the path

the publisher recommends getting nicely toasted before enjoying this cd on a quality stereo at a relatively high volume, slightly heavy on the base. like for real - no ghetto-blasters or desktop pc speakers - you wont hear the whole range of sound of the tunes and they'll sound like crap.

1. Hello

this is where you hear the sound of my voice.

2. Hawrań - Hop Dana, Dana

about the tune: i like this fusion of the traditional polish highlander music and the admixture of the dance beat. the base barely comes thru on my pc's soundcard, but sounded good on my car stereo. i like the shift from the single female vocalist to the female chorus, which, to me, has an unpolished (no pun intended), "real" , young, beautiful sound. wish they had a younger sounding guy though.

pertinence to the path: i was born in poland.


3. Hallucinogen – Wacko

the tune: this is i believe the 3rd discernible track out of a live set Hallucinogen (simon posford) played at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco on December 7th, 2001. most of Hallucinogen's music is meant to be listened to at high quality rather than just loud. i love the pumping base, the old school techno sounds, the fast left-right panning of some of the sounds, the cool, seamlessly blended samples, the lot of finely doctored sounds, the richness and fullness of the whole thing, its sci-fi, psychedelic feel. i've said it before and i'll say it again: friggin' simon posford rules.

the path: things were pretty crazy there.

4. Logic Bomb – Lodjik

the tune: same genre as the previous tune, plus wickedly modulated awesome samples. i love it.

the path: logically, many people were leaving.

5. Lisa Gerrard – Sacrifice

the tune: i've only heard this on the paul oakenfold album "Another World" which i bought in 2000. until i was collecting info for this cd swap, i'd thought this must have been a man singing in persian or something. turns out its an australian woman idioglossing. in this video this woman makes me think of a friggin' female version of the creepy, nosferatu-like "Strangers" of the movie "Dark City", which detracts from the song in my eyes, or ears, as the case may be. i liked how oakenfold used this track, contrasting it against a much faster tune, and i used it the same way.

the path: given the opportunity to leave the craziness, my parents viewed leaving poland for "the west" at least partly as a sacrifice, believing that they themselves might not reap much benefit from the move, but that at least their children can expect a better life.

6. Morcheeba – Public Displays of Affection

the tune: i was gonna use the unbelievably sensuous "Undress Me Now" - the best tune that i know by Morcheeba, but when i heard phx was thinking of using it too, i decided to use their song i like 2nd best. bittersweet, sung by the interesting, smooth, funky-accented voice of Morcheeba's original singer - Skye Edwards, this song always brings to my mind the images of couples in new, blossoming love, kissing just anywhere, slowly, sensuously, the girls' eyes half-shut, drunk with hormones, their faces glowing... every time i see these couples i melt. it's a beautiful sight. though the guys dont seem to have that drunk look about them.

the path: i've fallen in love once or twice, but i've also been the one who'd join in the fun if i had someone.

7. Superchick – One Girl Revolution

the tune: my little guilty pleasure - a christian rock tune. but i love the message. there's too many insecure young girls putting themselves thru too much shit. wish they got some of this song's attitude. and i like the beat of this tune. and the funkiness of it. and the singer's voice. the guitar sounds too much like christian rock though, but apparently the band is getting better.

the path: i've met a couple girls that could have used some brainwashing from this song.

8. Josh Abrahams – Totally Addicted to Bass

the tune: phx loves this tune. i love the vocals, the way they're distorted, too, and the beat. too bad there actually isnt that much of that bass they're all talking about in there. unless its deeper than my hardware can do. maybe some of you can juice their subs in their trunks and lemme know if there's something there that i'm missing.

the path: i got addicted to base.

9. Basement Jaxx – Rendez-Vu

the tune: awesome beat, love the guitar bits, nice base, cool vocals, overall sound.

the path: i got introduced to this tune cruising along a small highway packed with other tourists cruising to the same little summer party town - sunshine, nice looking car, windows rolled down, the couple inside decked out for clubbing, bopping to this tune blasting out, stuck on repeat :)

10. Kid Koala – Third World Lover

the tune: a smoothly developing, bollywood sample-based wicked driving tune by local born turntablist kid koala. for me it really kicks in around the 2.5 minute mark, when the jingly bells come in for good, and then the drum beat takes off.

the path: third world lover - c'est moi. also, this tune has etched paths in my brain during countless blazed 50 km drives home from work.

11. Squirrel Nut Zippers – Put a Lid On It

the tune + path: i was pleasantly shocked when i heard this tune first, on much music - the canadian version of mtv. people playing this kind of music nowadays??? awesome!!! until checking things out for this here blurb i'd thought this band was canadian, what with the whacky name and exposure on canadian tv and seemingly nowhere else. alas, they're from north carolina.

12. The Seatbelts – Tank!

the tune: this iconic opening song for the episodes of the anime series "Cowboy Bebop" rocks ass - the loose string guitar sound, the trumpets, the energy, down to the extended saxophone reef at the end - fucking awesome.

the path: i was exposed to cowboy bebop during my short stint in toronto, and it knocked me on my ass. a large part of the appeal of the series is the brilliant sound track - composed by Yoko Kanno. phx and I also got TanK(ed) in Spain once upon a time...

13. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist

the tune: australian group's hilarious sample-mania. among other gems in this tune, i love the little kid's answers to the woman's questions at the end.

the path: this boy needs therapy

14. Compay Segundo – Pobre Corazon

the tune: i'd written about my odyssey to find this tune in this post.

the path: ... my poor heart was lonely.

15. Il Était Une Fois – Mescalino (English ver.)

the tune: sung by a 70's french group whose name means "Once upon a time...", i like this english version of the song better than the french one, even though the english is awkward. i'm not crazy about the twangy guitar throughout the tune, especially for the long stretch at the beginning. but i like the somewhat rough-around-the-edges voice of the main vocalist, even his lisp, and the backup female vocals are really cool. apparently normally their main vocalist was this very mixed heritage, multi-talented woman, who tragically died of a pulmonary edema at age 29, a few years after the group broke up.

the path: during an extended emotional hemorrhage period after the break-up with my "stupid bitch" ex, i came up with the idea that such suffering is basically withdrawal symptoms from a drug - the drug called love, consisting of whatever hormones, pheromones, endorphins or whatever it was that we stopped getting.

16. Estopa – Tu Calorro

the tune: i have a love/hate relationship with the somewhat badass sound/attitude of the vocalist, but i do like this slightly traditional spanish sound that totally takes off at about the 1 minute mark when the female flamenco singer joins in. the lyrics are pretty cool, too, especially the chorus:
"your perfume is the venom
that contaminates the air which your hair cuts
that even cuts my speech and understanding
because it's the drug that turns my head crazy.
later i fall asleep in a bed hard as a rock
dreaming that you havent gone yet
dreaming that you're still touching me..."

the path: the band is from Barcelona, which phx and i found to be a pretty cool city, quite different from the rest of spain. we'd like to go back and spend some decent time there.

17. Jimi Hendrix – Manic Depression

the tune: that reiterating, unrelenting drum sequence, with that heavy base guitar - this is a shockingly underrepresented song of Jimi's. it didnt hit me until only a few years ago that the jimi hendrix experience had a really good drummer.

the path: i give jimi hendrix' music a good chunk of the credit for helping me get my nose above the surface of the sea of teenage depression i was drowning in when listening to metallica and nirvana.

18. Kottonmouth Kings – Proud to Be a Stoner

the tune: this is a rap tune, i guess, but i like the guitar, and having a melody to a rap tune does wonders for me, my general dislike of crap music.

the path: umm, so, what is my current relationship with pot..? i dont know if i'm proud - no more than being proud of being a beer drinker. but i dont feel i should hide it from everyone. (maybe just my parents, for now - i think that'd be too much of a blow for them: first their firstborn becomes a friggin' heathen, and now he's doing drugs.) and i dont consider myself a stoner. more like a smot poking aficionado, a one hit wonder, someone who likes to get high rather than stoned. funny how pot smokers often get a sensibility for nature. i did start smoking at the age of 18. and i am proud of my daughter and my son :)

19. Cheech & Chong – Santa Claus and His Old Lady

this comedy bit is thematically appropriate for this swap, as well as effen hilarious! one of the things that got me the most was when the dude said he doesnt know who santa claus is because he's from pittsburg so he doesnt know too many local dudes...

so without knowing it, i ended up doing what shenry used to, with the defining of the playlist first, influenced only partly by the theme, and then justifying the songs' pertinence to said theme later. still, it's all true and will provide insight into me and my path for those who might be curious.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! :)

its been such a long time...

... thats gonna be on my next year's cd swap :)
so the cd's are in the mail as of last night. damn you shenry - this took sooooo effen long, dude. but i wanted it to be good. ppl who dont know me say i'm a bit of a perfectionist.

it's been so long since my last post. one thing that stands out hazily in my memory that i wanted to blog about, was that i attended a cheech & chong show recently. i told a friend of mine and he didnt know who they were. that was shocking. turns out not everybody in BC smokes pot.
apparently cheech and chong actually met in vancouver back in the day - cheech was on the run from the draft, delivering carpets, trying his hand at comedy. chong was on the run from calgary (just over the hill from here), having been kicked out of the town by the mayor for having an inordinately raukous show with his band, as well as wrestling with the problems of converting his brother's strip joint into a comedy club.
they met, and magic happened. but things went sour between them, and they werent talking for decades at a time. like two and a half. then chong's wife decided to meddle with their affairs and wrote an email or 2 in tommy's name, and got the ball rolling for another tour, which has been in the works about as long as the latest G'n'R album and tour. i thought that the tickets were way too steep, but as the show date neared, and i found the tickets werent actually "that" expensive, i started to wanna go. then actually trying to buy tickets online from goddam ticketmaster proved impossible. but the boss came thru and bought them at a ticketmaster outlet like 2 days before the show. just before the show i found out that the ticket was gonna be a little christmas present for me, so that was cool. he was sure there was gonna be an intermission when ppl are gonna flock onto the balconies and have a quick j, or maybe even smoke during the show, and we both thought ppl would smoke right before. i didnt think anybody would actually smoke during the show. i wondered what they were gonna be like - stupid stoner humour, or were they just gonna be talking about their history together..? i saw 2 blurbs online about the other shows (this was a tour) - one was quite positive, but the other was seriously disappointed and thought it was sad to see those 2 old men telling the same old jokes. well, they surpassed my lowered expectations, thats for sure. first of all - they did mostly skits, so that was cool, and some of them these 2 old guys were doing some funky shit, crawling around on all fours, pretending they were dogs, and then chong's wife crawled in, so then chong-dog started doggie-humping her, and then cheech-dog started humping him, it was funny. but there was some stand-up too - the opener was tommy chong's wife with a forgettable name doing some stand-up, setting the bar waaaay low - she was just embarassing herself. but at least some of it was fact based, so i got some details on how tommy's bust and court case went. overall, i thought the show was good, with some re-hashed greatest hit material, and some awrite new stuff, and they made it entertaining. people did smoke in front of the theater, and then as soon as the show started inside. first i thought they were gonna get told to leave by the ushers, then i feared they'd set off the smoke alarms and that was gonna be the end of the show. but apparently this must have been thought of and the appropriate policy set beforehand, because i didnt see anybody being hassled, and no fire alarm went off. soon the crowd had a smoke cloud emanating from it pretty evenly the whole time. and the boss' brother brought some pre-rolled j's, and started lighting those and passing them to us. but i was a responsible comedy show goer and made sure i didnt get stoned out of my tree, because i didnt wanna miss any of the jokes, etc. i just got nicely roasted :)
and towards the end we had a little sing-along - it was "up in smoke", karaoke style, with the lyrics on the screen and everything. i've sung this song lots of times, so it was such a treat to be able to sing it with the godfathers of stoner culture, and a theatre-full of heads. it was community :) and then a shitload of ppl lit their lighters and held them high, like a cool concert. one thing about a show like this, is there's no shortage of lighters :)

it was funny - when cheech first showed up on stage, doing a skit as he was walking on, he got a standing ovation right away. later, when tommy was walking on, he got a slightly longer standing ovation.
towards the end, people were throwing j's on stage, and cheech and tommy and his wife were dutifully picking them up, and as they were exiting after the last skit, somebody threw a big bag - like a few ounces, it was bigger than some women's purses, i mean, i've seen pillows on planes half that size! cheech took a double take, promptly came back for it, said thank you very much.

i'm really happy about having gone.

ok - playlist maybe next post.

i remember when they arrived from the east coast, from new brunswick. they had a little, shy, delicate son. i always thought the wife was a bit tall for the husband. i remember when we were camping one time, and my brother and i started building competing towers out of blocks of wood available at the campground for firewood, and the man made me sit on his shoulders and my brother sat on someone else's, so we could build higher. some years later the man's wife left him, and stayed with another man with the same first name (the man in the shades). he never gave her a divorce. he drank himself to death maybe two weeks ago.

totally getting a boner off this page

met a jewish dude named Ray the other day. asked him why he decided to come over here. he said he finally realized israel is going to collapse sooner or later, especially in light of apparently vast numbers of young ppl leaving there these days. this came as a shock to me. one way that it shocked me was the statement that so many young ppl are leaving there. the big shocker though, was a jewish guy saying he thinks israel is about to fall apart. i guess despite disagreeing with the way they occupied the land, and kept it under occupation, i'd sorta hoped they'd finally find a way to all get along, and things would start moving forward. together. i figure a nation needs a piece of real estate to belong to. and where better for jews than the israel area.
an interesting thing Ray said, was that hitler was a huge fan of the zionist movement. i guess that was before he became a fan of concentration camps.
another gem from Ray was something he was told by a non-jewish friend of his:
"Jews are like salt for the soup: a little gives it flavour, but too much spoils the soup."
i told him that i think thats how societies have felt about any visible minorities. and what really seems to sour the mix is when this visible minority is seen as having a degree of power over the rest of the society. maybe a melting pot society will safeguard against that.

currently listening to anne rice's "interview with the vampire"(mostly on the drive in to work and going back home). at first it was cool, then i started getting glimpses of some disturbing shit, until it became totally disturbing and a bit of a downer there for a while - almost an ordeal to get thru, and now its finally mostly back to interesting and exciting. i tried to think of the movie, which i had seen not long after it'd come out, and i realised that i actually dont really remember much at all from it, other than tome cruise, brad pitt, and kirsten dunst or whoever. and there was a fire. and lestat died. and they were in paris. and that's the part i'm just getting to now. maybe the disturbing shit was more disturbing to me because i kept thinking of Lily when they were talking about Claudia - it was just too close to home, when he nearly kills her. here's the excerpt:

"... And when I thought of this, I saw Babette's face contorted with
hatred when she had held the lantern waiting to light it, and I saw
Lestat in my mind and hated him, and I felt, yes, damned and this is
hell, and in that instant I had bent down and driven hard into her soft,
small neck and, hearing her tiny cry, whispered even as I felt the hot
blood on my lips, `It's only for a moment and there'll be no more
pain.' But she was locked to me, and I was soon incapable of saying
anything. For four years I had not savored a human; for four years I
hadn't really known; and now I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm,
and such a heart not the heart of a man or an animal, but the rapid, tenacious heart of the child, beating harder and harder, refusing to die, beating like a tiny fist beating on a door, crying, `I will not die, I will not die, I cannot die, I cannot die . . . .'
I think I rose to my feet still
locked to her, the heart pulling my heart faster with no hope of cease,
the rich blood rushing too fast for me, the room reeling, and then,
despite myself, I was staring over her bent head, her open mouth,
down through the gloom at the mother's face; and through the halfmast
lids. her eyes gleamed at me as if they were alive! I threw the
child down. She lay like a jointless doll."

the part in red probably hit me the hardest - almost made me cry. i was not expecting that.
it might not have had that effect on me had i read it. but the way the reader read it, embuing it with emotion... actually, that was probably a big part of it. it reminds me of the time we saw "moulin rouge", and somewhere along the line i accidentally turned on this option they had, which was something like an audio commentary of what was happening for the visually impaired. in the part when satine finally succumbs to her illness and falls to her doom - the way it was narrated, and then accompanying the cuts to the different characters from the show, watching in astonishment, and the big black dude's name was chocolat as it turned out, and it probably didnt help that i was on shrooms - the narrator was putting words to my feelings, crystallising them, making them explicit - i cried like i havent for a long time. and i've been afraid of watching the movie again, even though i thought it was deffinitely worth buying and bought it.

it seems almost banal or down right irreverent to go back to the vampire story, to their enchantment with paris, which immediately brought back memories of the movie "sabrina" (the remake) which we saw recently, and how many people seem to have fallen in love with Paris. and so now i wanna see it too. though for the longest time i thought it would be too stuffy, and sick of tourists.


i'm spent...

maybe i should start a list of pot names i at least "kinda" like - in the spirit of positivity and such like.

i remember there was a period of time during my "honeymoon" phase of smot pokage, when i'd often say "i love weed" when on the way "up". so guess thats a fond memory associated with the word weed. i call it pot i guess because most pot smokers call it that here. and i guess i kinda like "cheeba" despite its obscureness - kinda funky that way. "whacky tobaccy" is too wordy, but colourful enough to keep it around for occasional use in one's repertoire. just looking at a list of synonims and strand names - i like "power plant" - hilarious :)

not as hilarious as falling asleep at the comp. gotta go beddy.

got some fucken flu. as in flu en za.
dont wanna smoke pot so as not to make it harder for my throat, etc to heal. is having a couple shots better for my throat? 'cause thats what i'm doing. wish alcohol were illegal and not pot. i could vapourize pot - that would not hurt my throat. as far as i understand. dont like the word "pot" all that much. but it seems least of evils: 'weed' has the connotation of "undesirable plant", when it actually is quite desirable; 'marijuana' is so stigmatised, and a bit old fashioned; 'dope' is just totally old school and dorky; 'ganja' sounds all wrong from a caucasian - i know because i have a friend who says that; 'chronic' is too negative and smacks of dorky homie-ism; 'cheeba' is just too obscure; 'hemp' - industrial or new agey; 'herb' - just dorky; 'grass' - really old fashioned; not to mention dorky :) the list just goes on and on in unrelenting dorky fashion.

whatever.

installed a new router on the computer, updated it, set it up, and got bit comet working again. downloading some audio books: golden compass, subtle knife, hp lovecraft's cthulu mythos books, interview with the vampire, tom sawyer, ender's game, some william s. burroughs, like naked lunch...

gotta go to sleep...

the things you remember...

the greek civil war ended in 1949, resulting in the flight of thousands of greek communists to eastern bloc countries. poland accepted around 13,000 of them. my dad's dad worked with some of them. one once said: "once, when i cut off this one priest's head, the blood poured so much!"
my grampa said: "that's not something to brag about."

that same grampa went to a juvenile political prisoners' jail when he was maybe 14, for participating in acts of vandalism against rural communist agitators - they flipped their cars onto their roofs, and generally tried to make life harder for them. in this jail, he was subjected to unusual punishment such as having his foreskin nailed to the questioner's table, then being slapped in the ass with a large ruler; and being pressed on at the sternum with a huge, old key, with his back against the wall, while being questioned about something trivial, until he'd pass out.

that same grampa turned into an abusive father, who'd come home drunk and look for trouble. when my dad was small, he learned to recognise when his dad went into this mad frenzy, and learned to run and hide under the bed. this tactic didnt work for him when he was maybe 15, when his father learned from a neighbour that my dad skipped school that day with some girl. my dad had to walk using a cane for several weeks afterwards.

that very same grampa was born in france, where his father was able to find work as a miner. however, his father decided to go back to poland, apparently largely because his mother was over-indulging in what sounds like absynthe.

my mom's dad somehow ended up in siberia during ww2 in a forced labour camp, working on the construction of a rilroad. he saw people getting shot for trying to stuff their mouth with some grass while working. i wonder how it got to this, but apparently him and a cousin of his were able to escape naked through the snow while being fired upon. my grampa remained loyal to his abusive cousin more than to his own wife and children, until his cousin died a few years ago. my gramma took him back. her eldest son-in-law got so mad at her for it that he's severed all contact with her.

that same gramma got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time during ww2, and got rounded up with a whole bunch of other random ppl to be taken to a nazi labour camp. lucky for her, these germans were "civilised" enough to hold them in a corral for the rest of the day to give their families a chance to realise that their family members were being taken away, and to bring them some clothes and food and say goodbye. during this clothes drop-off and goodbye, she casually crossed to the "free" people side, and just kept walking, and started running as soon as she neared a corner. she's sure some of the guards knew what she was up to, but let her get away anyways.

my friend romek's grampa was captured and tortured by nazis, and when they thought they'd killed him, they dumped him out back on a pile of bodies. he didnt dare twitch until it got dark, when he crawled to safety.

what a site

write. about something. without bitching? i donno...
the new job is not how i'd hoped it'd be. at times its good. but at times its stressful. different kind of stress though, when ur working for a friend. maybe this is just not the industry for me? but at this time, with 2 kids and a mortgage - a bit late to change. its apparent to me now that a higher "IQ" is not a great match against punctuality and efficiency. i used to think IQ was the true measure of a person. i'm still kinda stuck in that kinda thinking. how to change? maybe just press on with my way of being, and maybe one day i'll shine, and it wont be weird or annoying, but original and cool. but isnt the world littered with ppl who kept on being themselves to the max, but just didnt make it, and burnt out? but maybe i'm too "sensible" to be myself to the max, or better - the sensibility is too much a part of myself to really BE different like that.
Terence McKenna's life sounds like it was cool - sure, it started out with a geeky, awkward childhood, but then he was in college, experimenting with drugs, talking to interesting people, travelling abroad, doing more drugs, studying philosophies, theologies, cultures, taking full advantage of that whole free love thing that was going around then. and then he was back, growing and selling shrooms for a living, starting to write books, going on lecture circuits, doing more drugs, achieving para-messianic dimensions... before succumbing to a brain tumour...
is it better to live (seemingly) that fully but for a bit shorter?
"Take Five" is playing thru my head. i also heard today a tango-y (tangy?) instrumental version of "white rabbit" - funky. weird, but funky.
a lot, if not all interpersonal problems would be avoided if we all really understood and felt, what others mean. but instead we try to translate to one another what we think we think we mean. we dont even understand ourselves.

Quote of the Day

"now THAT just made the whole day infinitely better..."

i'm just a whiny bitch. if i didnt whine so much, i 'd probably cease being a whiny bitch. but then i'd be some psycho that wrecks shit. and that doesnt help anyone, now does it. smot poking is frowned upon here, so i'm getting drunk, but i'm not liking it. whats making things worse is that i ran out of whiskey, so i mixed in some godawful polish potato vodka, and i'm starting to feel queasy. i'm probably gonna have a headache tomorrow. this sucks. i'm apparently not great with stress. i read a funny somewhere sometime to the effect of "being depressed is like being pissed off, but without the energy". sometimes i foray into the energy field. i probably straddle the fence most of the time. whatev. the terrible 2's havent even officially begun, and i've already had enough. this is not good. this is not right. my feet stick out of bed all night. thank you dr. seuss.
i cant keep living like this. this needs to change. i need some sorta drugs. legal, illegal, as long as it helps. its not like this all the time. but when it is it seems like it is. and when things are fine, the shit seems so distant. having a family is no walk in the park. for me, at any rate. having kids is hard work. i didnt understand that. speaking of parks - dealer from across "Crackhead Alley" is back after an extended absence. we were hoping he's been put away for a long while. so he's back, and the very next thing i notice is a cruiser with lights flashing and police tape attached to it, blocking off the exit from "Crackhead Alley" towards the park. turned out later that half the park was cordoned off. some old lady said she heard shots at night. funny coincidence with the dude coming back and the shooting.
ok, i'm falling asleep. gotta go.

i guess i should avoid blanket statements like " i hate weekends ", but there's certain things i dont like about weekends. on my 2 days off we still end up getting up early because of the kids. and there's shit to do thats piled up because we keep thinking we're gonna have time to get shit done on the weekend.
this is a post about nothing - so retarded. i'm just fucking grumpy. again. i need prozac. or some good weed. maybe both.
got a Blackberry Pearl as a hand-me-down from a guy whose place i'll sorta be taking at the new job. looks pretty cool so far. see if i can install the software for it without having the comp explode :)

a twist

patty cake, patty cake
got some hemp
lets all get baked as fast as we can
roll it, spark it, pass it 'round and see
how we'll get toasted with this great weed!
:)

havent posted in forever, and now is not the best of times, but whatev. a couple short things:

got a small buzz for half of yesterday from a vitamin B complex pill - weird. more pleasant than the Gingko stone, thats fo' sho'.

turns out outrageous comedian Louis de Funès was born in France, but his parents were from Seville. they just moved to France because their parents were opposed to their marriage.
here's a sample of his genius - the real shit starts ~40 seconds into it.
i first became aware of and intrigued by hallucinogens when i was a young boy, while watching a movie starring de Funès, where at some point de Funès' character ends up in some kinda hospital. while chilling in the hospital garden with many different patients, he somehow gets his meds mixed up with someone else's or something, and ends up dosing himself with some kinda hallucinogen. he doesnt seem to display any symptoms, until, to his utter surprise, he sees all the oranges fall off an orange tree, almost at once. followed by all the oranges jumping back up onto the tree! his jaw drops. all of a sudden he sees all the women in the garden walking around in their bikinis or naked. that's all i remember. i didnt know what was happening until my mom told me the pills he ate made him see that stuff. i was captivated by the idea.


turns out "Naked Lunch" was a bunch of manuscripts boiled down into a book long before it became a movie. they were written by William Burroughs while in Tangiers, and the drug use, homosexuality, writing, etc were all very much part of his life there - he just weirded them up a bit. having read about Burroughs has detracted from my fondness for the movie, which i'm yet to see sober and straight, but does provide some depth i guess. he has been quoted as saying: "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death...". Joan was his wife. the fucked up thing is, he was the one who shot her dead while playing a drunken game of William Tell in Mexico. Burroughs was a really fucked up guy. i was gonna say troubled, but i chose fucked up, because he was.

not only is the word "NO!" boogie's fave word, but yelling seems to be her favourite form of expression. this morning, i think i said to her something like "we're gonna changer ur diapie (diaper)" and she said "no diapie!" to which i asked "are you a little nazi?" to which she of course replied "no nazi!" ha! now that i think of it, when we were just visiting the inlaws during the weekend, we went to the beach, and boogie's nose was running, and she tried to wipe it with her sand-laden hand, ending up with a little sand moustachio, so i told her she's got a little hitler-moustache, but that it doesnt suit a little girl.
other things that sound funny at the time, but sound absolutely horrible, sick, insane and all that good stuff outside said time? something a friend of mine and i touched upon during a short conversation today - a parent yelling at their kid "when i smack you, your head will fall off with the lungs!" roughly translated, but you might get the picture.
or something like "if you dont stop that, mommy will kill herself." to which the dad adds "if mommy kills herself, then dad will commit suicide too. but first will kill you kids. it'll be a gory murder-suicide. then i'll choke myself with my own guts."
sounded funny at the time :)
ok, its super late, gats ta go

as if all this death wasnt enough...

... Albert Hofmann - the creator/discoverer of LSD died, almost a month ago. but at least I find consolation in that he's had a very full life - he was 102 years old. he was reportedly a great chemist, made big pharma lotsa money in "straight" drugs. in addition to discovering the psycho-active effects of LSD, he was also the first person to synthesize psilocybin - the psychoactive substance naturally found in "magic" psilocybe mushrooms.

an icon of a man. i'd like to try to honour him next "Bicycle Day" and go for a ride with the local heads. weird, this year's "Bicycle Day" was 10 days before his death. i wonder - had his death been slow, if he knew he was dying, would he have opted to go out accompanied by his "Problem Child", like Aldous Huxley ..?

i thought i'd be able to handle death a little better.
guy from work got gunned down outside a local bar. i'd been to that bar a few times before, with him and other guys from the company. i immediately thought of his poor wife, with their baby boy. he's a little older than Lily. i think her family lives in alberta. maybe she'll be moving back.
i just remembered a time he told me about how once, when he was in elementary school, he didnt get on his bus to school but decided to ride his bike to school or something. when he'd gotten to school turned out there'd been a suicide bomber on the bus.

no one knows how the fight started, but it quickly turned into a huge fight between 2 groups of people. i dont think they even know if it was a random shot or specifically for him.

it caught me totally by surprise. i suppose it hit relatively close to home, but i wouldnt have thought that it would have affected me quite this much. i've been stunned half the day - since i found out.

this brought right to the surface this story i heard just the other day, about how a friend of a friend went to a restaurant with his wife, and while they were dining, an asian guy got in this guy's face, so the guy asked if he wants to take it outside. when they went around the corner, followed by the asian guy's friends, the asian guy pulled out a gun... didnt matter how big my friend's friend was anymore - got pistol whipped and the shit kicked out of by the asian guys, and told not to contact the police or they'd kill him. he might have been followed home... he didnt call the police. i dont know what i'd have done. obviously i'd want revenge, and the fuckers confined so they couldnt do it to others. but i'd value the fact that i'm alive, and the safety of my family. but i think i'd still try, just would request help with relocating. what if the police didnt think it to be important enough to warrant that kind of expenditure?

songs with mentions of guns piss me off now.


a few weeks ago i saw a guy i havent seen in a couple years. he told me another story that shocked me. we kinda knew this guy named Al - he was maybe in his late 50's, very calm, quiet but pleasant, and he was the safety guy on a couple sites. on one of them, his then maybe 30 year old son was cutting something with a hand-held grinder, the sleeve of his shirt caught in it, and having the trigger blocked, it chewed up his arm pretty good. he could sometimes be a bit of a jerk, but when i heard about that, i kinda felt bad for him. but maybe 2 years later he was recovering well, working again, and somehow managed to adopt a more friendly disposition. a few years later, he got attacked on the street somewhere by a group of guys, and they beat him into a coma. and this is where a piece of fact is missing - the reason why police showed up on the doorstep of the comatose guy's dad's. maybe he tried to go after the fuckers that beat his son, maybe somebody complained. but the guy's dad told the cops that he's going to hurt himself if they dont leave. they left. apparently only then digging up information that he was the registered owner of several fire arms. apparently then they werent so keen on walking back in there, so they set up a goddam stand-off, calling him out through bull horns. he wasnt coming out. they wanted to wait him out. in the middle of the night they heard a gunshot. when they finally went inside in the morning they found he'd killed himself.
a few weeks later his son came out of his coma.

i talked to a friend today with whom i was hanging out last night - he said his sister's friend just died - she'd thought it'd be a good idea to try and run from the cops with 2 of her roommates, one of whom the police were actually coming up after, and do it by jumping from balcony to balcony - they were on the 5th floor. she slipped. the fall split her head in half, shattered her spine, but the doctors managed to keep her from dying. still, after evaluating the situation, they told the parents that there's no way she's gonna recover from that, and recommended pulling the plug. they will never forget that nod.

i just realised that i only found out about compay segundo because of a haunting melody i'd heard a couple times in a cuba commercial. i wanted to hear what the rest of this amazing snippet of acoustic guitar music sounded like. after many searches on winMX (waaaaay back, eh? :)) off and on for months and months, i finally found it by chance, downloading anything that said "cuba" in the title. The actual title was "Pobre Corazon"...
"Cubano Chant" turned out pretty cool too, even though obviously a very western, white-washed style - but its good music - i love how each instrument does its own version of the song, in turn. i think.

while walking thru walmart today, i noticed ash-trays for sale, and i wondered - if pot was legal here, or maybe "when" its legal here, will they sell cheap bongs and grinders from china and stuff? probably. i mean, they used to sell opium in the sears catalogue.

buddy came around with his elise today - nice :)
phx says she saw ppl rubber-necking as they passed. he asked me if i wanted to take it for a drive, but somehow i didnt feel like it was the right time or something, so i turned the offer down. hope it comes around again - preferably when "the time is right" :)

buddy bought a lotus elise today. just called to yell "yeeeee-haaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
cool :)
god speed montoyo! :D

Created by OnePlusYou

another one gone...

Just sold my Talon. always feels weird when they take away your car. but it had to go. it was getting on in years, and more and more things started getting buggered up in it. i was getting into deeper and deeper mechanics territory, and while every time it was a learning experience, every time was also a bit of an ordeal - not knowing, needing to read up and look at websites and forums, buying parts, buying tools i didnt know existed, and it always took sooooo looooooong. these 2 guys put a new arm in right there on the spot in like 15 minutes. it took me hours and hours to get all the shit off. mind you, it always seems harder to take shit apart in a car - shit is seized up, cant see a screw or bolt thats still holding it all together...
that was the first "good" car i bought with my own money. actually, it was the first one i bought with my own money, period. the previous one was bought with student loan money.
this car went with me to San Francisco, then almost to LA, then to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, back home, then to Toronto... and then back again :) well, there were little excursions to Niagara Falls, Windsor, Detroit. got quite a few speeding tickets with it, including one that might still make me wanted in California :)
when i bought it in 2001, it had about 60K on it. 7 years later - it has 235K

fastest i've ever gone in it was 215 kms/hr (133 mi/hr for you 'mericans) - 215 was also its nominal horsepower.

...

i wrote the above like a month or 2 ago, then just saved it - to be edited and added to later. well, that never happened, and i'm not sure what i was thinking of adding to it, so here it goes.

Łukasz

you were born on january 27 - a month premature. i knew that a month early, especially these days, is not bad at all, but watching you suffer like that right from the get-go felt really shitty. they plopped you down on the scale, all naked and cold and screaming, then put you on some examining table, squirting antibiotic cream in between your puffy eyelids, repeatedly vaccuuming your nose, mouth, throat and lungs with this tube, to clear out as much fluid as possible, injecting you with all kinds of shit to help with this and that, hooking up the intravenous, cutting your heel and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing to get way too much of your very thick blood for tests. other babies get to rest a lot with their moms after they're born. not you, little guy. your mom was in the recovery room, drugged and vomiting and being pumped with other drugs that were supposed to help but only exacerbated it. finally they ran out of things to inject her with, and she stabilized.
what did it do to you, baby - being born to pain for hours, and then subsistence for weeks - almost no comfort of human contact, just machines: checking your heart-beat, your breathing, your blood oxygen saturation, keeping an elevated air pressure to your nose with extra blows of air when you're supposed to be breathing, machines dosing intravenous fluid with an added fat solution and electrolytes, and a tube taped to your little chin and going down into your tummy to make sure air bubbles come out easily. and a UV lamp on for 2 days straight to help get rid of your jaundice. people would come around every now and then, to stick an IV in a different hand, foot, thigh, both sides of your head, and all you got to show for it is a crappy mohawk and tracks and bruises everywhere.
the nurses said that you were doing pretty good for a premie, but there wasnt much to be rejoicing about. i felt fucked up, and all i did was look.
but sounds like you've been doing better and better - too bad we havent even been able to visit with you more often, but we've been sick, and we dont want to risk getting you sick. wonder if the nurses think we're shitty parents. fuck'em if they do - i think this is unfortunately the best course of action. maybe they know and understand. here at home we've all been going through a stomach flu, a cold, boogie's teething, and trying to let mommy heal from the c-section. your babcia has been helping with your sister, so that's been great. times like this you feel the value of being part of a community, a family, having someone to help you when you need it - its survival of the group, not survival of the fittest.

i was on some web page when i noticed a link that said something like "video of heath ledger snorting coke". huh??? they're actually showing this?? after clicking on the link, i found myself on one of those celebrity-following websites, and an article talking ABOUT the video having been bought, but not released, yadda, yadda... so, disillusionedly reading down the short blurb i happened upon this line:
"Referring to his love of cannabis - an illegal drug often smoked in cigarette form - Heath added: "I used to smoke five joints a day.""

umm, where do you begin....
do most people not know what cannabis is? certainly people who read about these celebrity "indiscretions". though, granted, people who follow the lives of celebrities are much more likely to learn a thing or 2 about coke than pot. but calling pot "an illegal drug often smoked in cigarette form"? i guess it sounds more sensationalistic than an "illegal plant". and describing it as such might focus undue attention on the ludicrousness of the concept of an illegal plant.
smoking 5 jays a day may be a bit much. the guy probably had either problems that he should have been dealing with, or too much time on his hands and nothing to do with it. still, i would say let him do whatever he wants if it doesnt hurt anybody. unless it does, then thats a different story.
i can see how idiots might right away point and say"gateway drug!" i would love to pound their stupid heads with the bottles of booze he'd drunk before he ever touched a joint. i'm such an angry little boy :)
lots of people go thru life snorting coke and having jobs, raising families, and not becoming junkies. lots of people go thru life like everybody else, while smoking pot and not touching other illegal substances. lots never touch anything illegal, and just booze it up. some never even drink. "drugs" are not as straightforward as misinformed or misinforming loudmouths would have us believe. we need truth and education - not sensationalism.

here's a fucking positive post of the day - i fucking hate how life keeps throwing me curve-balls, shit i'm not ready to deal with, dont know how to deal with, dont wanna deal with. life is a story of just barely good enough to procreate the species, processes out of control, but maybe just good enough for the moment. maybe i was right in believing once that bringing a child into this world is cruel - if i'm suffering thru it, then why the fuck bring another being into it too? its the fucking blind, mechanistic instincts - liking sex, finding babies cute, caring for those close to you. shit like that.
i find life to be a nearly constant hassle. maybe i shouldnt have procreated - then i wouldnt have passed-on the fucked-up genes that make me feel this way. people for whom life is great should procreate - chances are their offspring will perceive life in a similar way.
i dont want fucking hassles, i just want to be happy.

got phx' car maintenance taken care of = changed rear brake pads and rotors, changed the oil and filter, and even topped up the windshield wiper fluid = purdy sweet :)

phew - almost forgot to make my positive entry of the day - well, it is the next day but i havent gone to sleep yet, so that should be ok.
there's several i can think of - the morning started with remembering that its friday - so that was cool - and i'd slept-in like a mofo - so that was cool too. listening to the dopecast - sans dope - that was chill. bla bla, work crap - then sampling some "juicy fruit" was cool, brought back a taste i havent had in years. realizing that a lot of work stuff was done already was cool.
getting everything together to work on the jetta was a relief in itself - before even starting any work. hearing that a friend is pursuing happiness over the mammon was cool, even if it does mean that i wont be really working for him for any length of time like we thought - but it might not even turn out that way. and now the crimpins tree is sitting neatly in 4 boxes, ready to be shipped off to my 'rents' garage - so thats a win. ok - my's ready to hit the hays :)

the time leading up to the holidays was dreadful, the holidays themselves werent much better, and i'm back to the grind. hitting another low point on new year's day, i was thinking about a fellow blogger's advice to just force myself into a positive mindset, think happy thoughts, *make* it happen. but i just couldnt/wouldnt - didnt happen, i wondered if i was simply more comfortable because more familiar with the depressed metal state or something. but i'm not really depressed most of the time, i dont think... either way, fast-forward to to my shower today, and i suddenly felt that i wasnt really down, and felt almost... positive or something. and then i remembered trying to feel happier when i wasnt, and thought that its so much easier to do when ur not totally down. and then i remembered my ex's "therapy" as advised by her doctor once - put little red stickers at various places around the house and places you look, and every time you see one of those - think a happy thought - a way to get the mind in the habit of thinking and feeling happy. so i decided to finally try it too - i put one little penguin sticker on the coffee maker, and one above the comp screen - that way my earliest moments of the day should get the positive vibe going. and i thought to make a new years' resolution - even though a few days late - i'm going to try to post at least one positive thought on the blog every day.
so - ...
man, my happiness kinda fizzled there. think happy, or positive. its friday tomorrow! thats kinda good. hmm.
this is depressing - i get brought down so easily. i get to smoke up and listen to the dopecast's 100th episode tomorrow morning..? well, that, the fact that its friday, and the fact i made this resolution should count for something. we'll see tomorrow.