EPISODE 21: IN WHICH THE AUTHOR REFLECTS ON PROGRESS MADE AND CHALLENGES AHEAD

Welcome to my blog which is posited to be the episodic unfolding of a writer’s life at a crucial time. Crucial to him of course. No-one else really gives a shit whether he finds an audience (and an income) or not. An oddity of a blog is that readers (when they appear) arrive in the middle of things and then can’t be bothered to scroll back to the beginning to find out what’s been going on. For example, how many of you know that in Episode 18, I advertised my novel, BOGGY STARLESS AND THE DRUIDS OF GLASTONBURY (written under a different name) which is available on lulu.com for a mere £9.99? 

Or that the reason this is called a ‘Self-Help Reality Novel’ is because, having decided that age dictates that this is a now and never situation, I thought I needed to utilize all the tools at my disposal, including whatever benefits I’ve accrued from years of psychological experimentation with drugs, meditation, newer age type thinking, Rebirthing, Avatar, The Path of Least Resistance, and various other techniques and advices, to make the best effort I could to produce the results that I want.

Should you have followed the story from the beginning, you might appreciate why today, rather than digress as I am wont to do, and prefer to do, onto tangential matters such as Dean Whitbread’s desire to diminish the power of the word, and concentrate on providing a progress report on the self-help side. When I made this leap of commitment to genuine effort, my plan was to spend May to September preparing the ground and then from now, my first week of self-employment as an ‘Author, Course Teacher and Thanatologist,’ upping the ante with a view to being well-established by the end of next year.

Plans, I can do. Enthusiasm for my plans, I can do. Heigh-ho, let’s get stuck in, I can do. Stick at it and finish it, I can do. At this moment I’m not sure what it is I can’t do because slowly, with years collapsing between paragraphs, work appears, creation happens. Job done. It’s the stage after the creation which seems incomplete because with the exception of a few stories and articles, and now Boggy, nothing has actually turned into a book because in manuscript form it has gone off to agents and publishers where it has been inspected, often commented on, sometimes praised and occasionally almost given a contract, but never actually published.

 Now we don’t need intermediaries to publish, although they could certainly help, to give us permission to be what we want to be. Thanks to lulu.com, any author can cheaply put themselves in print. Believe me, that’s fucking amazing.

Deciding to write this blog once a week, was an act of discipline and a statement of intent not to forget what I was meaning to do and not to find myself in two years’ time finding a list of projects which I never got round to completing. So far writing the blog has been very useful in surprising ways. Until writing tonight, for example, I’d been concentrating on producing and not really noticed that there’s a sort of post-completion step that I seem to be missing.

Before looking at the techniques that I have, or have not employed, I do feel that something’s dawned on me in relation to creating. The title of Harry Palmer’s book, ‘Living Deliberately,’ sums up the Avatar philosophy. In myself I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with the idea of living deliberately, of making choices, of defining, because it appeared to contradict what I believed more deeply, viz. that any self is an illusion and anything it ‘chooses’ is equally illusionary. I still believe that. What’s changed is that I have begun, or think I have, to disentangle my creations from my identity. Robert Fritz is very good on this (cf). Also I realized, and bear with my here, that although I believed I wasn’t really a person, ‘personing’ continued and that person was unable not to create – because creating is in the nature of personing – and would continue to perform the five-fold act of creation either unconsciously, through habit and repetition, or consciously by thinking of something it wanted to create and creating it. Instead of feeling guilty for focusing on particular goals (without undue attachment), I now see creating as an invaluable tool for mental health.

I’m now going to turn you over to Jack Heston, my inner American (cf Episodes 2,3,8,11).

Hi! As usual I’ve been left to clear up the dogends of John’s mind. And only 250 words left to do it in. Here’s my report on the current status of project positivity and focus.

OVERALL SUMMARY.

The original goals remain in place but there are more of them and they are more specific. There remains, however, a lack of definition about the final objective. Plans are in place but there are gaps in the plan. In terms of ideas, there has been an abundance, which is both good and bad; the bad being a sense of overwhelm and loss of focus as to what the next thing to do is. The various strands of my abilities appear to be coalescing in a way I didn’t expect. Writing 17,000 words of Sad Sam wasn’t in the original plan and took a few weeks of my time away – to what end I don’t know yet. On the other hand, I loved writing it and am certain writing a novel that works for me is the best feeling. Without Chris Wade’s intervention, I suspect Sam would have remained unwritten. Already I’m gagging to write two more novels.

Another surprise is that I now feel I can and want to teach Avatar again.

I suppose I should admit that John is smoking like the veritable chimney. I will work on him. He also keeps complaining about the lack of time. I’ll work on that too. How many minutes are spent rolling cigarettes and emptying ashtrays? I am pleased with his commitment to the job, however, though I can see that his struggles with the technology are a problem to be resolved if his efforts are to be properly productive. All in all, we appear to be on track. And, all being well, they’ll be a time when John creates an opportunity that will require him to face his threshold condition and to step out of his room and of himself to create his creations in the real world. I don’t think he’ll be able to do this. That’s when I’ll take over and establish myself as the proper captain of the good ship Heston.

Be seeing you.

WORDS, BASED ON BOWIE SONGS, WRITTEN FOR THE ELDEST SON, CALLED TOM MAJOR. HE WASN’T IMPRESSED.

This is Major Tom

Calling Daddy John

I’m floating in a tin can

Spaced out on your afghani man

Five years of stardust

‘N Rock ‘n Roll wanderlust

This is Lieutenant Tom

Can you hear me mum?

Everything’s hunky-dory

In this lovers’ story

The boys keep swinging

The boys always work it out

This is ground control to Colonel Tom

Lets dance, put your helmet on

We can be heroes

Though just for the day

We’re absolute beginners on a drive-in Saturday

Junked out on heaven’s highs

Cracked by Crowley’s lies

The lad’s insane

Booze, pills, and cocaine

Ziggy’s sixty-four

And can’t play the guitar any more

This is ground control to General Tom

Time falls wanking to the floor

And time will trace us all

A word on the wind from your dad and mum

They love you Major Tom

They love you Major Tom

By the way, before I forget; David Cameron’s confession that he is a KGB spy is very timely for me because I have the complete low down on Maggie T’s own career as a Russian agent as revealed in my story ‘Sex with Maggie T’, the memorial edition of which will be issued later this year, I hope. (It all depends on the OCR machine.)

EPISODE 20: ON SATIVEX, CANCER, MEDICAL MARIJUANA AND GOVERNMENTAL CONTROL OF PAIN RELIEF.

Welcome to my blog which this week which this week has been distracted by a friend, a cancer sufferer, who mentioned who said he'd asked his doctor for the drug, sativex, and been given short shrift.Maybe it would have been different if he had lived in Manchester because in the last couple of weeks, Sativex, a drug produced by GW Pharmaceuticals who are ‘sponsoring’ trials in two hospitals in Manchester, has received plenty of publicity as a potential palliative pain preventative for cancer sufferers.

Sativex® is composed primarily of two cannabinoids: CBD (cannabidiol,) and THC (delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol). Sativex® is administered as a metered dose oro-mucosal spray each 100μL spray contains 2.7mg THC and 2.5mg CBD.

 

GW Pharmaceuticals have been attempting to produce marijuana based medicines since 1999 and Sativex is already widely proscribed to Multiple Sclerosis although the evidence for its success seems, at first sight, unconvincing. According to the MS Society’s leaflet on Sativex:

The way cannabinoids work is not fully understood as yet, but discovery of the endocannabinoid system – a natural system found in the human body through which cannabinoids are able to exert their effects – has provided some insight.

The endocannabinoid system is thought to work in a similar way to the opioid system – the system that controls pain. Some pain-killing medicines exert their effects on opioid receptors to provide relief from pain. In a similar way, cannabinoids exert their effects on cannabinoid receptors that are part of the endocannabinoid system.

Receptors are protein molecules in or on the surface of cells to which a substance (such as a drug) can bind, causing a change in cell behaviour or activity. The specific receptors that the active ingredients of Sativex (THC and CBD) exert their effects upon are the CB1 receptor and the CB2 receptor. CB1 receptors are thought to exert their effects in the brain while CB2 receptors are thought to exert their effects on immune cells.

There’s a lot of ‘it is thought’ about this and one can only imagine that a very persuasive voice, or a very desperate situation, has allowed this through as ‘evidence-based’ medicine. Personally I’m all in favour of the trials, not least because I have a friend who may benefit, but I am disturbed, and perhaps irritated, by governmental obfuscation concerning drugs, especially cannabis. How is it, for example, that GM Pharmaceuticals can don white coats and grow forests of marijuana secretly in the English countryside, while a pensioner who bakes some hash cake to self-medicate or a middle-aged depressive who smokes weed to cheer himself up will find themselves prosecuted or imprisoned? And why is that drinking alcohol (which is rarely recommended as a healing drug) is fine for Prime Ministers, sport people and ‘responsible’ drinkers when puffing on your marijuana joint is a criminal offence?

Cannabis has been used as a medicine since time immemorial in China, the Middle East, and probably everywhere it has grown. 

AIDS Wasting Syndrome

Arthritis

Brain Injury/Stroke

Multiple Sclerosis

Nausea associated with cancer Chemotherapy

Anti-Tumour Effects

Asthma

Epilepsy

Glaucoma

Schizophrenia

Migraine

Eating Disorders

General Pain

Are just some of the conditions that reputedly benefit from cannabis. If the smooth talkers at GM Pharmaceuticals play their cards right, the entire NHS could be at their mercy. Of course for most of our 15,000 year relationship with the plants around us, the general populace hasn’t needed the sanction of government to help itself to herbs and plants considered healing. Will there be a time when the application of a dock leaf to a nettle sting will have to be applied by an oral spray, Extract of Dock, administered only by a recognized government sponsored professional?

The Sativex publicity is keen to declare that Sativex “does not get users high” and patients do not experience the “euphoria associated with illegal recreational use of cannabis”. Now, I’m no scientist (although I am a Master of Science) and I have observed in other writers the tendency to run with a ‘scientific fact’ as long as it appears to support their worldview, so my brief look at the figures does not mean a lot, but it seems to be that 2.7mg THC and 2.5mg CBD is equivalent to approximately 1gram of marijuana. Depending on the strength of the marijuana, and on how accustomed you are to it, and on a host of other minor circumstances, 1 gram of cannabis would get you ‘stoned’ if not ‘high’, In fact, according to a number of sources that I’ve just checked, particularly Peter Reynolds http://clear-uk.org/the-sativex-scam-part-2-5/, it does indeed get you high. My problem with this is, why is getting high considered to be a bad thing? Isn’t the getting high bit essential to the healing? Is it not the case that whatever happens in the brain, and in the whole body (and in our consciousness if we have one) when we get high, is what is required molecularly to relieve the distress we’re in?

Candice Pert, neuroscientist and pharmacologist, has claimed that short chains of amino acids called peptides, and their receptors, are the "biochemical correlate of emotion." Peptides are found in the brain, but also in the stomach, muscles, glands and all the major organs. Her conclusion is that peptides in these other organs have memories – what she calls “the unconscious mind”. Since reaching these conclusions she has promulgated notions such as ‘change your mind, change your life,’ on the premise that, to paraphrase, that getting high, though not necessarily through drugs, is good for you. Surely it can’t be bad for you, so what’s the government’s problem? I guess it’s got to be power or money or both.

Meanwhile in California, and other states, we have some sort of compromise; medical marijuana available on prescription. Presumably this is the way forward. Or rather, the way we’re going to go in the long run unless GM Pharmaceuticals and their ilk can seize the supplies and monopolize the market with their potions. It could be, of course, that the government have foreseen a problem I have often wondered about, viz. how to please a generation of pensioners when we stick them in homes and deprive them of the one drug they’ve been medicating themselves with for the previous fifty years. Give them pot!

Or MDMA. I’m not joking. A variation of Ecstasy is being tested on blood cancers and early study showed all leukaemias, lymphoma and myeloma cells could be killed in a test tube. My brother has lymphoma. 

Or LSD. Still not joking. Stanislav Grof did some pioneering work with the dying, giving them LSD, back in the mid-sixties. His results were interesting but the tests had to be abandoned owing to the bad publicity LSD received from the media of the day.

My point? I don’t know yet but I don’t like the idea of David Cameron and his champaign boozing, cocaine taking friends to be in charge of anything, maybe  least of all of the THC supply of the dire and desperate.

EPISODE 19: THE PAULOWNIA SAGA

Welcome to my blog; it pokes my head out once a week to say hello and tell you what I’ve been thinking about or writing about during the last few days. Upstairs is sleeping, I hope, someone who knows the publishing/creating world far better than I ever will and could probably help me no end, but these is so much to learn. Just last night he was showing me his iphone – I wanted to ask is this an iphone but thought he’d be unable to believe I didn’t know – and telling me all the wonderful things it can do with its apps while sharing with me some of the wonderful photos that people were sending him from all over the world via Twitter, facebook, and other media which I haven’t heard of, and I thought, I’ll never find the time to understand all this and probably will continue to every now and then get something together to send off by snailmail and never find out how to think just few words and then moments later find them echoing around the world.

   So it goes. At least he told me not to record interviews on a MP3 player which is just as well because I never did grasp what one of those was.

  Meanwhile, what happened to my publisher? Two weeks since I sent him the script, not a whisper of response. Does this mean that in a couple of days I’ll have to write and say, ‘by the way, did you get my script and become so overwhelmed that you couldn’t reply? Or were you disappointed? Tell me!!!’

   On Monday the plumber came. He arranged 9.00 a.m. Turned up at 10.30. Talked a lot. Told me he was going to reduce the noise of the water in the pipes by changing a switch. Three hours later he was finished. £115. No discernible difference in the pipe noise. On Wednesday and Thursday, I had a wall built between mine and the neighbour’s house; probably seven foot high and a metre across. £280. It had to be done for security reasons. Because my neighbour is away and because I can’t really work with people in the house, I took the opportunity to remove some branches of my pollarded paulownia tree which overhung her garden and also chop down a self-seeded buddleia which had intertwined itself with one of her trees and begun to bring the (my) fence down. It was a long job with a crap saw and blunt shears. Her brambles put up a good fight and both arms are satisfactorily scratched. The havoc done to her garden is quite considerable but I’ve got two months for it to heal before her return. I live in a mid-terrace of three, in a street where most of the houses are identical in size and layout, so much so that if someone pops in from a house up the road they become disconcerted. I’ve been here, off and on, for twenty years but this was the first time I’d been into next door’s garden. It was a revelation! For a start, the sunlight falls differently on her garden, even though they are joined together. Over the back of her fence I could see clearly both where the noisy parties have been held and who owns the big ash tree that takes away everyone’s light; two mysteries I have been trying to solve since returning here last February. The fact that such a small change in perspective can release such new information, is one of those lessons that I endlessly learn and endlessly forget.

   The downing of the Empress Tree has been quite contentious among my friends and family although everyone in the end acknowledges it had to be done. It should never have been there and its presence is a testament to the hubris Sof three people; me, and two friends of mine who were a couple, Henno (male) and Terri (female). Their passion was trees, especially varieties that they found abroad and introduced here. The Paulownia that we planted in the back garden, from just a twig, and the variety of Eucalyptus they chose for the front garden, were both truly exquisite and both vital in their growth. (I think we planted them around 1995.) My hubris was to want big big trees. When I very rapidly received what I wanted, the very good quickly turned into the quite troublesome. The Paulownia flowers are beautiful beyond belief with an aroma that would suit nectar. I’d look at them and smell them and want to cry for the magic of it. After a few short years, the flowers grew too highly up to bring down to the nose, though of course their perfume filled the garden. When the flowers went, the giant leaves would arrive and beneath this Empress’s skirts dark mini-worlds would form and then become flattened in the autumn when the leaves fell and covered three gardens with their carcasses. A decade on and the beautiful paulownia is massively tall and increasingly removing the sunshine from people’s gardens. Meanwhile in the front garden, which I’ve judged measured as 14ft by 14ft, the Eucalyptus also flourished and before long was having to be annually beheaded to keep it out of the telephone wires.

  So the order went out from high - I was being landlord rather than resident at the time – to destroy. 

   The Eucalyptus was bebottomed. An irremovable and awkward stump remains. The Paulownia, it would seem, used emotion to protect itself, so although the tree surgeon took away three quarters of its body he couldn’t bring himself to completely finish the job. Subsequently the branches and leaves regrew but in four springs it didn’t flower. This time I’m trying to finish the job, yet there is objection. Why don’t I use what’s left as a feature? Or turn it into something? Of course if I knew how to use my friend’s iphone, I could take a picture, put it on here and let you have an opinion. I hereby promise myself that within six months I’ll know how to do that.

   What has made the Paulownia decision more difficult is that Henno and Terri are both dead now and these trees were their gift to me.

 

EPISODE 18: AT THE END OF WHICH THE AUTHOR REMEMBERS TO ADVERTISE HIS BOOK.

Welcome to my blog. I write 1,000 words a week on themes connected with a writer’s life. In the 18 weeks I’ve been going I’ve achieved 60 hits. If you’re a populist, you are either in the wrong place or in the right place early.

How many hits would make it worthwhile? The answer, I suppose, is that readership is secondary. Or is it? If no-one ever reads a word, can it still be worthwhile?

Writers, especially those with no commissions to fulfil, can spend their days asking themselves pointless questions and their nights answering the questions with obvious replies such as, ‘Worthwhileness is in the eye of the beholder’ and ‘Seeing as time doesn’t exist, how can you waste it?’

A problem with working from home is getting any work done. In a town like Glastonbury, in which many of my peers are unemployed, as I am, it is easy for them to assume that it is absolutely fine for them to drop by and say things like, ‘Are you writing? That’s nice,’ and then not go away again until they’ve had their requisite cups of tea and gossip. Part of the problem is that I don’t know how to look busy. I could do it in factories, spending the days or nights wondering from one place to another with a purposeful expression on my face while actually spotting and enjoying the skiving and smoking places. In those of course, it wasn’t the smoking you were supposed to be ashamed of but the non-working and even that depended on your particular foreman. No overseers for the writer, however, unless you’re lucky enough to have a demanding editor or a vociferous readership. And how can I look busy when my writing life consists mainly of staring at the computer while thinking about everything under the sun except what I’m writing about and walking from room to room in the house suddenly in need of doing the washing up or planning what I may do in the garden sometime hence?

Which is what I’ve been doing for much of today. I’ve been out there, tidying up, but as I don’t which bits need to be pruned and which are to be left alone, the whole exercise becomes frustrating. Then I spent an hour unsuccessfully looking for my saw which, I guess, I must have left under a bush some months ago when I last got fed-up with a buddleia.

Why hasn’t the publisher got back to me? Last time he was as quick as a flash.

This week has been full of family. When people come to visit, it is hard to hide. The house is tiny: you can’t fart without someone hearing you. Yesterday I looked after my younger grandchild for a few hours. Is there anything more delicious than a 16 month old in a good mood smiling up at you in the sheer amusement of life? And in those moments of smiling back you probably do more good than any writer will do, even J.K. Rowling.

Having completed Sad Sam, I’ve lost focus a little. What next? Within the next couple of weeks, I’ll be signing off the dole and becoming a self-employed me. To cushion me from this fall from governmental cradling (as represented my £65 per week and council tax rebate of 100%), I will be applying for Working Tax credit. How long this may take to come through, no-one can tell me. Being on the dole, and for much of the time being told to sign-on weekly, is a discomforting experience – deliberately so – and a surreal one in a time of no jobs. I always had to wait for 20 minutes while watching, in an open plan office, my interviewer filing their nails or chatting to a colleague. This done, I’d be called over, asked a succession of patronising questions about what job searching I’d done in the last week, and then forced to stare at a  computer screen while the interviewer scrolled through lists of totally irrelevant jobs for which I had neither the skills or qualifications nor the slightest chance of getting. Admittedly, calling myself a ‘bereavement counsellor’ totally foxed them for it would appear that never in the history of Job Centres has anyone ever wanted to employ a bereavement counsellor.

There’s a rule that if the job centre assistant prints off a job for you to apply for than you have to apply for it even if, as happened, you find the closing date has past or the post specifically requires experience that you don’t have. So it goes.

18 weeks ago, at the end of April, I began this blog with this very time in mind. Up to now was meant to be the preparation period. Between now and Christmas I have to start earning. To achieve this end, I think I have to turn to non-fiction article writing as the most likely way of receiving a real cheque. Writing fiction is so much more appealing but the pay-offs can be years away. Maybe writing some drama for the BBC could work but again there is no pressure, no deadline, when it is an unfolding idea in the head with endless plot-lines to develop. I’m hoping that somehow if I focus on articles for a few months and ignore the Satan that is the imagination, I may get the hang of it and make some money.

On a more positive note may I declare the imminent availability of my novel ‘BOGGY STARLESS AND THE DRUIDS OF GLASTONBURY’ on lulu.com. For four years I’ve been meaning to press the button that says ‘make available’ and today I did it. I was prompted into action by an article in my local paper extolling a local author for writing a book about a murder on Glastonbury Tor. Blimey, I thought, I’ve done that. So I’m going to write a letter to the editor pointing this out and referring to the availability of mine on lulu.com.

When you get on to lulu.com, you will find that BOGGY STARLESS’s authorship is ascribed to Dominic Quarrell. This is an unfortunate alias that I adopted as the result of a bet and I can’t change it now. It is mine and it is very good. Believe me, I’d know.

Dear Editor,

Re last week’s story of a local author’s Glastonbury Tor murder tale, may I draw your attention to another local author’s book, the Avalonian metaphysical comedy thriller, ‘Boggy Starless and the Druids of Glastonbury’ which also includes a murder on the Tor. This critically acclaimed book is available on lulu.com or via the author on floor39@yahoo.co.uk.

Yours,

John Heston.