It was one of my favourite bits from the old shoot em up by raven / activision that went by the name of soldier of fortune, and it was a line of dialogue used by one of the bad guys, you first encountered it in a subway about the time you find another bad guy taking a piss and get to blow him away before he takes a different tool in hand and does the same for you.
So anyways I’ve basically been a week in and out of bed and not much else with this fucking winter flu / virus / bug / whatever it is doing the rounds, I seem to be unreasonably healthy generally, but every three of four years get hit with one of these things that takes me out for a few days.
Coming out the ass end of it now and weak as a kitten.
The interesting thing about such bouts of infection is how they fuck with your head and thought processes, if ever you needed proof that your brain was a biochemical computer nothing provides it so well as being on the inside looking out while said biochemical computer gets infected and fucked up.
Of course my name isn’t Princess Laidup so I haven’t been self medicating with Prozac for 40 years (just caffeine and nicotine) so the picture of her ashes in a giant prozac capsule for interment with her momma Debbie Remoulds was quite the WTF moment for me.
It’s easy for me to tell internally I ain’t well, because I could lie there and intellectually think all sorts of weird and wacky sexual things, but down in the trouser department nothing was stirring, not even first thing in the am, Roger the trouser snake wasn’t interested in much apart from draining piss from the bladder, and very drippily at that, he wasn’t even sulking at the loss of sexual function, he was more of a don’t give a fuck it’s gone and don’t give a fuck if it ever comes back either, so fuck you, now fuck off and leave me alone.
I’ve never been one to under-estimate how big an effect medication / diet / environment / etc not just “can” but does have on brain function, which means thought processes, which means personality.
Fred on Acid != Fred on Prozac != Fred on caffeine.
Not in a “fred ain’t acting himself” way, but in an all three are essentially different people way, I always used to say this to people who would come to me for advice about someone who was abusing heavily drink or drugs, the alcoholic/junkie Fred you are talking about helping is not the same person as the Fred you used to know, nothing applies the same any more.
I dallied for a few years at a time regularly daily dosing myself with grass and speed and acid, and then regularly daily dosing myself with alcohol, I know this to be true, I handled that shit like a pro, but the person I was then ain’t the person I am now, and between thee and me and the gatepost that’s all the reasons I have ever really needed to not go back on the booze or back on the dope, once I eventually discovered who I was, I feel no need to change that and go away from it.
Like Princess Fuckedup and every other celebutard you can name, I was clearly self medicating to change who I was, not realising that perhaps who I was wasn’t the fucking problem, who I was pretending to be and who I was hanging out with and what fucking lifestyle I was trying to live were the problem.
The thing I never really got was that I was fundamentally changing myself, I knew all the catchphrases, it’s not booze, it’s anaesthetic, it’s not reality, it’s lack of drugs, like some dystopian fantasy world where you take the psychopath pill every day to go to work in a particular job, then take the anti-psychopath pill when you go home, so that when you are at home you will be “normal”… fat fucking chance.
The huge irony is that looking back on it all, at the time the whole rebel without a cause “what ya got” thing pissed me off because it was so fake and so many tried to constantly fake it so I consciously avoided that whole scene man, but the reality was I didn’t like what life had to offer and instead of going out and actively changing that I just passively rejected it, and actually became the rebel without a cause, what ya got?
And with the benefit of enough years and 20/20 hindsight I was Brando, and similarly admired and reviled by the wimminz and others, rebels without causes ain’t particularly dangerous y’see, and revolutions that are never intended to progress beyond my own biochemistry aren’t particularly threatening either.
What ya got meant I was against anything you cared to name, and being against it meant I didn’t partake in it, responsibility’s for the birds man.
Never made the slightest effort to work *against* the thing in question, the cause du jour, “not my scene” non participation in that shit while I spent my time doing some other shit instead.
Jimmy Dean was too angst ridden and involved, Marlon was all fuck it, I’ll pass on that shit, but they were all of course silver screen fantasies, and whatever personal fantasies (or vanities) I was indulging in it was very much real life.
Unlike the on screen Dean and Brando playing with knives and fighting, I always carried a knife (always Buck for me) but never once showed one in anger, for we knew that knives weren’t toys to impress, a knife is a killing tool, and it works best if the intended deceased don’t see it, and even if the intended deceased is carrying a firearm if you get within 10 feet he’s dead, you might be too, but he would be. *maybe* one person walked away from a knife “fight”.
Nevertheless like everything else the mere carrying was seen as symbolic and proof of danger and bad intent, contrary to all the empirical factual evidence, because, you know, some people got injured and killed with knives.
See, that’s the other way to fuck with your biochemistry, make the harmless things that you want to do illegal, so you either avoid doing them or do them and take your chances, but the stress free innocent option of doing them freely is gone along with the biochemistry you would have had.
So welcome to the brave new world of 2017, Trump takes office in 13 days, the Kenyan is still fucking with things as much as possible, as are the MSM and just about everyone else, because it appears that in the US and in the UK and EU, the population is split, and those who have held sway for 30 years simply aren’t prepared to endure the brain biochemistry changes required for regime change, while those who have endured for the past 30 years really don’t want another month, and both sides would rather the whole fucking edifice of modern society collapse, rather than give an inch… not that there is an inch to be given.
2017 is going to be either coming round from a long spell of illness / drunkeness / stoned stupor, and entering a new reality, or leaving a long spell of the old reality and entering a long spell of sickness / drunk / stoned and getting used to it.
Pretty is one thing it won’t be.
“Real” is another thing it won’t be, just a shift change in who is stoned and who is straight 24/7.