of The Triffids, except in this world the blind man was the exception rather than the norm.  Cold and resentful by now, I went back to the payphones and called Debbie.  ‘There’s obviously been some kind of mix-up,’ I gauchely surmised, as I thrust twenty pence into the slot.  But, unsurprisingly, when Debbie answered the phone, she informed me that Sandra was there, and had been for the past few days.  How green was I?  Fresh as a still-screaming lettuce as torn from a Birdseye topsoil.  Like she was likely to honour, even recall our flimsily made arrangement.  Her shrunken life didn’t reach St Pancras, or anywhere more than a couple of miles either side of Westbourne Park.  Why would it?  Everything she needed and wanted, thought she needed and wanted, was there, all within a stone’s throw of the dreaded Droop Street.  I could hear the gravelly tones of Sandra in the background, and Debbie handed her the phone.  After a vague apology for not showing, she told me to get in a cab and come over, which I did with a consoled alacrity, going outside and sticking my arm out until a vacant black taxi came chugging to my rescue.  I leaned into the window, trying to give the impression of a youngish executive on his way to clinch a deal in a wine-bar, but I can’t imagine it was very convincing, especially when I said my final destination was Droop Street, just off the Harrow Road.  But at least I was on my way now - that soaring pinnacle was again in my sights.  Twenty minutes later, I was scampering up the concrete rat-run that led to Debbie’s door, which Sandra opened like a soul in Hades, almost before my knuckles had touched the wood.  Then I was back in that yellowy twilight I’d found so appealing a few nights before.

 

Debbie called the dealer on her still-extant landline, one of them went to collect, came back in what seemed like ages, but was actually only twenty minutes, and we fell upon the crack like vultures.  Sandra and I ended up in the bedroom, leaving Debbie with a chunk of her own in the living-room.  I just wanted to make sure I was close to the crack, and that, I thought, meant sticking with Sandra.  We smoked some more, sitting on the bed, sporadically getting sexual, obediently returning to the pipe when the high subsided.  Then Sandra, her face a dark mask of romance, said, ‘Let’s go to a hotel, just you and me…’  ‘Can we take something with us?’ I asked.  ‘Of course we can, darling.’  We returned to the living-room and she rang a minicab.  Debbie didn’t want us to go, presumably because she only had a few crumbs of crack left.  But minutes later, Sandra and I were in the back of a cab, speeding in the general direction of Paddington.  I passed her a clutch of notes, as she talked openly about who she was going to score from, and what she and I might get up to once we’d found a room for the night.  It all felt dangerously indiscreet, which of course it was.  She told the driver to park on a side-street she seemed to know, saying, ‘Look after the gentleman, I won’t be long.’  He grunted as she hauled herself onto the pavement, pressed a buzzer at the bottom of a tower-block, and waited.  Then, bellowing into the intercom, she was granted access.

 

The radio wasn’t loud enough to ease the silence that had fallen in the car, and it felt excruciating.  I cleared my throat, in an endeavour to at least indicate I had human attributes.  I, the gentleman, felt sure the guy knew well the general gist of things.  But because I didn’t want to worry him, or get into trouble, I told him casually that my friend and I had just moved into a flat, and were staying in a B’n’B while work was being done on the place.  I can’t imagine he believed me, especially when Sandra reappeared and told him she and I had just come down from Hertfordshire for a party at a friend’s.  If this wasn’t enough, she went on to say that we were going to spend much of tomorrow sightseeing on one of those topless buses (in January), and then get the train back to Stevenage, where apparently we lived, adding that she had an appointment at the mother-and-baby clinic in the afternoon.  Something about this last detail didn’t sound as untrue as the rest.  ‘Are you pregnant?’ I asked.  ‘It’s my fourth, love,’ she said, a softer side of her coming momentarily to the fore.  ‘I’ve got a son and daughter up in Stevenage.’  ‘But this is your fourth?’ I asked.  ‘My eldest daughter committed suicide last year,’ she replied, accounting for the missing child.  ‘She was only sixteen.’  ‘I’m sorry,’ was all I could think of to say, and I hardly was.  I was much more concerned with getting some crack in my system, and I think she was too.  Her face was stony, as if a true emotion hadn’t been expressed on it for years, and if she tried now, it might crack like granite.  There was something in her tone that seemed maudlin, assumed.  It was as if she was notching up a tally of sorrows, keeping me onside, guilty at any wish I might have to leave her.  But of course I had no such wish - our lives were now, at least for the purposes of tonight, entangled.  Casualties were accounted for very casually from hereon in.

 

So there we were, fizzing through the glistening mizzle of W2, down this street, up that one, vacancy-hunting, Sandra and I, an ill-conceived nativity in a world not yet mythologised enough to be comforting.  A rookie in a raven’s world, I was now digging into those parts of me that had no interest in being responsible, reasonable, or compassionate.  Sheer appetite and abandon held sway now.  The social me was in thrall to the antisocial.  The beast was still in a suit, but seams were tearing.

 

Like a child before Christmas, I was paralysed with anticipation.  Colours seemed more vivid, even the traffic-lights had a peculiar liquidity to them, and the sense of relief when they turned green was palpable - another little door opened on the Advent calendar.  Shop-windows had a luminescence of their own, almost as if my brain was experiencing a kind of pre-high, an overture to the sensory symphony to come.  I even had my own personal Snow Queen in the guise of Sandra, the bringer of gifts, seductive by proxy, heart, broken and cold in equal measure.  And I, the crippled child, against all safety-regulations, flew through the ice-black night beside her, as if in a darkside Disney animation, all on a sleigh-ride to moral decay – rated PG.  Then Sandra tugged on the reins, and Blitzen came to a halt beside a row of cloned hotels.  He drove off, and we entered the first tawdry doorway that offered a vacancy.  A bell heralded our arrival, and out popped the proprietor from a side-room.  Sandra did the introductions, but he was wary.  Thirty quid seemed to soften him up, and he handed me some keys.  We climbed a musty staircase, and then, door locked behind us, Sandra had a pipe.  I had my go, and we got sexual in a vague and fleeting way.  One thing about crack is that, though it might make you feel mentally sexual, the rest of the body doesn’t really want to know.  Whilst the high is high, it’s like being at the top of a helter-skelter – the only viable way is down.  There I was, ready to let go, to hurtle down that twisting tunnel back to ground, completely unaware there were nails sticking up at intervals from the floor of the chute, then splashdown in a pool of acid, where, undercarriage in shreds, I’d stagger to my feet, thinking, ‘I paid for this?  Can I go again?’

 

Having used prostitutes as respite from the ravages of the world of normal relationships, I was now using prostitutes and crack.  If I’d had a bit of a double-life before, it was beginning to seem quite tenable compared with my current circumstances.  At least when I’d been with a prostitute, I wanted to get home as fast as possible, and knew with agonising clarity that I wanted something better.  But this wasn’t to be the case with crack, for crack has no ending, no climax, no ‘well thanks for that’.

 

After a while, Sandra excused herself and went into the bathroom on the landing, pipe in hand, crack in pocket.  Some people want to smoke in company, some on their own.  Others crawl around the floor looking for more, even when they’ve still got some on the table in front of them.  Some get horny, start talking fast, twitching the curtains, doing the housework.  Sandra was a leave-me-aloner, which didn’t suit me at all.  I could hear her coughing, spluttering and spitting, and was worried our antics might be discovered.  What if one of the other ‘legitimate’ guests (if there were any) complained to the man downstairs?  The police could be called, we could be arrested, thrown in a cell, maybe end up in jail.  But none of that mattered.  We had crack.  Nothing matters when you’ve got crack, apart from the prospect of not having crack.  I placed a piece on the foil, and lit it.  As I did so, I was worried about the clamour from Sandra, afraid that a knock on the door would mark an ugly end to things.  But once I’d sucked up that strangely tasteless smoke, who gave a shit?  Utter euphoria swamped me.  I stood there, acknowledging the blissful force of this all-too-easily ingested vapour, and thought two things almost simultaneously.  The first was ‘where has this been all my life?’  The second was ‘this is going to be trouble.’  For once, I was right.

 

‘We can meet tonight if you like,’ said Sandra, returning with a clatter from the bathroom.  She lay there on the bed, her top unbuttoned just enough to expose the bulge of her belly.  ‘Yeah, we can meet up at Debbie’s - you can fuck me, suck me, anything you want me - no shit, I’ll wear a nice dress.’  My standards were so low that I probably found that quite enticing, but had no interest in the future.  My nascent wisdom was telling me that promises made in this kind of setting were not likely to be kept.  Moreover, I didn’t want to think about afterwards, because that meant this current binge would end, a possibility I didn’t want to entertain.  Sandra gave me a pipe, and, as she burned the crack, began talking about how she wanted to quit, change her life – she didn’t want to lose another child, to suicide or social services.  Perhaps, like me, she was seeking to compensate for things lost, or maybe things she never had but felt she deserved.  Either way, crack is a great way to plug an emotional gap for a short time…ten minutes…ten years.  After that, well, you’re even more on your own than you were to begin with, and your bank-account, if you still have one, has fallen through the floorboards…if you still have a floor.

 

Then Sandra decided she was hungry, and felt that I was just the person to go out and find her some food, a kebab preferably.  I didn’t want to go, because I didn’t want to be parted from the drugs, so I made out my sight wasn’t good enough for night-trekking.  This wasn’t strictly true, but I thought it just might staunch her raucousness.  She made out she was ravenous and, of course, was now eating for two.  I knew she wanted the drugs to herself, but her bluster, and the fact she’d now dragged the foetus into it, had me begging a pipe for the road, creaking my way downstairs, past our host, now asleep in his hovel, and out onto the slightly frightening main road a takeaway to locate, madam’s appetite to sate.  After some time, passing garage, bus-stop, phone-box, the garage again, I came upon a place of light, with men inside, and the warming orange glow of hot-food cabinets defending the vendor.  I went in, all very gauche and decent of course.  ‘Er, good evening,’ I said, not being able to see what was on offer, let alone the menu high on the wall behind the counter, ‘do you do kebabs?’  They did, and the guy fixed me up a couple.  I forgot the way back to the hotel.  Wandering around Paddington at four in the morning, lost, clutching two kebabs, is not my idea of fun.  But eventually, almost by accident, I stumbled on the right street, crept back in, made my way upstairs, and dinner, or breakfast, was served.  She chomped on it like an urban fox that’s just found brunch in the rubble.  I couldn’t eat when I was smoking – food felt such a letdown compared with crack.

 

We quibbled and quarrelled as the night drew on.  I tried to get sexual, pleasure-centres blazing away like a compromised reactor-core, but she nudged me away with various vagaries and vows regarding what was to come.  Then, after more smoking, and less conversation, she devoured the second kebab, as a dusty yellow blur rose over the rooftops.  She belched up the chilli-gas as I sat there coming down, physically tense and wracked with regret, wishing I were either high or dead, but not sinking into quicksand somewhere in that grey hell in between.  Maybe she took too big a pipe at some point, but it wasn’t long before a mangled kebab-and-a-half was scattered over the divan like a lamb Jackson Pollock.  A little later, the bin was ablaze, thanks to a discarded cigarette igniting various tissues and kebab-wrappers.  Then, at roughly eight o’clock, there was a rustling in the hallway.  A sense of dread passed through me, fearing the cleaner might be about to come in.  We sat there, frozen on the bed, in fear that the normal world was about to invade our privacy.  A hoover howled in the hall, hitting our door as it crashed around.  Bin-bags were rustled, throats cleared, and morning salutations exchanged, but somehow, our room wasn’t on the rota.  The stress prompted Sandra to produce a wrap of crack from her top, hitherto held back, no doubt for personal use in the bathroom.  She smoked it, even gracing me with a toke, but then it was back to griping and groaning, and the smell of sick, now wrapped in a sheet by the bin.

 

Shortly after this, I looked at my watch and noticed it was half-past eight, and suddenly thought, ‘I’ve got to go to work.’  When I made this announcement, however, Sandra was having none of it.  I was in a state of mental exhaustion, and just wanted to get out, heart pounding in my chest, head in a whirl of anxiety and remorse.  Then Sandra began pining, saying that if I was going then she’d have to go back to Debbie’s, and would need twenty quid for a cab.  She threw in a reference to her being pregnant, and had me pinned a second time.

 

So I slid away into the chiding morning.  By now there were staff and guests around, and I felt ghoulish passing through them.  Outside, the traffic was heaving.  People were pounding in droves up and down the pavements, and there I was in their midst, feeling like a phantom, doomed to walk the streets of Paddington for the rest of time.  But I had to complete the mission.  I found a cashpoint and made my way back to Sandra, gave her the note, and we said an unceremonious goodbye.  Back through the rush-hour crowds, somehow I found my way to the station, and the platform that would take me to Regent’s Park.

 

This may all sound pretty cold.  It was glacial.  We were just each other’s gateway, or getaway, to oblivion.  Everyone was happy, all short-term goals were met.  And short-termism is what crack’s all about.  It doesn’t matter if you’re knowingly spending your last twenty-quid.  Who cares?  You certainly won’t once you’ve had that first pipe.  Well, not for ten minutes or so.  Who cares if you should be buying food with it?  There’s bread in the fridge, it’ll just have to be toast again.  You could spend it on going out with a friend.  Nah, they’ve probably got plans, and anyway, who wants to turn up somewhere with just twenty quid?  That’s crack money.  A score ain’t gonna save ya.

 

And the muffled witness to all this conjecture?  The baby curled in Sandra’s swollen belly, listening in on Primal FM, the slows, the rushes of the heart, the rhythm of an irascible sea that can’t decide what the tide is doing.  A couple of months later, Sandra, flat-stomached, during another distended encounter, told me that she’d given birth a few weeks before.  Not sure she even saw the child before it was taken away.  Said it was a girl.  Didn’t name it.  Jettisoned into the world, was she earmarked from day one to fail, the word ‘addict’ etched into one of her yet-to-be-activated genes?  Is she now a confused, lost, unmanageable tearaway, bouncing from care-home to care-home, as if rehearsing for the role of the dissolute adult, following in her mother’s footsteps without even knowing what her mother’s footsteps were?  Or does she lead a stable and untroubled life, mournful origins wiped out by the comfort of a loving environment, the adopted ward of a Guardian-reader alliance, who, for reasons of infertility, have decided to go the adoption route.  There she sits, diligently doing her homework, in an actual house, in a pleasant, leafy part of town.  Maybe she’ll grow up to be a counsellor, having been drawn by an unfathomable desire to help people with ‘issues’.  Presumably, by then, someone will have named her.

And, as ever, here is a song for you.  It is old, but there are new ones on the way, I promise ya - just click on the title and you are safely transported to my youtube channel: I'm Too Tired To Kill You

See you soon I hope.

BLIND MAN ON CRACK: Episode 2

Hi, here is episode two of 'Blind Man On Crack', the salaciously titled second airing of my drugs hell story...

Chapter 2

 

The First Cut

 

One evening, after a day of sealing envelopes for a forthcoming conference, I was languishing on my bed, listening to the sound of people having medieval fun in the living-room, and I just couldn’t take any more.  I sprang from the mattress, and picked my way through the living-room, telling Josie I was just off to see an old friend.  Actually, I was going to call on Debbie, who lived near my old flat by the canal.  She was a working-girl, with whom I’d had a couple of bleak encounters in the previous year or two.  I got the train across London to Westbourne Park and made my way to Droop Street, where Debbie lived (and yes, Droop Street is its real name).

 

It must have been about eight o’clock when I climbed the narrow concrete steps to her door, and knocked.  But unexpectedly, when I did, it wasn’t Debbie I heard from behind the woodwork, but a gruffer, more ebullient-sounding voice.  ‘Who is it?’ she bellowed.  ‘It’s Ben,’ I replied, completely inured to the desperate nature of my situation, ‘I’m a friend of Debbie.’  The door opened, and a woman who looked like a failed boxer in a copper-coloured wig stood in the hallway.  ‘Debbie’s just at the shops,’ she explained, but invited me in anyway.

 

The living-room was dim, and I could barely see the chair I’d been offered.  We were sitting either side of a rather cluttered coffee-table.  She told me her name was Sandra, and then, after the minimum of smalltalk, asked me, ‘Do you smoke?’  ‘Er, smoke what?’ I stumbled, not knowing if she meant cigarettes or joints.  ‘Shit,’ she said, ‘white…’  My vague response prompted her to be clearer still.  ‘Crack,’ she croaked.  She had a crackpipe on the table in front of her.  It was of the traditional style, a small, plastic mineral-water bottle, broken biro jammed in the side to suck through, and foil on the top to burn your crack on.  I could go into the intricacies of its construction, but this isn’t Blue Peter.

 

I’d heard of crack.  I knew it was addictive, but then so was nicotine, alcohol, gambling, sex, and god knows what else.  I’d tried all of them, but hadn’t got hooked.  I knew it was sometimes used in the same sentence as heroin, and had maybe featured in a Spike Lee film I’d seen.  This was the extent of my knowledge.  I didn’t know it was the concentrated, smokeable form of cocaine.  I didn’t know that you could find yourself on the scrapheap within weeks or even days of having your first taste of it.

 

So I, being of a curious disposition, not to mention depressed enough to turn to almost anything, said, ‘Yeah, I’ll try.’  She seemed darkly gleeful as she passed me the pipe and told me to suck on the biro, as she held a flame to the translucent white lump on the foil.  Her instructions I followed to the letter, and I can honestly say I barely noticed a thing, at least not consciously.  A lot of white smoke billowed from my mouth as I exhaled.  Then she asked, ‘Did you get it?’  I said something like, ‘It comes on quite slowly, doesn’t it?’  I was really just being polite, to mask what I thought was a bit of a non-event.  Or maybe that’s the insidious deceiver that is cocaine, infiltrating the brain with a spring-heeled assurance that it means you no harm.  Do you remember the song ‘Duel’ by Propaganda?  The chorus goes, ‘The first cut won’t hurt at all, the second only makes you wonder, the third will have you on your knees.’  It wasn’t long before Sandra gave me another.  This time I felt a sexual, almost orgasmic rush, and Sandra could see I was in the grip of euphoria.  I hugged her, as if in relief that finally someone had given me something to anaesthetise my state.  ‘Did you like that, love?’ she asked.  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, head embedded in her leopard-print chest.

 

The front door slammed, and in clattered Debbie with chips and cans, bedraggled like a spaniel, and it wasn’t long before she realised something was amiss.  Perhaps she saw the crackpipe on the table before me, a furtive smirk on Sally’s face, or just sensed an awkward silence.  Dropping her shopping, she turned to her associate.  ‘Oh, you haven’t,’ she said, her tone a mixture of scorn and concern.  Sandra, however, appeared quite pleased with herself, saying, ‘He liked it, it turned him on.’  And there was I, pretty cocksure by now, oozing assurances, telling Debbie, ‘I’m ok, I’m fine.’  Well I would, wouldn’t I?  Depression, low self-esteem, and loneliness felt like things of the past, my miserable half-life little more than a figment.  Then Debbie, an imploring solemnity in her voice, began to give me the lowdown on crack.  ‘It’s very addictive,’ she warned, ‘but mentally, not physically, not like heroin.’  She interspersed her lecture with sideswipes and admonishments at Sandra, quietly gloating in the half-light, now munching on chips.  I received Debbie’s words like someone listening to a hurricane-warning who was still, nevertheless, determined to go up in his light-aircraft.  Actually, thinking about it, I was already airborne.

 

Next, Sandra’s inviting me into the bedroom.  By now I’m responding with, ‘Can we take the pipe with us?’  ‘Of course darling,’ she replies.  And so into the bedroom we swan.  Then a third pipe.  She loads it up, tells me to ‘suck hard on that’, which I obligingly do.  Then Debbie crashes in, and has a pipe herself, and minutes later there we are, the three of us, lolloping around on the bed, them with their tops off, and me, up in the clouds by now, from gauche to gangster in three simple steps, mistakenly believing myself transfigured.  My ego was soaring, intimating I was some kind of crack-debutant, gliding along the red-carpet, cameras fizzing and flashing, fans and paparazzi jostling for a piece of me, barriers buckling as adoring arms lunge across the divide.  What a honeymoon – the perfect product, all pleasure-centres in overload, with no discernible price to pay, like capitalism without the landfill.

 

Then, after a while, Sandra’s little supply ran dry, moods changed, sexual advances became retreats, a kind of normality kicked back in, and things began to fizzle like a wet firework.  So I announced to my companions that I really should go.  I was still, albeit tenuously, connected to the real world.  I was aware of the time, the fairly arduous journey back across London to Josie and the medievalists, and I had work in the morning.  Debbie and Sandra didn’t want me to go, and made a collective plea for me to stay.  When you can only get money by nicking stuff or selling sexual favours, a gullible depressive with a cash-card is always the preferred option.  So I made my way back to the affluent murkiness of the Essex borders.  My confidence in walking away, though, was tempered by the fact I’d arranged to meet Sandra the following week.  She’d seen the chink in my armour, or possibly gaping hole.  Crack ‘went’ with sex.  Sex ‘went’ with crack, and even though nothing too outrageous had occurred that night, the two things would now seem inextricably linked, like a double-helix of two bad things, entwined.

 

I arrived in the flat around midnight.  All was quiet, lights were low.  In the dimness, a luminous skull scowled from the bookcase, as if with an enquiry as to where exactly I’d been.  Josie and her boyfriend were in the kitchen, making hot chocolate.  ‘Did you have a nice time?’ she asked.  ‘Not bad, thanks,’ I said, ‘played a bit of scrabble.’  They made me a drink, and I retired to my bedroom, propping the door shut with a spare bayonet.

And that is the end of episode 2, with a song for your entertainment: Revenge Of The Sirens

See you soon.

BLIND MAN ON CRACK

Well, here goes, the big sell-out, the retitled book, the second lunge at fame.  Episode One of...

BLIND MAN ON CRACK

 

 

How Many Therapists Does It Take To Change A Life?

 

I was working for a counselling organisation in central London.  Our office, on the first floor of a converted church, overlooked a swathe of Regent’s Park.  A more pleasing vista one would struggle to find.  Across the lawn, peppered with flowerbeds, a psychology college loomed like a monolith to good mental health.  When empty, our high-ceilinged chamber retained some of the tranquillity of its pastoral past, but on a working day, with counsellors dropping off documents, dictating letters, and rushing in and out of the committee-room, the place could feel like a therapeutic railway-station.

 

I was the one below a stained-glass window depicting the return of the Prodigal Son, my desk a mess of leaflets and envelopes, big font on my computer-screen, magnifier for reading print, and white cane propped against the radiator.  Contrary to popular belief, when you lose your eyesight, as I did aged nine, you don’t necessarily become any of the following: an oracle, a pianist, a mean pinball-player, basket-weaver, or Stevie Wonder – nor do you develop sat-nav.  In my experience, you feel disconnected, pushed back from things, a blurred observer in a blurred world.  The visual cues that most people take for granted are gone.  Picking up a smile from a passer-by becomes a dreamed-of luxury.  No more eyes meeting across a smoky room, or smoke-free one.  Even in an intimate setting, feelings of low self-worth can rise up and grab the steering-wheel of self.  You might feel you’re saying all the right things, but if you can’t see whether or not the other person is even awake, paranoia can invade the empty spaces.  Seeing can be doubting as well as believing.

 

So, in my mid-twenties, having fallen short of other people’s dreams, not to mention my own, I found myself in clerical purgatory, agnostically praying daily for something, anything, to transfigure my life.  Polly, our manager, had a flexible approach to the concept of the working day, her innovative lunch-breaks encompassing both elevenses and afternoon tea.  Her hair, a New Age explosion of mottled ringlets, crazily framed a face that always seemed to care.  A concerned frown was her default expression, even if the news was good.  She’d waft in and out in charity-sector chic, hobnobbing with the higher echelons of the counselling profession.  Her secretary was Sally, sandbagged behind a desk that betrayed her business heritage.  She’d arrived from the cut-and-thrust of pharmaceuticals.  Her hair, grey with ambition, was tied back so tight that her nose was almost on her forehead.  Words like ‘workshop’ and ‘action’ were verbs to her.  To ‘workshop’ a thing was to think about it, to ‘action’ a thing, to do it.  You could even ‘breakfast’ something, at a push.  George was my ally in this temple to self-betterment, and looked like George Harrison around the time of Rubber Soul.  We’d offset the stress of repeated calls from people who’d forgotten to either meditate or medicate, by hanging round the water-cooler and slating our colleagues.  George played the guitar, had a girlfriend, and did the accounts, the first two of which I envied.

 

I’d been there about six months when Polly and the counsellors announced a new member of staff was needed.  An ad was placed in the Guardian for someone to fill an exciting role in an engaging environment.  A few weeks later, a psychology graduate called Emma arrived, and we became firm friends in the frenzied world of counselling provision.  She was alarmingly beautiful, willowy, with a blonde bob and a sweet, lilting Lancashire accent, made slightly husky by the occasional Marlboro Lite.  We liked similar things, Morrissey, Reeves and Mortimer, and bad game shows.  Many’s the summer lunch-hour we’d spend lounging on the lawn, deep in conversation, me in a state of extracurricular longing, wondering if she was too.  Then, baguettes consumed, we’d return to earn our crust, for the next day’s baguette.

 

As autumn drew in, my feelings for Emma grew, and I decided it was time to express myself, to tell her how I felt.  An airless afternoon dragged on, and the lights in the college opposite looked like little candles of hope.  Emma was loitering by my desk, as she often did, spinning my chair as I tried to type.  Swivelling assertively to face her, I said there was something I wanted to talk to her about, so ‘could we go for a drink after work?’  An hour later, there we were, tucked away in the corner of our local pub.  I went into sombre teenager mode, weighed down as I was by years of hard-won self-consciousness, but this time there would be no backing out, as there had been so many times before.  I had to tell her.  I was 28 – that’s what 28 year-olds do.  I asked her what she was doing at the weekend.  She said her boyfriend was coming to visit.  Well there’s a thing.  Just when you want to put yourself up for audition, you find the part’s already gone.  I felt cursed.  But I’d come this far, and was not going to turn back now.  I wasn’t sure I had the provisions for the return journey, without first reaching my goal.  But I felt obliged to pay some lip-service to this unwanted urchin on my path to glory.  ‘Oh really, what does he do?’ I asked, not caring.  ‘He’s a professional footballer,’ she replied.  I couldn’t trump that.  Clerical Assistant doesn’t have the same ring to it as Liverpool Striker.  Then she asked, ‘So what is it you want to talk to me about?’  I forced out some clumsy words, and she understood what I meant.  She wasn’t phased, but replied in a gentle and humorous way, adapting a Reeves and Mortimer phrase to soften the blow.  ‘Ben, you know that office-relationships are prohibited under the country-code.’  I was both disappointed and amused.  And that, for then, was that.  But at least I’d done something positive, expressed myself, reached out in the name of feeling equal, worthy of respect, yes, even love.  I’d spent years not telling anyone anything, so I gave myself a B+ for effort, D for outcome, and went home to ponder my wounds.

 

My flat overlooked the canal in Westbourne Park.  Milling around in domestic isolation, I did what I could to poeticise my loneliness and put some Smiths on, smoked a joint, watched Frasier, and went to bed.  How could Emma call herself a Morrissey fan without even having the decency to be single?  A few months later, I learned that her boyfriend played for Crewe, and it wasn’t long before she put him up for a free transfer, and that was the end of him.  But his demise was not my cue to go blundering in.  A friend had already filled the vacancy.

 

As the months dragged on, my feelings of isolation and inertia deepened.  My social life was pretty sketchy, and many an evening I’d spend stoned alone, and even though it was good to have George and Emma at work, the job itself was mind-numbing.  So, in a bout of self-respect, I decided I would see a counsellor.  After work, I had a look at our database and picked one out who was based in my neighbourhood.  There were therapists all over the place, so I narrowed it down to one whose name I liked, Louisette.  It had a Parisian feel to it, and conjured up bookish boulevards, Bohemians in conference outside cafés.  Her room was above an antique-shop in Notting Hill, and her profile said she’d worked with blind and partially sighted people.

 

So I hit the couch, except it was a folding canvas chair.  I spent most of my sessions regaling Louisette with tales of Emma, and my inability to get into a relationship.  I began talking about the effect of my sight-condition, the first time I’d really considered it a topic worth exploring.  I even touched on the subject of abuse experienced in my early teens, and the general direction my adult years had gone in as a result.  I also went to my GP asking for antidepressants.  After telling him I was unhappy, had no confidence, couldn’t move on, was lonely, and anxious all the time, he happily scribbled out a prescription.

 

After a week or two, the tablets began to help, but it wasn’t long before George and Emma moved on to new jobs, which marked a further downturn in my spirits.  There I was, forlorn and demotivated, alone in the office, with Sally talking in management-speak, and Polly coming and going, dumping a mailing on my desk, then swanning off for a three-hour lunch.  Whenever a counsellor came by, I’d put out as much good cheer as I could, hoping my chirpy demeanour would put them off the scent.  But one morning, an eminent psychiatrist gave me a bundle of papers to file.  I took them, and they fell all over the floor.  ‘Sorry,’ I said, shamefacedly scraping them up.  ‘There’s no need to be sorry,’ replied the urbane Hampstead shrink.  ‘Oh, I’m always sorry,’ I mumbled, prostrate before the filing-cabinet.  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he quipped, in a way that felt like checkmate in a therapeutic game of chess.

 

Then, just to keep things interesting, I had to move out of my flat.  It was owned by a charity for blind and partially sighted people, and the deal was you could live there for three years.  My time was nearly up, but I’d made no plans to move on.  In the dying weeks of my tenancy, I did go and look at a flat in Notting Hill, a small room with a wardrobe, single-bed, and table and chair.  There was just enough room to enter and stand.  The landlord, who was about twelve, wanted more than I was already paying for my canal-view cell.  I asked him about cooking and washing, and he said the kitchen and bathroom were communal, shared with six other tenants.  I felt like throwing myself out the window, except I couldn’t get to it.  So it was vaguely fortunate when an old schoolmate, Josie, asked me if I wanted to move in with her, over in the wastelands between East London and Essex.  So this is what I did, for two main reasons, one, I had to move somewhere, and two, I fancied her.

 

One dazzling Saturday morning, two Australians rolled up in a removal-van and sped me across London, me perched precariously between them with no seatbelt.  They helped me unpack at the other end, which was no easy feat, as the flat was at the top of a rickety set of backstairs.  It was a struggle getting some things up, most notably my fridge, which, after a few attempts, we decided to leave downstairs.  Then, my Aussie friends having wished me well, I sat in the living-room and watched telly.  Nobody was in, but I knew from that moment I was not going to be happy there.  I think it was the swords and armour hanging in the hall, the skulls and aliens lined up on the bookcase, and the fact that within a matter of days I was being invited to mock-medieval banquets, where everyone dressed up and said ‘hail thee’ and ‘farewell’ to one another, for Josie and her friends were members of a historical re-enactment society.  I had Sally’s office-speak at work, and mock-medieval doggerel in the flat, and felt alienated from both.  Josie’s boyfriend resembled George Formby in a Robin Hood outfit, and the other flatmate, pallid as a vampire, looked like a Goth who hadn’t changed his t-shirt since 1988.  Josie, however, was a buxom Essex girl, whom I’d craved since school days, but never quite managed to ask out.  If they weren’t having a banquet, or out the back waving swords around, they might be scuttling around a derelict castle on a treasure-hunt, pitting their wits against bards from far-off leagues - but this at least meant they were out.

 

To make matters worse, the flat was above the local Conservative Club, and I had to pay rent to the miserable dogs.  It was not in good condition.  We were up in the attic, where parts of the floor were so warped that you couldn’t put anything down, else it would just roll away or fall over, and the place felt like a tinderbox waiting for a spark.  As for my stranded fridge, when the club secretary realised I couldn’t get it upstairs, her response was to drag it into their office to keep milk and biscuits in.  Reversing Robin Hood’s dictum, they seemed happy to take from the poor, and give to the rich, the rich in question being themselves.

 

My life had become a form of medieval torture.  The average weekend would be me in despair in my bedroom, the door of which wouldn’t close properly, listening to the vampire assembling a chain-mail vest in the living-room, a process which seemed to take months, week after week, the sound of pliers fastening one more silver hoop onto the bottom of his already lengthy metal smock.  I was also disillusioned with Josie.  I was jealous of her boyfriend, but unable to do anything about it, and bitter that she seemed to be in her element among these rapscallions.  Some of my happier moments were spent on the Central Line, because this meant I wasn’t bored at my desk, or brooding in the flat.  I felt isolated in both places, and just didn’t see an end to it, barring some kind of miracle, and there was no obvious sign of one of them.

A song: Tarantula
 

AFTER ADDICTION: There Is Such A Thing

By the way, thanks.

You can read my ebook 'How To Become A Crack Addict' here if you want, or you can purchase and 'own it' on amazon, if you stoop to those levels.  Otherwise, welcome to the rooftops I skid upon, Peter Pan, but pubescent, grieving the snow he sullies.

And there is the alleged Pan.

Sometimes I don't know if I'm too stoned, or not stoned enough.

Don't you?

I've gone on too longer already.  And yet not long enough.

Here is a picture to elucidate, perhaps:

I hope you like my suburban primitivism, if such a thing exists.  And, I don't know, but I'm not sure so this is art, Reader.  I mean, look at it.  Where's the effort to idea ratio?

Fear of magic?

We do comedy at the Duchess of Cambridge, Chiswick, London, every Wednesday, etc...here's the pub's beautiful link:

It has quite a Shakespearean courtyard, I feel...

Here is the pub from the front:

And here is a hint of the secret courtyard...

Skip ad.

AFTER ADDICTION: If There Is Such A Thing

Hi, and thanks for dropping by.  As you may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict' (Jan to April 2013), which you can read here, or buy for £3 on Amazon, if you do that kind of thing.  Since then, it's random ramblings of yours truly, Benjamin Lo-Fi.  And here is today's ramble, so get your hiking-boots on...

AFTER ADDICTION:  If There Is Such A Thing

(The picture is the Duchess of Cambridge pub, where, currently, we have a comedy evening called 'Duch Ado About Nothing', every Wednesday.  It's on the cusp of Chiswick and Shepherd's Bush, London, if you're ever in the neighbourhood.  It's a lovely place, and does great sweet potato fries, too).

In the bleak, cobweb-clad world of twelve-step fellowships, I found myself strung up on a twitching web of all-or-nothing thinking.  Don't get me wrong, I can only talk from personal experience, and from the attitudes I choose to adopt, and practise adopting as time goes by.  When I first attended a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, it was a dim, tranquil room, with a tank of tropical fish lighting up one corner, topping off the scene.  There were about a dozen of us, one or two females who 'seemed interesting' to my slightly addled mind, but, all the same, it was one of the strings that tugged me, puppet-like, back a few days later.

At that first meeting, I thought I'd arrived in a panacea, a place I could return to, again and again if needed, to tap into the happy defiance I thought I'd found.  The readings, the mellow sharing, even the tea and custard-cream, left me feeling pretty chilled.  Even the joining hands bit, and the reciting of the serenity-prayer, didn't put me off that much.  Perhaps that was testimony to how desperate I was feeling, because I'm not a natural joiner-inner.  Even at a gig, when I like the band as much as everyone else, I still feel as if any collective behaviour could be one step away from the formation of some kind of cult, or a Fourth Reich.  But even so, I went home and defiantly listened to 'Irish Blood, English Heart' by Morrissey, and actually felt free from what was normal at that time, that flat, resigned, dead-end kind of feeling, that, even with the evidence of my addiction all around me, the empty fridge, barren cupboard, and husk of a flat, was my default state.  I even had thirty quid or so in the bank, and I didn't feel like blowing it on a couple of bits of crack, and a smudge of heroin to come down with.  I really believed I'd arrived somewhere special, and I had...but I don't think it was a 'special place' for me, at least not in the long-run.

I committed heresy more than once in a meeting, by saying that, although I wanted to quit crack, I didn't really want to stop drinking, or smoking the odd spliff, because these weren't a problem to me.  I got various responses, such as 'drink will lead you back to crack', 'alcohol and cannabis are still mind-altering substances' (and therefore off the 'complete abstinence' menu), 'drinking and smoking puff is still avoiding your feelings, mate', and many variations on these themes.  There was, it seemed, no middle ground, and it's not nice finding yourself in the midst of a 'support group', trying to be honest, but discovering your honesty is sacrilege, too off-message.

That initial glow of positivity I felt after that first meeting disappeared within weeks, although I continued going back to meetings for several years (and may again), but it got to the point where I was turning up just for the tea'n'biscuits.  Things had got so bad at one point, I suppose about six years ago, where I turned up for a meeting and, when the person taking it was out the room, I pocketed a load of biscuits for later, because I literally had nothing in the kitchen.  By this point, I didn't know who or what to blame, or turn to.  My life was use when my benefits came in, spend them in a day, go to bed for three, then cadge twenty or thirty pounds of my ailing, suffering, worrying mum, to tide me over 'til the next money-day.  It wasn't a good life, yet still I thought I looked ok, even with a puffy, blotchy face, old t-shirt flapping about, and jeans like two cloth cylinders hanging from a beltless waist.

I write this partly because I met someone from one of those first meetings on the street a few days ago.  He spotted me first (I wouldn't have spotted him, because of my limited eyesight), and I felt instantly awkward, in case he wanted to know 'how I was doing', 'was I still going to meetings', etc, etc...

But, when he approached, in the brilliant light of the milk-aisle of Tesco Express, even I could see that he didn't look good.  Ghostly stubble veiled the lower half of a saggy-looking face, and the coat he had on didn't look appropriate for the kind of day it was, making me think he'd put it on because it was one of a very select selection of clothes currently hanging in his wardrobe (if he still had one).  'It's Ben, isn't it?' he said.  'Yeah, that's right,' I replied, 'Daniel...'  I had remembered his name, at least.  'Are you still going to the meetings?  You look well,' he observed, in a warm tone.  I told him I'd been to a few, because I was now thinking that he might benefit from doing the same.  When I arrived in that first meeting, he'd picked up a celebratory key-ring for being six months, or maybe nine, clean.

He told me that he'd been going to lots of meetings until a few months back, when he relapsed soon after his girlfriend starting drinking again (also from 'the fellowship), and now they were both back in a state, begging, fighting, their flat gradually becoming a stop-off point for anyone who'd scored, and wanted a quick place to smoke, or inject.  I've heard it said, although I'm not sure it's universally true, that when you get time clean, then relapse, you don't pick up where you left off, but where you would have been if you'd been using throughout.  I don't think there are any universal truths about anyone's relationship with drugs, drink, or whatever.  For a time, I got three months clean of crack, but leaned quite heavily on red wine and cannabis, relapsed on crack, and then it took me another six months to get away from it again, with plenty of self-will, and support, and that time, because I'd joined a meditation group, I found myself a little calmer, and wiser.

Daniel asked me if I could lend him (like I was going to see him any time soon) a couple of quid.  He already had two cans in his hand, but wanted to get some lasagne, or some such sludgy ready-meal from the reduced cabinet.  I gave him it, and said I'd better be on my way because I had a friend waiting at home, which was a lie.

So Daniel and I shook hands, his rough, mine loose, not wanting to get too entwined, and I said 'I hope you can get back into meetings, maybe, if you find them helpful...it's not about pride, lots of people relapse, no one'll be on your case...' or words to that effect, and he said he would go back.  I reminded him of the drug-service round the corner, like some walking 'good rehab guide'.  Our hands disentwined, and I went towards the exit, he to the checkout, ready-meal and cans in hand.

I haven't seen him since.  Don't know if I will.  But, twelve-steps or not, I think the bottom-line of substance use, or abuse, is personal choice.  It's just my opinion, but if we start classifying problematic using as a 'disease of addiction', we sidestep the fact that it is always a choice whether or not to have a drink, smoke, or whatever, and I know from personal experience, and choice, that it is possible to give up one drug, but continue, occasionally, to have a drink, or even a bit of cannabis, or pot as I believe the kids call it.  That's my personal choice.  I may choose to go without them, too.  I may not.

I don't know if that shambling little anecdote was of use to anyone, but I suppose I'm just trying to say that everyone's different, and sometimes the twelve-step fellowship, Narcotics Anonymous being my main experience of one, can seem a bit 'one size fits all', and that can contribute to people denying themselves their right to selfhood, independent thinking, considering alternatives, etc.  Obviously, I don't want anyone to go down the pan on drugs, and if someone goes the NA way, it's not for me to try and dismantle it, it's their personal choice, and may have saved their life - and I guess it's better to live in a uniform than die in your own clothes.

Here's one of my songs, just in case you have a spare two minutes twenty seconds.  It's called Windswept - just click on the name and it goes to my youtube channel.  There are more songs, and comedy postings to come - arguably.

Anyway, that's enough of me.  Until next time...

AFTER ADDICTION: From Drugs Hell To Comedy Purgatory

Hi, and thanks for dropping by.  You may know, the first 22 posts of this blog are the text of my ebook, 'How To Become A Crack Addict', which you can read here, or buy for £3 on Amazon, if you prefer.  It has three very good reviews, I'm pleased to say, but I would like more reviews, good or otherwise.  Nowadays, the blog is the kinda twice-weekly musings of yours truly, Benjamin Lo-Fi, singer, writer, songwriter, and comedy performer (arguably).  I usually write these blog entries, but I'm trying to resuscitate, or maybe just suscitate, the little comedy soiree I organise in the pub over the road from me, at the Duchess of Cambridge.  Here are two pieces to camera, one by me, tired of a day of worrying and trying to whip up audience, and one from Professor Brian Cox, floppy-fringed stargazer, who wishes to endorse the evening, due to having good taste in the absurd.  I hope you can bring yourself/selves to muster a little sympathy for my cause, and, if you can, come along to one Wednesday evening to what is, even if I say so myself, an original, friendly, and funny evening of comedy antics.

Here is my bit to camera:

And here is Professor Brian Cox's much more succinct endorsement of the soiree:

Thanks for dropping by.  See you very soon.

Best wishes, Benjamin Lo-Fi.