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thebaconsandwichofregret · 5 years

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Happy False Value Day everyone!!!

As many of you know Ben Aaronovitch used to work for Waterstone’s, a bookshop chain in the UK, and because he’s quite proud of having worked there (and they are proud of having once employed him, no seriously, every time I even look at one of his books in one of their shops a member of staff spontaneously appears to tell me “He used to work here you know!” If I had a pound for every time I’d heard that I could afford to buy the Folly) he gives Waterstone’s a special exclusive short story in the first run of every new Rivers of London book.

Obviously this is great for those of us who are UK fans.

It’s less great for those of you who are international fans. However in the spirit of International Magical Cooperation I managed to get my hands on my copy ever so slightly early and so I have here for your reading pleasure, the exclusive short story from False Value - A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Please note that this story contains mentions of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

By Ben Aaronovitch

You know that song by The Kinks? Not that one. The other one. No, not that one either. Yeah, that one- ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’. You wouldn’t believe it to look at me now, but that song’s about me.

These days my daughter does her best to keep me looking respectable, and I haven’t the heart to tell her that I’d much rather wear my nice comfortable corduroy trousers, with braces, and leave my shirt untucked. But back in the sixties I was the dedicated follower of fashion. And it’s true that they sought me here and they sought me there but, as Ray Davies knew perfectly well, that was probably because of the drug dealing. What can I say? Clothes aren’t cheap.

I was a middleman buying wholesale and supplying a network of dealers, mostly in and around the King’s Road. I rarely sold retail, although I did have a number of select clients. And of course nothing lubricates a soirée like a bowl full of alpha-methylphenethylamine. It was all going swimmingly until some little shit from Islington stiffed me on a payment and I found myself coming up ten grand short. And, believe me, ten grand in 1967 was a lot of money. You could buy a house in Notting Hill for less than that - not that anyone wanted to, not in those days.

Now, I’ll admit that as an entrepreneur working in such a volatile industry, I probably should have ensured that I had a cash reserve stashed away against such an eventuality. Mistakes were definitely made. But in my defence, not only had I just discovered the joys of blow, I was also distracted by my infatuation with Lilith.

Now, I’ve always cheerfully swung both ways and, to be honest, I’ve always been more attracted by the cut of someone’s trousers than what was held therein. But when I met Lilith it was if all the cash registers rung out in celebration. She was so like a man in some ways and so like a woman in others. I’d love to say that it was the best of both worlds, but looking back it was a disaster in every respect. Although a completely exhilarating disaster, like a roller coaster to an unknown destination. I tried explaining what she was like to Ray Davies and that beardy writer who ran that sci-fi magazine, but they both got her completely wrong.

So there I was, suddenly ten grand down to people whose names you’re better off not knowing - let’s just call them the Deplorables and leave it at that. If I tell you that their nicknames were Cutter, Lead Pipe and Gnasher, that should give you a flavour of their character. You could call Cutter the brains behind the gang but that would be risking an overstatement. Organised crime in the good old days required little in the way of actual brains and relied much more on a calculated defiance of the social niceties vis-à-vis psychotic violence. Terrify your rivals, bully your customers, and hand out a bung to the local constabulary and you were away.

And it goes without saying that aesthetically they were a dead loss.

The Deplorables had a straightforward approach to those that owed them money which I will leave to your imagination - suffice only to say that it involved a sledgehammer and, of all things, a marlinspike.

But I had no intention of losing my knees, so I had arranged a couple of new deals that would net me a sufficient profit to cover both what I owed the Deplorables and the same again to appease them sufficiently to save my poor knees from a fate worse than polyester.

I know some of you are thinking that polyester was hip and groovy back in the Swinging Sixties, but trust me when I say that it was an abomination from the start - whatever the elegance of its long chain polymers.

In order to keep body and wardrobe together while I waited for these deals to come to fruition I decanted, along with Lilith and my faithful sidekick Merton, to a squat in Wandsworth just off the Earlsfield High Street. Now, I normally shun the transpontine reaches of the capital. But my thinking was sound. With my reputation as a flower of Chelsea and the King’s Road, I reckoned that nobody - least of all the dim members of the Deplorables - would think to look for me across the river.

‘No fucking way,’ said Lilith when she first saw it, ‘am I living in this shithole.’

Squats come in many flavours. But political, religious or student, they are almost always shitholes. However, I could see this one had potential and Nigel, God bless his woolen Woolworths socks, had at least kept it clean.

But not particularly tidy.

Outwardly Nigel was definitely one of the children of Aquarius. Inside he had the soul of an accountant, but alas none of the facility with numbers.

According to Nigel, who could be dull about this sort of thing, the building we were squatting in had been built in the eighteenth century as an inn that specialised in serving the trade along the river Wandle. This was news to me, because I had assumed the rank channel immediately behind the house was a canal.

‘There used to be factories up and down the Wandle,’ he told me despite my best efforts to stop him, ‘all connected up with barges. And this is where the wartermen used to get their drinks in.’

With the collapse of that trade it was converted into a grad town house, a status it retained for a hundred years or so before providing slum housing for the unwashed multitude. Occasionally on its hundred-year odyssey it would surface into the light of respectable society before descending once more into the depths of squalor.

Which is where yours truly arrived to bring a touch of colour and a modicum of good taste to the old place.

Looking back, I believe that might have been the start of the whole ghastly business.

Now the thing about the drug trade is that it overlaps with the general smuggling industry. As a result a man with the right contacts can acquire much in the way of valuable cloth - Egyptian cotton and the like - without troubling the good people of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. Then such an individual might use his reputation for fashion to sell on said items to the East End rag trade at less than wholesale, cash under the table, no questions asked and no invoices raised. Not as lucrative as a suitcase full of horse, but safer and more dependable.

Cloth, even expensive cloth, takes up considerably more room even than Mary Jane, so the fact that the old building had a beer cellar capacious enough to store the stock was the other reason I’d chosen it as a bolt-hole. Merton and I pressed Nigel into service to help us carry the bales, wrapped in tarpaulin for protection, down to the cellar, which proved to be mercifully dry and cool.

It was surprisingly cool - you could have used it as a pantry.

‘That’s because of the river,’ Nigel explained. ‘It’s just the other side of that wall.’

I touched the wall and was surprised to find it cool but bone dry.

‘They know how to build houses in those days,’ said Nigel.

Once we’d moved the good in, it was time to deal with the ever simmering domestic crisis that was life with Lilith. In the latest instalment of the drama, she had ejected Nigel from the master bedroom and claimed it as her own. This was less of a distraction than it might be because Nigel, like nearly all men, was clearly smitten with Lilith and acquiesced with surprisingly good grace.

And so we settled in companionably enough, especially when Lilith and Nigel discovered a common in the works of Jack Kerouac. I could see that at some point I would be bedding down with Merton for a night or two. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t find Lilith’s peccadillos upsetting but Merton, bless his acrylic Y-fronts offers compensation in his own rough manner.

Things started to go wrong the night of the storm and consequent flood. And while our decision to drop acid and commune with the thunder- Nigel’s idea, by the way - probably wasn’t to blame, it certainly didn’t help.

I don’t normally do hallucinogenics as they often disappoint. You go up expecting Yellow Submarine and get a lot of irritating visual distraction instead. My colour sense is quite keen enough, thank you, without having a pair of purple velvet bell-bottoms start to shine like a neon sign.

The master bedroom - now Lilith’s domain - contained, of all things, a king-size four-poster bed that was missing its curtains. But since I’d arrived, it at least had matching cotton sheets in a tasteful orange and green fleurs-de-lis pattern. They matched the old wallpaper with its geometric tan and orange florets that still showed the retangular ghosts of long vanished photographs and paintings.

At some point - Nigel had said the 1930s - the owners had installed an aluminium-framed picture window that ran almost the length of the room and looked out over the canal, or more importantly, up into the boiling clouds of the oncoming storm.

Lilith started on the bed with all three of us, but I can’t take anything seriously when heading up on LSD, least of all sex. So I quickly disengaged and chose to sit on the end of the bed and watch the storm. I doubt the others were troubled by my absence.

I watched the storm come in over the rooftops of South London with lightning flashing in my eyes and that glorious sense of joy that only comes from something psychoactive interacting with your neurones. I lost myself in that storm and, in it, I thought I sensed the roar of the god of joy, whose acolytes dance naked on the hilltops and rip the goats apart.

But the mind is fickle and darts from thought to thought and I became fascinated by the patterns the raindrops traced down the window glass. Then the play of light and shadow drew me to the walls, where I found myself pulling at the torn edge of the wallpaper. Like most squats, damp had gotten into the room at some point in the past and the top layer peeled away to reveal another layer below - a vertical floral design in red, purple and green on a pale background. Carefully I stripped a couple of square feet away. And while behind me Lilith howled obscenities in the throes of her passion, I started on the next layer. This revealed a faded leaf design in silver and turquoise. The colours pulled at me and I realised that if I could just find the original surface I might open a portal to another dimension - one of style and colour and exquisite taste.

But I had to be patient. Clawing the walls would disrupt the delicate lines of cosmic energy that flowed along the pinstripes of the layer of blue linen-finish paper. Delicately, I peeled a loose corner until I uncovered a beautiful mustard yellow bird that glowed with an inner light. Gently and meticulously I revealed more. A trellis design overgrown with olive and brown brambles sporting red flowers and crimson birds. I knew it at once as a classic design from ‘the Firm’, the company founded by William Morris to bring back craftsmanship to a world turned grey and smoky by the Industrial Revolution.

I was ready for a hallucination then, and willed my mind into the pattern in front of me, but nothing happened. The wallpaper shone out of the hole in the wall, the light shifting like sunlight through a real trellis, real birds, but that achingly rational part of my brain stayed aloof. Chemistry, it said, it’s all chemistry.

At some point Nigel escaped the bed and fled whimpering into the cupboard and closed the door behind himself.

The trellis and its mustard-coloured birds mocked me from the walls,

‘I think we’re sinking,’ said Merton, for what I realised was the third or fourth time.

I was still coming down and it took concentration to focus on Merton, who was stark naked and pacing up and down at the foot of the bed. Lilith was sprawled face down, arms and legs spread like a starfish to occupy as much space as possible. There was no sign of Nigel, and in my elevated state I seriously gave consideration to the thought that Lilith had devoured him following coitus.

Merton rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, as if testing his footing.

‘Definitely sinking,’ he said, and ran out of the door.

I flailed about a bit until I found a packet of Lilith’s Embassy Filters and a box of Swan Vestas, managed to not light the filter on the second attempt and dragged in a grateful lungful. A burst of head-clearing nicotine helped chase away the last of the lysergic acid diethylamide and I was just trying to determine whether I’d hallucinated a naked Merton when he reappeared.

‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘We’re not sinking but we’re definitely flooding.’

The cellar was divided into two parts. The stairs led down to the smaller part of it, essentially a wide corridor which used to house, so Nigel insisted on telling me, the coal chute - now bricked up. A big metal reinforced door opened into the larger part of the cellar - the part with over ten grand’s worth of fabric stored in it. The door was closed but the corridor part was two inches deep in filthy water.

‘Don’t open the door!’ called Nigel from the top of the stairs.

I had no intention of leaving the dry section of the stairs, let alone risking the cuffs of my maroon corduroy flares in what looked to me like sewage overflow. Merton, who’d been trying to force the door open, now splashed back as if stung. For a man who I’d once seen cheerfully batter a traffic warden for awarding him a ticket, it was odd how he never argued with Nigel - not about practical things to do with the house anyway.

Nigel, resplendent in a genuine Indian cloth kaftan - or so he claimed - passed me and stepped gingerly into the water. Reaching the door, he rapped sharply with his knuckles just above the waterline, then he methodically rapped up the door until he reached head height. After a few experimental raps to confirm, he turned to me and told me I was deader than a moleskin waistcoat.

‘The whole room’s flooded,’ he said. ‘Probably not a good idea to open this door.’

I sat down on the stairs and put my head in my hands. I did a mental inventory of what I’d stored and how it had been packed. It was bad, but if we could pump out the room half of it could be salvaged - especially the silks, since the individual rolls had been wrapped in polythene.

Thank God for Hans von Pechmann, I thought, and got to my feet.

‘We need to drain the room,’ I said. ‘Nigel, get a pump and enough hose to run it back out to the river.’

Nigel nodded.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, and practically skipped up the stairs.

‘Put some clothes on before you go out!’ I called after him.

I told Merton that when we had the pump and the hose, he would have to cut a suitable hole in the door - near the top.

‘Will you need tools?’ I asked.

Merton eyed up the door.

‘I have what I need in my bedroom,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Let’s have a cup of tea.’

It took Nigel the best part of the day to source the suitable equipment. In the meantime, I sent Merton out to the local phone box to see if I couldn’t rustle up another life- and kneecap-saving transaction. Ideally, I should have been making the calls myself but I didn’t dare show my face on the street - it’s a well-known face, even in South London. I spent the time cataloguing my wardrobe, alas much reduced by my exile, ironing that which needed ironing and casting away those items that had fallen out of style since my last purge.

Some things never go out of style - some things, thank God, will never come back. Let us hope that the lime-green acrylic aquiline button-down cardigan is one of them. I really don’t know what I was thinking when I bought it.

Apart from a spectacularly noisy toilet break, Lilith stayed blissfully asleep in the main bedroom until teatime and then vanished into the bathroom for the next two hours.

Once Nigel had returned with the pump and the hose, Merton used his hammer and chisel to cut a rough hole, six inches across, near the top of the door. Nigel had brought down the cream-coloured hostess trolley and mounted the pump on that to keep it out of the water. Once it was rigged we ran a hosepipe up the stair, down the hall, across the kitchen and poked it out the back window. Merton stayed to supervise the outflow while I returned to the top of the stairs and gave Nigel the nod.

It looked ramshackle and was, indeed, held together with string and gaffer tape. But like most things that Nigel built, especially his improvised hookahs, it was perfectly adequate. The pump puttered into life, the pipe going through the hole in the door stiffened, there was a gurgling sound and I followed the passage of the water upstairs and into the kitchen. There, an arc of water shot from the hose and into the river beyond.

‘How long until it’s pumped out?’ I asked.

‘A couple of days,’ said Nigel.

When I objected, he pointed out that it was a small-bore hosepipe, that the cellar was large and that we didn’t know how the river water was getting in.

Some things you can’t control, I suppose, such as Lilith - who I found sitting in the kitchen in a loose yellow kimono, drinking brandy and letting her assets hang out.

‘It smells different in here’ she said.

I pointed out that the window was open to allow egress of the hosepipe and was thus allowing fresh air, to which Lilith was generally unaccustomed, to enter the room. Lilith grunted and said she was going out that evening to meet some friends in Soho.

I tried to talk her out of it but she insisted, and there was no stopping Lilith when she was set on something.

‘What if the Deplorables see you?’ I asked.

‘Darling,’ said Lilith, throwing an orange ostrich feather boa around her neck, ‘the Deplorables never frequent the places I do and in any case - I’m invisible.’

I was making another calming cup of tea when I realised that Lilith had been right. The kitchen smelt fresh and, oddly, sun dappled - of you thought sun dappled was a smell. I went to the open window and took a deep breath. Not normally something I’d recommend given the foetid nature of the Wandle - which still looked more like a canal to me - behind the house. The air was fresh and another thing I noticed was that the water shooting out of the hosepipe was clear. I pulled the pipe in a bit and had a closer look and then an experimental tate - just the tip of the tongue, you understand. It was plain, clean water. Perhaps, I thought, the cellar had been flooded by a burst mains pipe. If so, then there was a chance that much of my stock might survive relatively intact.

I also noticed that the house had a small back garden, or rather a side garden, an overgrown patch of weeds and brambles that filled a roughly triangular space between next door’s garden wall, the river and the side of the kitchen. I replaced the hose and went looking for the door that led to the garden. I’m not a horticulturalist myself, but to a man in my position, knowing there’s a back door - for egress in extremis - is always a comfort.

It took three days to drain the cellar, which passed as quickly as two quarters of Lebanese cannabis resin could make it. Now I’ve never been one to get the munchies, but Nigel could consume an astonishing amount of fish and chips, and poor Merton was forced to make several supply runs. On the morning of the fourth day, Nigel declared that we could force the door and I went to fetch Merton.

Who was nowhere to be found.

His room was as he always left it, the bed made with military precision and knife-edge creases. Merton was a thoroughly institutionalised boy, but what institution - the navy, prison, the Foreign Legion - I’d never thought to ask. His clothes, though dull, were hung or folded with the same admirable care. His tool case was missing but the canvas bag containing his baseball bat, bayonet and the long wooden stick with the stainless steel barbs that I didn’t want to know the purpose of, was tucked into the wardrobe next to his two spare pairs of Doc Martens boots.

I returned to the basement corridor, which Nigel had mercifully mopped clean once the muddy water had soaked away. Nigel was standing by the door to the cellar, stock-still and staring at something on the floor.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

Nigel pointed mutely at a battered blue metal toolbox sitting by the door. Its top was open and its trays expanded to reveal its rows of neatly arrayed tools and boxes of screws and nails.

‘He must have gone inside,’ said Nigel. His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. ‘Inside there!’

Since I had no idea why Nigel was so agitated, I reached out and pushed the door open. It opened a fraction and then pushed back - as if someone was leaning against the other side.

‘Merton,’ I said, ‘stop fucking about and let me in.’

I shoved harder and the door opened a crack and out poured a weird sweet smell like cooked milk. And with it a sense of outraged dignity which so surprised me that I jumped back from the door, which slammed shut.

‘Is he in there?’ asked Nigel.

‘Must be,’ I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it.

Neither of us could match Merton - because that’s who it had to be - for physical might. I mean, I employed him precisely because he could intimidate your average creditor just by breaking wind. So we trooped upstairs for a cup of tea and some pharmaceutical reinforcement.

‘Got any more black beauties?’ asked Nigel, who never could separate his biphetamines from his common or garden amphetamines. I swear, you try to educate people but there are limits. I gave him a couple of ludes, and given the day we’d had so far, took a couple myself. Lilith returned fabulously drunk at two in the morning, and we all piled into bed and didn’t get up until the next afternoon.

The door to the cellar remained closed and Merton’s tool case was still where he’d left it. I tried the door, but it was stuck fast with no give at all. I even tried knocking it down, like they do in films, but all I did was bruise my shoulder.

If Merton was in there, he wasn’t coming out until he was good and ready. And since I wasn’t getting in, I had to accept that I wouldn’t be realising any value from my stock of fabrics any time soon. Still, I’d already written down their value and put other deals in motion to generate cash flow - another drug deal, as it happens. A stack of Happy Bus LSD out of Rotterdam. A little bit riskier than my normal deals, but needs must, as they say.

Without Merton, I was forced to rely on Nigel to go out and make the necessary phone calls. Unlike Merton, who followed instructions without question, I had to explain everything to him as if he were in a spy movie with Michael Caine. Once he had the gist, he darted out the front door wearing an RAF surplus greatcoat. As I watched him go from the upstairs window, I realised that his hair had grown long enough to reach between his shoulder blades and wondered why I hadn’t noticed.

The next couple of days went past with no sign of Merton, and I only managed to keep anxiety at bay with the help of my dwindling supply of cannabis resin and long punishing nights with Lilith.

The door to the cellar remained closed.

When I had nerved myself up to go look, I noticed that something had been jammed into the cracks around the edge of the door - as if it had oozed out from inside the cellar in liquid form and then set on contact with air. I took a set of pliers from Merton’s tool case and worried a fragment out. It’s a long time since I’ve prepared a slide in earnest, but while I didn’t have a microscope I did have a jeweller’s glass I keep for checking crystal shape. Under magnification the fragment revealed itself to be a tangle of threads - blue cotton, my good Egyptian cotton at a guess. I picked at the tangle with a pair of tweezers and a strange notion struck me - that the threads weren’t tangled randomly, that there was a pattern to the knots.

I could imagine a circumstance where the pressure of water could both shred the original weave of a cloth and then tangle the threads. I could even imagine water pressure forcing the threads around the edge of the door, but it seemed unlikely. Before I discovered fashion and pharmaceuticals I did a degree in chemistry. Started a degree, to be precise - I stopped paying attention in the second year. But I always thought of myself as rational even when under the influence.

If I’d known what I know now, I would have run screaming from the house and taken my chances with the Deplorables. But I lived in a much smaller world in those days.

Although large enough for my Rotterdam connection to agree to a deal. Not only that, but it seemed my credit was good enough for me to procure a sample shipment on good faith. With the profit from that sale I could finance a larger shipment and thus dig myself out of my financial predicament and quit the squat - and it’s creepy basement.

The only catch being that I would have to provide my own mule to bring the sample in. Normally you don’t use your friends as mules, not even friends of friends. What you really want is a gullible person who’s been talked into it by someone you only know through business. I knew a guy who could meet a girl at a party and have her on a plane to Ankara the next day. He made a living recruiting mules and didn’t mind some wastage at all - right up to the point someone’s mother gave him both barrels of her husband’s grousing shotgun. The police never caught her and only Merton and I turned up for the funeral.

It wasn’t hard to persuade Lilith to fly to Rotterdam - especially first class - and the beauty was that wherever she touched down, she paid for herself. Or to be strictly accurate, other people took care of her needs for her. The downside, of course, was that you had to allow her time to party - in this case, at least a week. You’d think that without Lilith sharing the high thread cotton sheets of the four-poster bed I’d be getting more sleep, but I found myself spending most of every night staring at the underside of the bed’s canopy.

It didn’t help that I had to ration the Quaaludes - I needed them to keep Nigel functioning.

‘There’s something in the cellar,’ he said, and refused to go down into the basement.

I, on the other hand, found myself increasingly drawn to the cellar door. Especially when it started to flower.

It started with a spray of cotton around the door frame, overlapping triangular leaves of white and navy-blue cotton that stuck to the bricks of the wall as if they’d been glued in place. I took a sample and found that instead of regular weave, the cloth was formed by the intertwining of threads in a complex pattern. Some of the threads amongst the white and blue were a bright scarlet and spread through the fabric in a branching pattern like streams into a river basin. Or, more disturbingly, like capillaries branching out from a vein.

I did make an attempt, cautiously, to scrape one of the ‘leaves’ off the wall with a trowel I found in Merton’s tool case. But even as I pushed the blade under the edge of the cloth I felt such a wave of disinterest - I cannot describe it more clearly than that- that I found myself halfway up the basement stairs before I realised what had happened.

The next day the cotton leaves had spread out at least another six inches and surrounding the door were tongues of crimson and yellow orgaza. Individual threads had begun to colonise the door proper - curling into swirling patterns like ivy climbing a wall. I spent an indeterminate amount of time with my back to the opposite wall, staring at the pattern to see if I could spot them moving.

I wondered what it meant. Perhaps Nigel was right, and the Age of Aquarius was upon us and we had entered a time of miracles.

When I was upstairs I tried to put the cellar out of my mind and concentrate on plans for the future. I had fallen into drug dealing almost by accident and had always found it an easy and convenient way to keep myself in the sartorial fashion I aspired to. But if my run-in with the deplorables was an indication of the future, then perhaps it was time to pack it in. A boutique of my own instead, one in which I could serve both as owner-manager and inspiration. Before the merest thought of doing actual work, no matter how supervisory, had filled me with disgust but now … now it seemed attractive.

I didn’t trust these feelings.

I needed out of the squat. I needed to be strutting down the King’s Road or Carnaby Street. I wanted back out into the world, where I could be as dazzling and as splendid as the first acolyte of the goddess of fashion.

But you need working kneecaps to strut your stuff. And so I stayed where I was.

By the third day the door was completely obscured behind a tapestry of red, black and gold thread, and wings of cotton spread out across the walls and ceiling. The organza had likewise spread and a third wave of pink and yellow damask now framed the doorway. By the sixth day the entire corridor was curtained in swathes of multicoloured fabric, so that it seemed a tunnel to a draper’s wonderland.

I no longer dared leave the safety of the foot of the stairs and yet I still found myself walking down them three times a day to look. The urge to walk into its warm comforting embrace was terrifying.

On the seventh day, Lilith failed to return. I started to seriously worry on the eighth; on the ninth, I fell into such a despair that no amount of near pharmaceutical-grade Drinamyl amphetamines could lift me from it. On the tenth, a postcard arrived with four jaunty pictures of a tram stop, a fountain, a town square, a gigantic statue of a man holding up the sky and Groeten uit Rotterdam written across the front.

On the back Lilith sent me love and kisses, explained that she’d met a splendid sailor or three and would be staying on in the Netherlands for a bit, but not to worry because she’d found a perfectly wonderful Spaniard to courier my product back to London. Thoughtfully she’d written the travel and contact details of the Spanish courier on the postcard - in plain English.

With a heavy heart I sent Nigel out to pick up the package and when he failed to return I was not surprised.

We live in a universe constantly assailed by the forces of entropy. Nothing good, pure or beautiful can stand up to the relentless regression towards the mean, the dull and the shabby. A minority have always striven to be a beacon in the gloom, a constant source of inspiration to those around them. Some worked through the medium of paint, or music, or literature, but I have sought to make myself the living embodiment of style and culture.

God knows it hasn’t been easy.

But a man should always know when he’s been beaten. That morning, as I sat in the kitchen, futilely waiting for Nigel to return, I realised that that time, for me, was nigh. I went upstairs, stripped myself down to my underwear - not nylon and not frilly, thank you, Ray - and after taking a deep breath to steel myself, donned a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a matching moleskin shirt. A pair of Hush Puppies and one of Merton’s donkey jackets completed my transformation. I looked in the mirror - I was unrecognisable.

Stuffing the last of my cash reserves in my pockets, I headed for the front door. I paused by the basement only long enough to ensure it was closed. From behind it came a noise that might have been a giant breathing, or water flowing, or shuttles running back and forth across lines of thread.

I shuddered and walked boldly out into the sunlight.

My plan was simple. Take the train to Holyhead, the ferry to Dublin and then, via a few contacts I still had, to America and freedom.

I didn’t even get as far as Garratt Lane before I ran straight into Cutter. I tried to braout but somehow he recognized me instantly and called out my name.

I turned, ran back to the squat, slammed the door behind me and went for the back door. There I could escape via the garden, over the wall and run for Wimbledon Park station.

But Lead Pipe was waiting in the kitchen, with a cup of tea on the go and the Daily Mirror open to the back pages.

‘About time,’ he rumbled when he saw me.

Three guesses where I went next.

I was down the stairs and into the basement corridor before I even noticed that the walls had grown a fringe that glowed with a soft golden light. I was prepared to throw myself frantically at the cellar door but I found it open. I ran inside with no brighter plan than to barricade myself inside and hope the Deplorables grew bored.

Inside the cellar was a riot of colour. The walls were arrayed with purple organza and burgundy charmeuse, while sprays of a brilliant blue habotai framed cascades of fabric woven in a dozen colours - scarlet, yellow and green - into tangles of vines, leaves and flowers. Globes of light hung suspended from golden threads in each corner, illuminating a bundle of gold and black embroidered silk suspended from tendrils of lace - like a cocoon from a spider-s web.

Around me was a giant’s breathing and the warp and weft of a loom gigantic enough to weave the stars themselves. I could no more have stopped myself from grasping that bundle than I could have stopped myself breathing.

The bundle was warm and squirming in my arms. I unwrapped a layer of gauzy chiffon, gazed down on my fate and was lost.

‘Oi,’ said a voice from behind me.

I turned to find myself confronting the sartorial disaster that were the Deplorables en masse. I won’t describe their appearance on the off chance that children may one day read this account.

‘Can I help you gentlemen?’ I asked, because politeness is always stylish.

‘Yeah,’ said Cutter. ‘You can give us the ten grand you owe us.’

‘Plus interest,’ said Lead Pipe.

‘Plus interest,’ said Cutter.

‘I’m rather afraid I haven’t got it,’ I said.

‘That’s a shame,’ said Cutter, and he turned to Lead Pipe. ‘Isn’t that a shame?’

‘It’s definitely a shame,’ said Lead Pipe.

The bundle in my arms squirmed a bit and made happy gurgling noises.

‘Since the money is not forthcoming, I’m afraid we’ll be forced to take measures,’ said Cutter. He looked once more to Lead Pipe. ‘Is your sledgehammer ready?’

By way of reply, Lead Pipe held up his sledgehammer and I couldn’t help but notice that there were brown stains on the long wooden handle.

‘And Gnasher,’ said Cutter. ‘Do you have a marlinspike about your person?”

Gnasher grunted and held up a pointed lump of metal that I can only presume, in my ignorance of all things nautical, was a marlinspike.

Cutter turned back to me and smiled nastily.

‘I’d say that you should take this like a man,’ said Cutter. ‘But that would be a waste of time.’

Never mind his rudeness, I had more pressing concerns.

‘Shush,’ I said. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

Cutter’s face suffused to a fine shade of puce and he opened his mouth to continue his ranting, so I twitched aside the fine damask sheet to reveal my daughter nestled in her bundle of silk and high-thread Egyptian cotton.

Her beautiful brown face broke into a charming smile and, opening her chubby arms in a benediction, she laughed - a sound like water tumbling over stones.

Cutter gave me an astonished look and whispered.

‘Is this your…?’

‘Yes,’ I whispered back. ‘Her name is Wanda.’

‘But,’ said Cutter, ‘you can’t keep her here.’

‘She likes it here,’ I said indignantly.

‘It’s a dump,’ said Lead Pipe in a low rumble. ‘It’s not fit for human habitation.’

‘He’s right,’ said Cutter. ‘There’s damp and mould and the kitchen is a disgrace.’

‘And there’s no nursery,’ rumbled Lead Pipe.

‘And the garden is a jungle,’ said Gnasher. ‘Totally unsuitable.’

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I can’t attend to any of these details if you break my legs.’

‘Obviously, we have to deal with the immediate shortcomings of the house before we return to the matter of breaking your legs,’ said Cutter. ‘Don’t we boys?’

‘I know a couple of builders,’ said Gnasher. ‘And Lead Pipe has green fingers. Ain’t that right?’

Lead Pipe cracked knuckles the size of walnuts. ‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘You should see his allotment,’ said Cutter. ‘He has compost heaps you wouldn’t believe.’

I thought of the rumours of what exactly happened to people who crossed the Deplorables and I decided that I actually did believe in those heaps.

‘About my legs,’ I said but Cutter wasn’t listening.

‘And there’s the roof,’ he said, and the others nodded.

‘About my legs,’ I said louder and then wished I hadn’t, because the trio were jerked out of their dreams of home improvement and focused on yours truly in a somewhat disconcerting manner.

‘What about them?’ asked Cutter, taking a step towards me.

‘I thought we might reach a more mutually beneficial arrangement,’ I said.

‘What kind of beneficial arrangement did you have in mind?’ he said.

‘There’s the matter of the way you dress,’ I said.

Cutter pushed his face towards mine.

‘What’s wrong with the way we dress?’ he said. ‘It’s practical.’

‘Stain resistant,’ said Lead Pipe.

‘Yes, but,’ I said, ‘it could be so much more.’

And Wanda laughed again and this time behind the chuckling stream was the crisp snap of fabric shears and the whistling hum of the shuttle as it plays back and forth across the thread.

‘But first,’ said Cutter, waving a blunt finger in my face, ‘we have to sort out the playroom.’

And that was that. I gave up the pharmaceutical trade and opened a boutique instead. Cutter and his boys were my first customers, and while they never stopped being an unsavoury gang of foul-mouthed thugs, at least when they broke legs they were well dressed doing it.

Merton, it turned out, had fled the squat the day we pumped out the water and, being in need of some security, assaulted a police officer so that he could spend a couple of nice peaceful years at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Lilith visited him regularly, and after he got out they ran an animal sanctuary just outside Abergavenny until their deaths, within three months of each other, in 2009. Nigel is still alive and taught cybernetics at Imperial College until his retirement a couple of years ago.

My daughter and I never got around to giving the boutique a name. It was always just ‘the shop’ and given that we never advertised it’s a wonder that we stay in business. We’re always at the cutting edge of fashion. We were out of flares while the Bay City Rollers were still number one and stocking bondage trousers before John Lyndon had dyed his hair. We’ve moved the shop a couple of times and, while we’re hard to find, we’re always close to the river.

So if you want to know what the herd are going to be wearing next spring, and if you can find us and are prepared to pay the price, you too can join the ranks of the stylish, the à la mode, and truly become a dedicated follower of fashion.

END

#rivers of london #ben aaronovitch #false value spoilers #false value #a dedicated follower of fashion #rol spoilers #rol short stories

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saskialongunit04 · 3 years

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Wider World and Media

Magic mushrooms are a well known hallucinogenic drug. These mushrooms contain a well known psychedelic compound called psilocybin. People often prepare mushrooms by drying and eating them. Some people eat freshly picked mushrooms, and you can even mix the mushrooms into food and drinks, such as tea. They can also be mixed with cannabis or tobacco and smoked. You can get psilocybin in liquid form, and the liquid is clear brown.

Mushrooms that contain psilocybin, mainly liberty caps, look like dried ordinary mushrooms with a long and slender stem. These stems are usually whitish-grey and the caps are usually dark brown, with a lighter brown center. Actual dried mushrooms are a rusty brown with isolated areas of off white. These mushrooms are also known as shrooms, liberty caps, mushies and golden caps.

When you take these mushrooms, it can result in a trip where the user could feel relaxed and drowsy, or you could have a more severe reaction and have a bad trip, with delusions and panic. In a worst case scenario, magic mushrooms can cause convulsions. Physical effects usually include drowsiness, headaches, increased temperature, blood pressure and heart rate, muscle weakness, dilated pupils and more. Mental effects include things such as a distorted sense of time, place and reality, euphoria, hallucinations, psychosis, spiritual experiences and hallucinations, whether visual or auditory.

In my game, I can focus on things such as the way the user supposedly takes the mushrooms, and I can try to include some of the mental effects that people experience, such as distorted shapes and colours.

Psilocybin is a chemical compound found within things such as magic mushrooms. It is a so called classic psychedelic that is in the same category as LSD. When you take psilocybin, your gut converts it into another chemical called psilocin. After taking psilocybin, activity in the visual cortex increases, which leads to changes in your perception, and it decreases network activity in the default mode network, which leads to a loss of ego. Due to this, people may report having a profound sense of unity, transcending beyond themselves.

Psilocybin can also increase connectivity among different regions of the brain, and change the way that different areas of your brain synchronize with each other. Scientists believe that because of this, psilocybin can be useful for combating depression and addiction. With different areas of the brain communicating with each other, you might gain new insight to a new problem.

Research has actually showed that psilocybin can greatly help depression and addiction. Two studies published in 2016 gave cancer patients with depression a large dose of psilocybin, and six months later, 80% showed a significant decrease in depressed mood. In another study, 15 volunteers took psilocybin to quit smoking, and after six months, 80% had managed to kick the habit. Overall, psilocybin is considered to be a safer drug, and only 0.3% of users had reported needing medical emergency treatment, compared to 1.3% for alcohol.

Many users who took psilocybin described things like seeing sounds and hearing colours. Users may also have an out of body experience in which people may observe a version of themselves, typically this begins 20 to 90 minutes after taking psilocybin, and it can last around 6 to 12 hours. People may also feel more open and imaginative, and overall the hallucinogenic trip produced by psilocybin is described as the most important experience of many peoples lives, as it can greatly increase mood and overall makes you feel better and more emotionally aware and stable.

Of course, there are many hellish stories of people having nightmare trips whilst taking psilocybin. People can have increased anxiety, and may feel trapped by a distorted view of the environment they are in. Old past traumatic experiences can come back to haunt them. They may want to run and throw up, but don’t have the ability to do so, and so it will feel like they’re stuck in a never ending nightmare.

DMT is a psychedelic drug that is known to cause some of the most powerful trips and it is a very powerful hallucinogenic drug. When in pure form, it looks like a white crystalline powder or solid. If it isn’t pure, it is often yellow, pink and orange powder or solid. People often smoke, drink, snort or inject DMT.

DMT gives the users a very brief but extreme trip. Most commonly, people hallucinate, feel like time is speeding up or slowing down, feel like colours and sounds are distorted and it may sometimes feel like you’re having an out of body experience.

There are some possible mental side effects that people experience after taking DMT, and these can include things such as euphoria, altered sense of time, depersonalization and feeling like you’re floating. Physical effects include paranoia, dizziness, increased blood pressure, nausea or vomiting, chest pain or tightness and agitation. These side effects can days, or even weeks after the user originally takes DMT. DMT trips can also last a lot longer if you take a brew called ayahuasca, which can make the trip last for up to 14 hours.

Machine elves are entities that people claim to see whilst tripping on DMT. DMT is one of many drugs that makes you hallucinate. Usually, it only lasts 15 minutes (can last 30 to 45 minutes), and it causes users to see beautiful fractal patterns. Sometimes, users can undergo an experience that is beyond their ability to describe.

Some people describe this experience as being taken to another dimension, and in this other world, people meet alien beings. These beings are often described as machine elves or clockwork elves. These can be either a voice, a presence, an actual being or anything the mind can think of whilst on DMT. Most commonly, these machine elves have a humanoid shape with alien or animal faces. They supposedly talk in a coloured language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Fabergé eggs. Most interactions with the machine elves are telepathic, and they mainly communicate by song, movement, colour and shape. The dimension that people enter whilst taking DMT is said to be 4D. These machine elves give me insight to what people experience whilst taking psychedelic drugs.

Ayahuasca is a brew that is made from a variety of different leaves and vines, and is always made with the shrub psychotria viridis. In this shrub, the leaves contain the psychedelic substance DMT.

Ayahuasca contains two main ingredients, and was mainly used for religious and spiritual purposes by ancient Amazonian tribes. It still is used for these reasons by some religious communities in Brazil and North America. Traditionally, a shaman (experienced healer that leads ayahuasca ceremonies), boils ingredients together in water. One main ingredient is the Psychotria Viridis shrub. The leaves from this shrub contain the substance DMT, which is responsible for causing powerful hallucinogenic trips. The torn leaves of this plant is added to water, along with the stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine.

DMT is broken down very quickly in your liver and gastrointestinal tract by enzymes called MAOs. This is why that, if DMT is taken without anything else, the trips caused by it are usually brief and quick. And so, the stalks of the caapi vine are added to the brew, as these stalks contain MAO inhibitors, which prevent DMT from being broken down. The B. caapi vine also contains substances which have psychoactive effects of their own. When combined, these two plants form a powerful psychedelic brew that affects the central nervous system, and leads to a trip that can last for hours, and sometimes can even last up to 14 hours, where the user will feel an altered state of consciousness, which can include hallucinations, euphoria and out of body experiences.

People often take this brew for the hallucinogenic experience, but many people like to partake in a ayahuasca ceremony in order to completely cleanse their body, open their minds and heal from past trauma. Ayahuasca can benefit brain health, can improve psychological well-being and may even treat addiction, anxiety, depression and PTSD. People may still have miserable experiences, and sometimes it can result in serious and deadly side effects.

Bicycle day is well known day within the psychadelic user community. It is the day that Albert Hoffman took the first documented LSD trip. On April the 19th, in 1943, Hoffman absorbed some of the synthesized LSD he had been experimenting with in his lab. He was originally experimenting with it as a medical stimulant for the respiratory circulatory system in 1938, but had no idea what kind of powers it held, especially the psychadelic powers. He decided to abandon it for a few years, until rediscovering it five years later, where he caught a glimpse of what it could do when it got absorbed through his fingertips.

He described the experience as ‘dream-like’, and a ‘not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition’. Intrigued, he decided to experiment on himself with a 250 microgram dose of LSD three days later, on what is known today as bicycle day (19th April). This 250 microgram dose was, well, pretty much an overdose, and Hoffman had a very trippy experience. Within an hour the effects of LSD were at full effect, and Hoffman freaked out, even thinking his neighbour was a witch. From his lab, he had to ride his bike home, as, at the time, he had no access to cars due to war time restrictions. The ride home on his bike, he described, was a stressful one, as he witnessed kaleidoscopic patterns and alternating colours as his vision wavered, and he could see multiple circles and spirals exploding and folding and rearranging themselves in a vast amount of colours.

His experience, and many other LSD experiences, give me a good idea as to what people can see and experience during trips, which will help me to further improve my game and give me ideas for what I can add.

Trainspotting is a well known film that surrounds a group of people and their journey and struggles with drug addiction. Renton is one of the main characters within the film, and the film focuses on his journey to try and clean up and get out of the Edinburgh drug scene despite the allure and temptation of drugs and the influence of friends. He has a heroin addiction problem, and a few of his mates are also drug addicts.

When he decides that he wants to give heroin up, he decides to lock himself in a cheap rented room with only just enough supplies to let him endure the withdrawal. He decides to buy opium rectal suppositories from a dealer to give him one last high to get through the night. He later goes on to visiting a nightclub with his friends, and ends up going home and sleeping with an underage 15 year old. The film focuses on a lot of sensitive topics, and things that can happen when you are intoxicated by drugs, and really shows how disgusting the life of serious hard drug addiction can be, and mainly how hard it is to stop addiction mentally and physically when you’re in a toxic environment that continually encourages the use of drugs (rough areas people live in, other friends using drugs etc). It even goes into the death of a fellow drug addicts baby, that happened due to neglect that has been caused by heavy drug addiction. A lot of the topics covered in the film are very sensitive, and too extreme for what I am featuring in my game, although these topics are a glimpse into what heavier drug addiction can cause, if people continue down the path of trying out new and more extreme drugs.

LSD: Dream Emulator is an old PS1 game that is supposed to show the player what being on LSD is like. There is no goal in the game, and all players can do is experience each in-game days dream and walk around the strange, colourful and shifting dreamscape environment. There are some video and text-based dreams in the game, but a majority of the time, you’re free to walk around a real time 3D environment.

The game features old graphics, and it has many bizarre and messed-up textures and random events. There are many strange events, such as running into a wall and having a demonic head explode out of it whilst little white elephants float out of the sky as a man in a huge cloak comes up behind you and the screen turns blood red. Many strange, random events. The textures also sport obnoxiously bright and neon clashing colours. All supposedly what some experience whilst tripping on LSD. This game will be the thing that helps me the most when it comes to my project, as it will include some things that I too could add to my game, such as brightly coloured textures that will make your eyes bleed.

Spinch game is a wacky and vibrant platformer game. In this game, the main playable character Spinch must rescue its 12 children who are stranded in 4 different levels. Rescuing these children aren’t completely necessary, but the more of them you’ll have at the end of the game, the more prepared you’ll be for the 5th stage boss fight. You can rescue up to three in each stage.

The main appeal of this game, to me, is the art styles and colours used. This is what makes the game ‘trippy’. Each enemy and level are made up of brightly coloured swirls and shapes within faces and even faces within shapes. These shapes and swirls consist of vibrant neon rainbow colours that somehow work well together.

The opening sentence to a description of the game even begins with ‘enter a world thick with bubbling psychedelia’. The odd enemies and shapes and colours all point to what you hear people experiencing whilst they are tripping on psychedelic drugs. This gives me a bit of an idea for what I can add to my game, such as very vibrant and neon colours.

GTA V is a well known game, popular for the story, guns and cars. Although drugs aren’t a big theme of the game, they are still present in a story mode mission, and you can even do them whilst roaming around in the open world.

Peyote is a popular plant, in the real world too, that if taken within the game, will make the player witness the screen shimmer and display bright colours. After this, the player will faint and fall to the ground. They will next wake up and come to their senses, seemingly finding themselves in the body of a random animal. This is all a part of the hallucination sequence, but players will be able to move around and roam as whatever animal they have been put into, be it a bird or a cat.

Another thing you can do in GTA is hit the bong. When you do so, either in story mode or online, the camera will sway, and everything will go blurry and the screen will have a green tint to it to imitate the effects you feel whilst high.

Even in story mode there are a few missions you can do where you experience trips, such as jimmy drugging michael and him supposedly going on an acid trip, and michael taking weed from someone and having to fight imaginary aliens. A few missions also involve the delivering of drugs such as weed and cocaine.

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readyaiminquire · 5 years

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Hippies, communes, Star Wars, and the future.

While I am duct-taping my life back together after Christmas and New Year - and with a to-do list longer than a Leonard Cohen song - I wanted to do a quick-fire piece to bridge things over while I am completing the next part of my Microchipping series. Enjoy!

I’ve also endeavoured to keep spoilers to a minimum - but read at your own risk all the same.

An old man hangs from a mechanical arm, controlling him like a puppeteer in his underground lair. His eyes are white, faded, clearly dead. Before him, our two heroes lie, burned by the lightning shot out of the Emperor's hands. He cackles at them, as he realises he no longer needs to convert either of them to the dark side - he no longer needs to steal one of their bodies to continue his maniacal reign. No, he announces, with a bond between them so rare and so strong, he can corrupt that power, and fully restore himself. He can circumvent what the mechanical puppet-arm only succeeded to do as pathetic imitation. With such a rarity, he can bend nature to his will.

He will corrupt it.

This is at least how I remember one of the scenes at the climax of Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker. I finally had the opportunity to watch it over Christmas, and it left me with a lot of question - many of which I shan't air here. Nonetheless, after speaking to family and friends about it, one recurring comment (again, among many that I will not mention here) is the perceived absurdity of the story itself. It came across as ridiculous, a rehash, absurd, or as simply uninteresting. A part of me was inclined to agree - where had I seen, read, heard this story in the past? Was it the original trilogy? Probably, after all, several story beats are clearly the same - but there is more to it.

This is when I realised; it was literally a story from a different era. A different time. It was, in many ways, based on the same foundation as the original trilogy, and this foundation was and remains a very particular product of its time. In essence, the story is a conflict between those using technology to as a means of controlling what is around them, to get further from 'Nature' (to ‘transcend’ nature, if you will) and through this control it; and those who seek to use technology and innovation as a means to get closer to nature. The Sith and Jedi very clearly embody this dichotomy, something made clear in the scene I outlined above: machines (implied to be an unnatural and pathetic imitation of life) versus using the very rare, special, and most important ‘natural’ bond between our two heroes as a resource to 'fix' the Emperor's predicament.

The concept of using technology to control, reshape, or otherwise 'change' what we perceive to be the natural order around us is not particularly novel today. However, the idea of using technology - something often imagined as being squarely in the realm of the man-made, and therefore 'unnatural' by definition - might be a bit tougher to grasp. It's important to appreciate that the Jedi and their allies are not Luddites. There's no rejection of technology here - after all the light sabre is still pretty damned advanced. However, structuring the Jedi order and their subsequent duties, aims, rules, and so on as a monastic order is exactly the point. They do not reject technology, as long as it furthers their understanding of what 'becoming one with the Force' means. Summed up by Obi-Wan, when referring to the light sabre, "a more elegant weapon for a more civilised time" - The mass-production and industralisation of conflict surely horrified him.

The original Star Wars trilogy was very much conceived in a time when this particular perspective was not only emergent but was beginning to take deep hold of a particular scene on the West Coast of the US. In his book From Counter Culture to Cyberculture Fred Turner outlines how today's ideas around technology as something fundamentally and inherently liberating, developed - perhaps most clearly seen in what other scholars have called "the Silicon Valley ideology". Perhaps surprising, in the 1960s, the computer (though but a distant great-great-great-something grandfather of what we use today) was understood as something far more oppressive. During the 1960s Berkeley student protests, for example, students wore punch cards around their necks to signify how they were nothing more than a cog in an ever-growing machine, one which forced them to do whatever the wider system demanded. The development of the computer was heralded as a new stage of bureaucratic centralisation, one which struck fear into the hearts of these young students, a new dawn of mechanisation (or digitalisation) that would crush their dreams.

With the emergence of the 1960s and 1970s countercultural movements - in particular, the hippies - an ideology of 'returning to nature' began taking root. The enemy, if you will, remained centralised bureaucratic power. This sparked the founding of many, many communes in what was understood to be untouched land, with the express purpose of reforming society, from scratch. It was among these communalists that the liberating potential of technological innovation first found fertile soil. The use of new structures and materials (famously, the geodesic dome), simple computers (something as basic as calculators), mixed with the ideas and ideals of writers like Buckminster Fuller, systems thinking, and likely a shedload of LSD, all that was needed was something to tie all of this together - the Whole Earth Catalogue. Though I won't go into details of WEC here (it's a really interesting story, though!), suffice it to say that the Catalogue functioned like a proto-social networking tool which mixed all of the above ideas, with ads for buying the latest tech or tool for these communards. It, in effect, tied together the fabric into what can be largely understood as a movement (or network forum; see my text here for more detail).

The point is, these hippies eventually returned to California - and in particular the Bay Area - as these communes failed one by one and brought these ideas back with them. Doing some historical compression, these ideas spread throughout this particular social strata, allowing a whole new positive and liberating view of technology to take hold. Suddenly, computers and the technology of the future would not enslave us under the yoke of technocratic oppression, it would emancipate us in ways we could never even imagine - some even imagined it would usher in a new era of post-humans: humans, but more.

In George Lucas' original Trilogy, it becomes very clear why this Sith-Jedi dichotomy remains so strong: thematically it ties into the whole debate and ideology outlined above. And in 1977 it was still very much a debate, technology was still by our standards deeply rudimentary. After all, the questions remained in the air, and it is clear what side Lucas stood on. After all, one side uses technology to oppress a whole galaxy, committing genocide, and forcefully enslaving just about anything that isn't them. The Empire also drew strongly on Nazi imagery. The Rebels, though no Luddites, use technology as a means of liberation; as a path to awaken the connection between people (of all races, species, etc.), to bring us closer to one another. In Episode VI, with the help of teddy bears in a redwood forest, they not only destroy the Imperial Forces, but they allow the Jedi as an order to reemerge - Isn't this a large signposting for nature reclaiming its central position, signalling to the Empire that it cannot win (and by extension invoking ideas of the ‘”noble savage” is even less surprising)?

The problem with this is, of course, that the world has moved on. As far as technology and innovation goes, the techno-utopian ideology of Silicon Valley has largely won out, and as a result, the concern of technology vis-à-vis nature or society has shifted. We are now more afraid of algorithms tracking our movement or usage, the gathering and sale of personal data, the influence and manipulation that automated systems might mete out. The current top-of-mind concern is not that technology will bring back goose-stepping soldiers in black leather trenchcoats, but that it will oppress us through very different means - and perhaps even oppress us without our noticing, until it is too late (assuming we might realise at all). The popularity of shows like Black Mirror very clearly show an understanding of what within the current popular discourse around technology concerns us.

Instead, Rise of the Skywalker very much returned to the old approach, that of violently oppressive technology versus a more humanising technology. This debate is in many ways dated, it doesn't connect within the current cultural imagination and instead alienates its audience. Good fantasy and sci-fi holds up some sort of mirror to society, critiques it in some way or another (and some more subtly than others) - Rise of the Skywalker and in many ways the rest of the 'new' trilogy holds up a mirror to what society was, and signals to us that it is still very much stuck in 1983.

Selected References

Delfanti, A. 2013. Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, Pluto Press.

Haraway, D. 2014. Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble. Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Presentation)

Turner, F. 2008. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

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letsnjk-blog · 5 years

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Bluetooth Headsets Provide Very Good Reception

The cans will need to be lean enough to permit sleeping so the speakers do not feel like they're pressed from the ears, and also have to ensure maximum relaxation here. Thus, once you are going to buy one, you shouldn't only check for fit and comfort, but also its own quality that is noise-cancellation. A robber holding you up at gunpoint is going to try run as soon as possible handing over your wallet and to get cash - with fewer cards indoors than usual - is the best alternative. We have no doubts that in relation to headbands, the CozyPhones Sleep Headphones are most among the best headphones you can sleep in. Among the principal doubts that people have is whether they will have the ability to listen to even the children calling in the space next door or their alarm clock. The US Census Bureau has reported that noise is Americans' top criticism for their areas and their primary reason for needing to proceed. Click here Deeply inserted earplugs will be the best passive approach to decrease noise.

It's no excellent revelation to find out that individuals with Asperger's attend the world in a way that's different from how"neurotypicals" attend the planet. Marijuana and LSD aren't utilised in isolation (e.g. how someone could take Adderall as a'study drug'). Someone who takes LSD frequently will, by virtue of attending to different facets of fact, find it harder to be motivated by the same items (and in exactly the same ways) as the remainder of the populace. These medications are infectious, and compete with all the network effects of the rest of the population. And since so many of our institutions, norms, values, etc., are thought to harness a specific type of inspiration (that the work/consumption cycle?) , someone who's using these drugs isn't going to resonate'correctly' with the remainder of society. Obviously this isn't a recent development -- it's been going on for millennia. The consensus seems to be no. It's only a different sort of consciousness, and it falls within the scope that society finds acceptable. Imagine a society of people whose brains are wired so that they behave like drunk nightclubbers. Put ten Aspies in a room together and they will have a glorious moment, exchanging all sorts of information -- mutually (and thickly ) ignorant of each individual's (quote/unquote) faux pas.

Headphones To Block Noise For Sleeping

's'front end' of roads and public spaces." And in the identical time, our expertise with this'end' is mediated by the smartphones we use to navigate it. Use lavender scented hand lotion. You can even use them Along with utilizing them if you rest and sleep. These headphones are extremely simple to use. In these instances, your brain just"fades out" the sounds of your surroundings. If need be, keep my cans and I want to swap it out. EasYoung Headbands for Men, 3 Pack Guys Workout Sweatbands Sport Headbands for Running, Crossfit, Working Out and Performance Stretch Workout Hairbands, Moisture Wicking Versatile Headbands Fits All 5B07BK5JMQV description. Bose SoundSport Free Truly Wireless Sport Headphones - Midnight Blue / Citron 5B0748JM8M5 description. Now we pick destinations in advance by tailored, algorithmic hints -- and also navigate by tracking a dot. Let's see what these thoughts can tell us about important issues.

Whythen, are they handled as such a danger -- the perennial bogeyman of so many politicians and (let's be fair ) much of the voting public? But the threat will likely be especially pronounced when the awareness has its own personal network effects. Language, culture, and (as I've argued) understanding are 3 methods whose network impacts will grow stronger as communication technologies improve. First there was speech, that gave rise to verbal consciousness. The first step is to improve your sleeping environment. By no way am I the first person to point this out. It's not surprising once you consider that Bose continues to be an industry pioneer in creating aviation cans for pilots who have to spend hours at plane cockpits that are noisy. And each technology that enhances communication will unlock benefit for those who share the culture and the very same patterns of control and attention. For those who wander its streets, the town is (was?) A cause for inducing a mindful experience that is shared along with other pedestrians.

https://magazine.iit.edu/winter-2012/now-hear

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 6 years

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Sally Kempton on Meditation | How to Manifest Your Thoughts

Sally Kempton among oak trees in her backyard in Carmel Valley, California. “My home has become such a powerful retreat space for me that I sometimes find it hard to leave,” she says.

DAVID MARTINEZ

One of the biggest gifts I’ve gotten from meditation came out of my struggle with my own mind.

As you know, the mind famously resists settling down and getting quiet. It much prefers to plan, critique, worry, and obsess over questions like, What year did Kendrick Lamar win his first Grammy?

When I was first meditating, and for many years afterward, my meditation sessions consisted of 40 minutes of rumination broken by brief stretches of focused mantra repetition and then a short period of relaxing into stillness.

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Facing my overactive (and sometimes overwrought) mentalogue was a little like facing down a dragon. I clung to my mantra, seeing it as a kind of tether that steadied me while my dragon mind belched clouds of fire and smoke. But every few minutes, the dragon would slip its leash and thrash around wildly. And often, I couldn’t get it to come back until, at last, the bell on my timer would ring and release me from the struggle.

See also Try This Durga-Inspired Guided Meditation for Strength

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After a while, though, I noticed that a funny thing started happening. Even though my mind rarely got quiet until the last five minutes of an hourlong session, it had begun behaving differently. I wasn’t taking my thoughts as seriously when they arose. In fact, I was starting to be able to choose which thoughts to give weight to.

As it turns out, the daily struggle to stay focused and present in meditation teaches you to separate your identity from your thoughts. You’ll be thinking some ordinary disempowering thought such as, I’ll never get this right. Then some other part of your mind will pipe up and remind you, This is just a thought, and I don’t have to believe it. That means something: A part of your mind has actually stood apart from that negative thought, observed it, and let it go.

If you keep doing this for even 15 minutes each day, you’ll eventually learn a lot about how your mind works and how to tame its wilder manifestations. You’ll recognize which thoughts make you feel bad, which thoughts enhance your love and clarity, and which thoughts are just noise. You’ll learn to discern the infinite tricks the mind uses to get you to believe what it tells you—If I don’t get up and eat now, my roommate will polish off the bran muffins!—and you’ll experience letting go of a thought without missing it!

See also How to Find More Calm—Even When Life Feels Craziest

Eventually, you’ll realize that even when your thought-stream feels like a whirlpool of confusion and negativity, something in you can always step out of the maelstrom and become its witness. Little by little, you’ll start to identify with that witnessing part of your mind rather than with your thoughts. You’ll start to become more and more intimate with your own knowing, unconstructed awareness.

Kempton’s statue of Lakshmi, goddess of abundance, love, and sustainability.

DAVID MARTINEZ

In some traditions, this recognition that I am the witness—not the thoughts! is considered the goal. There’s truth in this; discerning the inner witness is key to personal and spiritual progress. It’s obvious: If you can continue to identify yourself as the witness to your emotional states (rather than identifying with the emotions themselves), you will be a lot freer even when life sucks. Mindfulness practice cultivates witness-awareness, as do the meditation practices of sages such as Ramana Maharshi and contemporary teachers of Zen. In fact, in these traditions, learning to identify as the witness and not as your body, personality, and mental creations is called liberation.

But there are other traditions in which discovering the power of the witness is just the beginning. Tantric philosophy has a particularly practical and, for me, exciting attitude toward the mind. Tantra identifies the mind with the absolute creativity of Universal Consciousness—the subtle intelligent energy that underlies all life, and that some people call God. Tantric sages claim that your mind is the microcosmic version of the universal mind, the vast creative intelligence that imagines this universe into existence. One major text, The Recognition Sutras, says that universal intelligence becomes your mind by a process of contraction, analogous to the way H₂O can start out as steam, condense into water, and then freeze into ice. Your thoughts seem very solid when they are in their densified form, but they can also melt, evanesce, dissolve, and reform themselves into different configurations.

See also Test Your Integrity in 5 Questions

From this point of view, our thoughts are actually condensed squibs of consciousness. From one perspective, they are insubstantial, like clouds. But just as clouds carry moisture, every thought carries energy. That thought’s energy can be harnessed, shaped, played with. You can change a negative thought to a positive thought, and that will affect your mood and even your physical state. You can use your imagination to visualize a positive outcome for a project and influence that outcome.

Thoughts, we learn, are creative powers. Consciously or not, they are the tools with which we shape our experience. And though not every stray thought has that power, if you know how to collect and harvest those casual thoughts, you can use their energy to create more loving and empowered realities.

Learning to witness the ebb and flow of thoughts is the first step, because we can’t consciously manage the mind’s creative potential until we know how to stand aside from it.

Kempton likes to begin her meditation practice in a mudra of devotion, singing mantras and asking for grace. “It helps open my heart and brings a luscious feeling into the whole sitting practice,” she says.

DAVID MARTINEZ

Change Your Mind, Change Your Life

Neuroscientists now call the state of habitual, repetitive, often-negative thinking patterns that most of us are in “the default mode network” of the brain. Meditation (as well as psychoactive substances like psilocybin and LSD) can turn off the default mode network, freeing us to experience the nearly unlimited power that exists in the subtle field of intelligence that we call the mind, once we are no longer subject to the uncontrolled movements of our own mental chatter (vrittis).

The sages of the yogic traditions have known this for a very long time. A great text of Vedanta states baldly: “Consciousness plus thoughts is your mind. Consciousness minus thoughts is God.” The implications of this idea are radical, and they were not lost on the Western thinkers who discovered Indian thought in the 19th century. Pragmatic idealists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James understood the immense power of the imagination. They realized that when we know how to liberate the mind from conditioned ideas about our own possibilities, we can dramatically change our experience of life.

The more you enact the daily discipline of shaping your own thoughts in meditation, the more you discover its possibilities for changing your life.

See also Sally Kempton’s Simple Self-Inquiry Meditation

For instance, if every morning during meditation you create an intention such as, “I am focused, aware, and loving,” you will begin to notice that this affirmation affects the way you move and act and think throughout the rest of the day. Of course, you’ll forget it, you’ll lose it over and over again, but when you look back after some time, you’ll start to realize that the thought itself has created a different climate in your mind. You’ll be more focused, aware, and loving than you had been before.

In other words, you’ll have sculpted the subtle material of your own consciousness into a more beautiful form. You can use the power of visualization to imagine a future of abundance and success for yourself or someone else. You can ask questions and receive inspiration. You can offer blessings to others and even reimagine a world where people take care of one another and nourish the planet.

Once you’ve had a direct experience with the sheer energy of your thoughts, you can become an activist of the subtle, using your own consciousness to create palpable shifts in the atmosphere—in your family, in organizations, and even in the political sphere. Sports psychologists have known since at least the 1960s that a tennis player who visualizes a perfect serve has a much better chance of executing one. We know that believing you will succeed makes a big difference in your ability to complete a task. You can apply this principle to every aspect of life once you’ve learned to play skillfully in the field of consciousness that is your imagination. And when your motivation is to be of benefit to others and to the world, your thoughts will have even more power than you’ve imagined.

See also 5-Minute Guided Meditation to Cultivate Patience

Kempton meditates at her altar, which is dedicated to the sacred feminine, and presided over by a Sri Yantra.

DAVID MARTINEZ

Becoming an Active Participant

Consider doing this as part of your meditation. You might set aside just five minutes at the end of a meditation period to cultivate an intention for your life that you believe will transform it for the better. Consider filling your mind with a healing vision for the planet or a prayer for someone you care about. Before you start this process, spend some time contemplating the intention you want to manifest. Write it down using the present tense, knowing that it may morph during the weeks ahead. For instance, here’s an intention a friend created for herself when she began running a small nonprofit: I am living in love, intimacy, and abundance, surrounded by dear friends who, together, are helping bring more art, music, and dance to the schools in our town. By 2017, we will have arts programs in place in all the public schools in the state.

She wrote this intention down in a notebook in 2013 and promptly mislaid the notebook. A couple of years later, discovering her notebook in the bottom of a drawer, she realized that everything she had intended had actually taken place.

See also A Meditation to Tap Into a Sense of Unchanging Well-Being

Of course, she had to work hard for the outcome. Her intention had not just been a mental exercise—it had given direction to her organization’s work.

So here is my suggestion: Take a few minutes to sit for meditation while asking yourself, What do I want to create that will serve the highest good, for myself, my family, and the world? Write down what comes up, and then craft an intention or a prayer that expresses it succinctly and powerfully. Then take it into meditation.

Sit as you normally would, focusing on the breath or a mantra or any other technique that helps you get centered. Take some time to observe your thoughts. Notice how thoughts arise and subside. Remind yourself, These thoughts are energy, and every thought has potential power to transform my reality.

Master meditation teacher Sally Kempton shares her thoughts on the importance of selective thinking, and why you can—and should—work with your own thoughts.

DAVID MARTINEZ

Now, introduce a simple thought, and follow it with great concentration until it dissolves. Make it a positive thought, such as, I love you—or at least a neutral one. I like to use the simple mantra I am as my focal point.

As you focus on the word or phrase, you’ll gradually notice the slight pause, the pulsating space in your mind where the thought comes to an end.

See also 10-Minute Meditation On the Sounds of Daily Life

Focus your attention there in the fraction of a second before a new thought arises. In that space of quiet, bring to mind your intention, remembering to couch it in the present tense.

Imagine yourself living in the satisfaction of complete fulfillment of your intention. Imagine that your life is filled with abundance. Imagine how a world would look in which all people had enough to eat. Imagine your child enjoying new friends or walking on the campus of the school she is hoping to be admitted to.

Focus on your intention and its fulfillment for several breaths. Then, let it go, and let your attention return to the feeling of your breath rising and falling on the edge of your nostrils. Or, simply stay present with the space in your mind where your intention has dissolved.

Recognize that this space, where stray thoughts and even charged thoughts can melt back into their source, is loaded with creative power. Notice how the quiet center within your mind is constantly creating. Let yourself be awed by the creative power within your own mind. And one more time, make the decision to use that power—which is your birthright—for growth, for self-transformation, and for healing your world.

See also 5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Home Meditation Space

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mdwatchestv · 8 years

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Watch This Show: LEGION

I think it is more than fair to say that we have reached peak superhero. The number of hours I have spent in the Marvel Cinematic, and Marvel Extended, and Marvel Television Universes makes me feel obligated to not miss an offering, lest all those previous hours spent been in vain. Netflix alone has overwhelmed my tv time with a seemingly endless parade of superhero shows (Jessica Jones is the best, I can skip Iron Fist right?). I refuse to engage with the DC universe because life is simply too short. Ironic that it is FX, the network of John Landgraf (forewarner of 'peak tv') has opted to throw out another offering from the world of Marvel.

Full disclosure, I have not read any of the X-Men comics and my experience with the characters has purely been through the movies and a childhood friend who dressed as Wolverine for 6 Halloweens in a row. That being said, the X-Men have always been my favorites in the superhero world. While the X-Men themselves may fight for good, mutants in general are not inherently heroes (or villains). They are not super soldiers, or vigilante billionaires, but rather just people who were born differently and have to deal in a society that is consistently suspicious of those who are different (hmmm feels familiar...almost like.....a parable...or something...). The best parts of the movies for me were never the blockbuster action sequences, but rather the mutant characters who were living their lives as teachers, line cooks or petty criminals. The potential mundanity of a mutant's life sparked my (and I'm sure countless others) imagination: what would it be like to have mutant powers? What would they be? How would I live my life with them? In case you were wondering, my power would be to kill people with my mind. It would cause a lot of problems for me.

Legion captures that imaginative spark perfectly with the outsider narrative of David Haller (played by my nemesis Dan Stevens), a young man who believes his telepathic powers are really a schizophrenic mental illness. Even his sneaking suspicions about his own abilities feel intertwined with a potential psychosis, leaving the audience, like Haller, unsure of what to believe. Yes, I know I could easily google what the extent of this character's powers are, but seeing them uncovered is infinitely more delightful. Instead of surrendering fully to the hero narrative we share Haller's doubts and hopes regarding the increasingly surreal situations in which he finds himself. He is not an untouchable god or immortal alien, and while he may be a mutant he still suffers from the fallibility of his humanity.

Most superhero movies, despite the presence of a different white male lead (I said it), are intensely formulaic. Even Deadpool, the R-rated black sheep superhero movie, still followed the standard formula pretty faithfully. And while these movies are on a whole enjoyable, the Marvel films have begun to feel more like a Mad Libs fill in the blank rather than films with individual vision.

Legion, however, has taken that Mad Libs booklet, set it on fire, and scattered the ashes to the wind. Legion is superhero story that feels 100% original, it is able to stand alone on the strength of its artistic merit and would be just as good without the Marvel and X-Men labels on the tin.

To start with Legion looks INSANE. With Fargo, Noah Hawley showed us he could channel the unique style of the Coen brothers, but he is a far from a one trick pony. Imagine that Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch decided to raise a child together, and that child grew up to be Wes Anderson, and then armed with his father's directorial ambition and passion for the color red, he directed Legion. That's what Legion looks like. Haller inhabits a world of earth tones punctuated with fire alarm reds and sickly greens, Zissou crew members scurry around the foreground while ominous figures lurk in the shadows. It is a world of menace, imagination, and overwhelming beauty. It feels like Twin Peaks on LSD, like the Royal Tenenbaums trapped in A Clockwork Orange. It is sublime.

Even though I will never forgive him (he knows what he did), Dan Stevens is magnetic as the titular character, and even his sometimes odd American accent lends to the delicious oddness of Haller. Now get away from me forever Dan Stevens. Rachel Keller (who is only 24!!! Don't talk to me.) Is as radiant here as she was in season 2 of Fargo. Her sweet but doomed romance with Haller is the anchor in a world that is constantly tilting on its axis. Rounding out the pilot cast is Jean Smart (legend), Aubrey Plaza (possibly, actually, a mutant) and Hamish Linklater who I love in everything. I just love that guy! Don't you??? He's always good (do I have a crush on Hamish Linklater? Help).

Most importantly, Legion is FUN. It is not bogged down in self importance or the dreadful moral hemming and hawing that plagues so many comic book outings. For chrissakes, it has a Bollywood dance break that is as emotionally resonant as it is playfully irreverent. Legion is a show that is both a visual existential escape while being inescapably tethered to our present reality through its allegorical content. It is the show that we need even though we may barely deserve it's staggering beauty and sublime weirdness. I will not be recapping Legion, because (a) I don't want to sully my enjoyment of this fine television program with my opinions and (b) I am already covering a lot when no one pays me to write (yet..?). But you have all been put on notice to watch this gem.

Five out of five, ten out of ten, hearts, stars and horseshoes.

XO MD

PS. FX you can pay me in cash or check. I also accept Venmo.

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swan1974-blog · 8 years

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Sam Says,Can I Tell You A Fun Fact? Swans Only Have One Partner For Their Whole Life, If Their Partners Die They Could Die From A Broken Heart. It's Like I Was Reading About Myself And Not The Species Of Bird. Swans Are Highly Intelligent And Remember Who Has Been Kind To Them, Or Not. Man, What A Compliment! Amazing Swan Facts About A Cob Make Them Distinguishable From Other Birds. A Cob Or A Male Swan Acts Responsibly For His Children And For His Partner. He Protects His Family By Making A Blow Using His Knucklebone. The Blow From His Wing Is Said To Be Strong Enough To Break A Man's Hand. Swan Says,I Wouldn't Want To Take A Punch From Him! Sam Says,That's Interesting, And I Will Want To Add Although It Is True That Swans Are Gentle And Defensive Animals By Nature, They Have Their Rare Moments Of Aggression. If Any Intruder (Such As Another Swan, Geese, Or Even A Human) Gets Too Close To Their Nesting Ground Or Young, They May Chase Them Away. They May Also Bite – Not In The Typical Sense Considering They Have No Teeth, But They Can Still Pinch The Skin Which Can Be Irritable. Can You Bite Like That, Daddy? Swan Says,Heck, Yeah! Sam Says,You Know What? I Would Love Twilight Better If Swan From Phantom Of The Paradise Was Bella's Father, You Know, Adding The Portrait Of Dorian Gray In The Vampires And Werewolves Film. What Do You Think Of That? Swan Says,I Lobe It. Sam Says,Do You Get Teased A Lot? Swan Says While Rolling His Eyes,You Sure Bet I Do. People Call Me A Blonde Austin Powers. I Think That Is Mildly Insulting. People Think I Am Stuck In The 1960'S,1970'S. That Doesn't Stop Me, Though. I Am Continuing To Incorporate Cultural Elements Of The 1960S And 1970S In 2017. I Continue The Dream, So To Speak. I Always Wear Flared Elephant Bells Bellbottoms,Waistcoats Lapels Vests,Colorful Patterned Frilly Shirts,Ascots To Look Out Of 1960'S Counterculture. I Do That Because I Like The Style Compared To The Style Today. I Was Often Accessorised With Bright, Bold Colorful Shirts And High-Heeled Boots. Some May Say I Looked A Little Feminine, But Never Mind That. The Flamboyant Look Was In,And Is Still In For Me. During The Mid-1960S Frills And Cravats Came Back In, Together With Vividly Printed Shirts. I'm Contributing To The Trend Even If I'm The Only One Still Doing It. My Patterned Waistcoats With Lapels Is A Little More Elegant And Dandy. It Also Works A Little Better When Worn On It’s Own Or With The Suit Jacket On. I Don't Think It's A Real Jacket, To Be Honest. It’s More Jacket-Like, I Guess You Could Say. One More Thing, I Promise. Finally, Lapels And Trousers Took On Exaggeratedly Wide Dimensions. I Kinda Of Like That. I Have Been Called A Hippie Nowadays, But I Have Also Been Called A Hippie Then, Too. I Don't Care About Being Called A Hippie. The 60'S Slang I Use Nowadays Are Far Out,Peace Out,Groovy,Outta Sight,Freakin' Out,Flower Child,Make Love Not War,Cop A Feel,Love Bite,Shag,Rave On, Rip-City,Peace And Love. Man, I Wish That Slang Was Used Today! How Cool Would That Be? The Woodstock Festival Was A Three-Day Concert (Which Rolled Into A Fourth Day) That Involved Lots Of Sex, Drugs, And Rock 'N Roll - Plus A Lot Of Mud. Mud Riding Would Be Fun! The Woodstock Music Festival Of 1969 Has Become An Icon Of The 1960S Hippie Counterculture. It Was In August 15-18, 1969. I Went There. I Went With Your Mother Whom Was A Flower Child Hippie Back Then. She Was So Beautiful. When I Was There, We Had So Much Fun Together. The Woodstock Was Just Absolutely Fantastic. That Was Not Even Close To All The Good Stuff You Can Imagine. Granny Takes A Trip Was A Boutique Opened In February 1966 At 488 Kings Road, Chelsea, London. The Shop, Which Was Acquired By Freddie Hornik In 1969, Remained Open Until The Mid-1970S And Has Been Called The "First Psychedelic Boutique In Groovy London Of The 1960S. You Want To Know Something Interesting About It? The Name Of The Boutique Was Giving Away Its Policy – ‘Granny’ Symbolized The Influence Of The Past, And ‘Trip’ , A Colourful World Of Bougeoing Hippie Movement And Its Drug Of Choice – Lsd. I Used To Shop There A Lot Because Lots Of Good Stuff There. You Something Else Fantastic? Granny’s Opened In February 1966 At 488 King’s Road, A Previously Unfashionable Part Of The Road Also Revered To As The World’s End, In London. That's Awesome, Right? They Used To Cut Up Colorful Blouses And Floral Dresses And Turn Them Into Colorful Patterned Shirts Or Tops For Men. I Guess You Can Say That Created The Feminine Look For Me. What Was Great About Granny’s Was That There Were No Boundaries. Anything Went And They Kept On Changing. The Effect Of Granny’s Clothes Was Foppish, Flamboyant And Decadent – A 1960’S Reinvention On Fin-De Siecle Dandyism. They Were Absolutely One Of A Kind. It Was A True Mish-Mash Of Influences - My Garments Had To Be Either Colorful Or Unusual Or Both. What Do You Think? Sam Says,Your Garments Are Colorful And Anything But Boring. Your Sixties Grooviness Is Just Awesome. You're A Blast From The Past. Your Personality Is 1960S Swinging London, With Your Advocacy For Free Love, Your Use Of Obscure Impressions And Your Colorful Clothing Style. You Are So Unique. Swan Says,Why, Thank You. I Am Embodying The Swinging London Mod Culture And Hippie Culture Of The 1960S,1970'S. I Hope You Like It. Sam Says,I Wouldn't Change A Thing About It. Swan Says,I Appreciate That About You. I Always Wear Elephant Bells, Popular In The Mid-To-Late 1967-1970S, Were Similar To Loon Pants Which Was A Variant On Bell-Bottomed Trousers, With An Increased Flare. They Are Great. Elephant Bells Had A Marked Flare Below The Knee, Often Covering My Shoes. Shoes? I Have Shoes! Oh No, Where Are They? Anyway, The Preferred Shoes Were Platform Shoes With Soles At Least 2 Inches (5.1 Cm) Thick And Heels 4 To 5 Inches (10 To 13 Cm) To Keep The Pants' Hems Off The Ground. That Way I Never Dragged My Pants On The Ground. They Were So Popular That They Became A Symbol Of The Outlandish And Colorful Style Of The Decade. Awesome, Right? Sam Says,Yeah, And Is The Shop You Shopped At Then Closed? Hey Where Do You Shop Now. I'm Curious To Know. Swan Jokes,You Know Where I Shop At Now? Forever 21. No Wonder I Always Look Young Despite Being Old, Obviously. Sam Laughed And Says,You Have Quite A Sense Of Humor. Swan Says,I Know Right? Sam Says,Where Do You Like To Shop At For Real? Swan Says,I'm Glad You Asked. I Like Hot Topic The Store Because Of All The Costumes And Accessories. They Fit My Tastes. It's So Gothic And Dark, And Others Don't Seem To Appreciate My Style, Honestly. I Have Been Called A Emo,Goth,Scene Because It's So Dark. You Know What? I Miss The Hippie 60'S. When It Was Cool To Wear The Clothes I Just Can't Stand Not Wearing I Love Them So Much. Sam Says,You Know What? Uncle Paul Was Very Popular In The 1970'S, Which I Know You Already Know. But Did You Also Know, Although Predominantly Known For His Music, Paul Williams Has Also Appeared In Films And Many Television Guest Spots, Such As The Faustian Record Producer Swan In Brian Depalma's Film Phantom Of The Paradise (1974)—A Rock And Roll Adaptation Of The Phantom Of The Opera, Faust And The Picture Of Dorian Gray, For Which Williams Also Wrote The Songs Also You Cowrote The Script With Brian Depalma. And He Was As Virgil, The Genius Orangutan In Battle For The Planet Of The Apes (1973). On February 9, 1973, Williams Made A Joke Appearance On The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson In Which He Sang A Song In Full Make-Up As Virgil. He Also Played Migelito Loveless, Jr. In The Wild Wild West Revisited (1979), A Reunion Movie Featuring The Original Cast Of Wild Wild West Television Series, And Played Himself, Singing A Song To Felix Unger's Daughter Edna, In The Odd Couple Television Series In 1974. After Appearing On The Muppet Show In 1976, Williams Worked Closely With Jim Henson's Henson Productions On The Muppet Movie, Most Specifically On The Soundtrack, And Even Had A Cameo In The Movie As The Piano Player In The Nightclub (Who Had A Sign On The Piano Saying "Don't Shoot Piano Player") Where Kermit The Frog Meets Fozzie Bear. He Was Also The Lyricist For Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas. Williams Was Hired By Tv Producers Paul Junger Witt And Tony Thomas To Write Title Tracks For Two Of Their Abc Comedies, It Takes Two (1982–1983), On Which He Also Co-Sang With Crystal Gayle, And Condo (1983), In Which Williams' Theme Was Sung By Drake Frye. Williams Has Appeared In Many Minor Roles. He Provided The Voice Of The Penguin In Batman: The Animated Series. He Appeared On An Episode Of Walker, Texas Ranger As A Radio Dj Covering A Modern-Day Bonnie And Clyde. He Appeared In 2009 In An Episode Of Nickelodeon's Children's Show Yo Gabba Gabba! Entitled "Weather", Where He Performed "Rainbow Connection". He Has Also Appeared On Cartoon Network's Dexter's Laboratory Where He Played Professor Williams In An Episode Entitled "Just An Old Fashioned Lab Song". He Made Numerous Television Appearances In The 1970S And 1980S, Including On Hawaii Five-O, Match Game '79, Hollywood Squares, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island,The Hardy Boys, The Fall Guy, And The Gong Show. In October 1980, Williams Was Host Of The Mickey Mouse Club 25Th Anniversary Special On Nbc-Tv. He Stated That He And You Both Tried Out For The Show In Early 1955 And Were Both Turned Down. He Was A Frequent Guest And Performer On The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He Also Appears As The Man Making The Phone Call At The Beginning Of The Music Video For Hank Williams Jr.'S Song "All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight". And So, So Much More! He Was Very Well Known By Everyone, Including You, Of Course. Everyone Knew Him. Were You Jealous Of Him Getting More Fame Than You Back Then. He Stole Your Spotlight, Huh? Swan Says,Well, Yeah, In A Way He Did. Sometimes The Icarly Fans Say That Paul Williams Created The Show, But I Did. Sam Says,I See How That Would Be Bothersome. Swan Says,Yep. Sam Says,You Have A Creative, Colorful Imagination Like He Does. Swan Says,I Know, I Know. Speaking Of Colorful,And I'm Getting Off Topic Now, Cyclia Was Created By The Muppets Creator Jim Henson And Willy. Willy Wonka, You Know? The Club Was Very Small. Suddenly, It Got A Whole Lot Bigger. It Felt Trippy,Not Knowing If They Were Just Seeing Things. Sam Says,Was It Just Their Imagination? Swan Says,Nope.

#swan #phantom of the paradise #paul williams #sam puckett

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wahooo0-blog · 5 years

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a pretty fab annotated bib

Coleman, Gerald D. “Is America Going to Pot?: We Need to Weed through the Pros and Cons of Marijuana Use before Rushing into a Decision on Its Legalization.” U.S. Catholic, vol. 79, no. 5, May 2014, pp. 23–27. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=reh&AN=CPLI0000585550&site=eds-live.

Coleman writes that there is a generational divide to the acceptance of marijuana. Age is the strongest predictor in attitudes towards marijuana legalization, according to Coleman. He explains that young adults (18-29) are more than twice as likely to consume marijuana than seniors (65 and older) who believe that marijuana legalization is a sign of America’s decline. Coleman also writes about the legalization of marijuana in many states. In 2013, Colorado and Washington state became the first states to allow recreational marijuana consumption following referendums. Colorado projected to make 67 million in marijuana taxes in 2014, the first 40 million would be earmarked for school construction. This is an example of the good that can be done through marijuana taxes. By legally selling and taxing marijuana, we could put marijuana tax money back into communities most affected by unfair drug laws and unjust policing. Marijuana taxes could also boost the economies of poor states, especially those in the south where marijuana can be grown readily. According to Coleman, federal laws prevent legal marijuana merchants from using bank accounts or credit cards, forcing a multimillion-dollar business to operate in cash. This is the most dangerous aspect of the legal marijuana business, according to Coleman. Coleman also notes the plethora of benefits attributed to medicinal marijuana. However, most marijuana revenue is from recreational marijuana, which many people still take issue with. Many Americans believe marijuana should be legalized for medicinal uses, but not recreationally. The federal government needs to at least decriminalize marijuana to end disproportionate policing when it comes to marijuana.

“Drug Scheduling.” DEA, www.dea.gov/drug-scheduling.

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency organizes drugs, substances, and chemicals used to make drugs into five distinct categories or schedules depending on the drug’s medical use and the drug’s abuse or dependency potential. A drug's position on the schedule largely impacts one’s conviction if they are caught with the possession of certain drugs. For example, a person arrested for the possession of marijuana would likely face a longer, harsher sentence than someone arrested for the illegal possession of Xanax because marijuana is a schedule one drug whereas Xanax is a schedule 5 drug. The organization of the drug schedule is hotly debated because many of the drugs’ placements on the schedule do not correlate with their actual danger or risk for dependency. LSD, marijuana, ecstasy, and peyote are all listed in the schedule one category, but there have been no recorded overdoses on any of those drugs. The DEA would like you to believe these drugs are at high risk for dependency and have no accepted medical use, but this is untrue for most of the drugs listed on the schedule one category. For example, marijuana has recorded medicinal benefits and one can not become chemically addicted to marijuana, unlike many of the other drugs on lower schedule categories. The position of peyote on the drug schedule is also contentious because of its use in Native American ceremonies. Many believe its position is used to target Native American communities. Cocaine, methamphetamine, and many prescription opiates are listed on lower drug schedules despite their high risk for dependency and abuse. There have been no changes made to the DEA drug schedule in years, which many take issue with because of the rise of opiate overdoses and growing rates of abuse benzodiazepines (Xanax) among teenagers.

Goldstein, Margaret J. Legalizing Marijuana : Promises and Pitfalls. Twenty-First Century Books ™, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1283710&site=eds-live.

In this book, Goldstein gives readers a different perspective on marijuana users. Most people think of the stereotypical stoner in coming of age films, but Goldstein writes of a family in Colorado who gives their daughter a non-mind-altering form of marijuana to control her seizures, which has saved her life. Up until taking medical marijuana to control her seizures, she would suffer hundreds of seizures a day. She had tried many common powerful treatments] but nothing worked. Doctors told the family to prepare for their daughter's death, but after taking medical marijuana for months, the number of seizures she suffered monthly was reduced greatly. She now only has a few seizures a month, mainly in her sleep and she can live a pretty normal life. This family is extremely lucky to live in a state where medicinal marijuana is legal, if they had lived in a state where it was illegal, their daughter could’ve died. Goldstein also explains how even though many states have legalized marijuana, it is still very illegal at the federal level because of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution which states that when federal and state laws conflict, federal laws take precedence. This allows the federal government the power to enforce anti-marijuana laws even in states where it is legal. Goldstein notes that in the past ten years, the DEA has conducted numerous raids on medical marijuana operations in California. This is interesting, considering mainly republican lawmakers oppose marijuana legalization. Aren’t conservatives for State’s rights?

“Marijuana Arrests by the Numbers.” American Civil Liberties Union, 2019, www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 52% of all drug arrests were for marijuana in 2010. These were not drug kingpins, rather they were people with small amounts of marijuana. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests from 2001 to 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana. Aside from marijuana being relatively harmless, many would argue the over-policing of marijuana is a waste of taxpayer money and police powers, especially when there are worse crimes being committed and more dangerous drugs being used. The note that police aren’t arresting drug kingpins is important because police aren’t looking at helping communities when they arrest an individual carrying drugs, they are only seeking to punish the individual. This only leads to more harm to communities suffering from police targeting. If the police wanted to help communities, they would focus more on kingpins, those who introduce drugs to communities. The American Civil Liberties Union also found that black Americans are far more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. This is despite white and black consuming marijuana at roughly the same rate (white people actually consume more marijuana). It is noted that black Americans are nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. I’m many U.S. states, black people are 7.5 to 8.5 times more likely to be arrested for having weed. This discrepancy in data has led many, including the ACLU, to conclude that police target communities of color in drug arrests. Arrests are expensive. Getting caught with marijuana could lead to losing a job or public benefits, which hurts communities. States waste well over three-million dollars every year enforcing marijuana laws according to the ACLU. Imagine the good it would do if that money were put back into education, or helping communities of color prosper.

McGinty, Emma E., et al. “Public Perceptions of Arguments Supporting and Opposing Recreational Marijuana Legalization.” Preventive Medicine, vol. 99, June 2017, pp. 80–86. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.ypmed.2017.01.024.

Essentially, McGinty explores the results of a 2016 national survey designed to answer two main research questions: (1) How do Americans perceive the relative strength of competing arguments about recreational marijuana legalization? (2) How are perceptions of argument strength associated with public support for recreational marijuana legalization? It compared the attitudes of people living in states where marijuana was still illegal and states where marijuana was legal and compared the attitudes of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. The results showed that 54% of Americans supported the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. This was for reasons including federal research limitations on schedule 1 controlled substances and the novelty of recreational marijuana laws. It is worth noting that Americans are being asked whether they support or oppose marijuana legalization without sufficient research into public health consequences. However, the lack of research is caused by the DEA’s placement of marijuana in the schedule 1 category. McGinty notes that the best available research shows that marijuana legalization could lead to increased rates of cannabis use disorders and death due to driving while under the influence of marijuana. There is also some research that suggests that recreational marijuana legalization could have beneficial public health consequences such as reducing prescription opioid overdoses. McGinty writes that one of the largest public health concerns regarding marijuana legalization is how well regulatory schemes will prevent underaged people from illegally accessing marijuana. Another big concern is that marijuana’s legalization would create a new powerful industry that puts profit before public health, like the tobacco industry.

McNearney, Allison. “The Complicated History of Cannabis in the US.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 20 Apr. 2018, www.history.com/news/marijuana-criminalization-reefer-madness-history-flashback.

In this article, McNearney describes cannabis’s complicated history in the U.S. She writes that initially cannabis was produced in the early colonies for hemp, to create rope, cloth, and paper. In 1619, a law was made in Virginia requiring cannabis to be grown at every farm in the colony. McNearney states that cannabis in the form of hemp was considered a proper form of currency in many colonies. Contrary to popular belief, the early North American economy was rooted in cannabis production. Eventually, hemp as a material to make clothing fell out of fashion as cotton gained popularity but following the Civil War, cannabis was becoming an increasingly popular ingredient in medicines and tinctures. Cannabis or Marijuana continued to gain popularity in the United States as Mexican refugees brought marijuana to the states fleeing violence. In the 1930s, it’s popularity would expand to the black jazz community. Crackdowns on marijuana began during the Great Depression after Prohibition. McNearney states that straight-laced bureaucrats wanted to turn their attention to Marijuana which was commonly used by Mexican and black communities. They painted the drug as something hurting the country and worsening the Great Depression. By 1931, twenty-nine states had outlawed marijuana and in 1937, the Marijuana Tax Act was passed, essentially making the plant illegal in the United States. This may have been what led to the unjust policing relating to communities of color, which still exists to this day. “Reefer madness” would continue in the 1950s, as parents began to worry about their teenage children consuming the drug.

Murray, Robin, MD, M.Phil, MRCP, MRC Psych, et al. Marijuana and Madness. [Electronic Resource]. Cambridge University Press, 2012. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat07712a&AN=flc.230340&site=eds-live.

First, this book begins with an overview of how cannabis works in the brain. This is followed by reviews of how cannabinoids other than THC (the psychoactive component of marijuana) affects the brain’s cannabinoid system. In looking at this, the increasing potency of cannabis is considered. It is noted in the book that the increasing potency of marijuana cannabis has been obscured in the debate of marijuana’s legality. However, it is worth noting that there is little evidence that suggests more potent marijuana could cause problems. For the most part, the book concentrated on the impact of marijuana on schizophrenia. It is recorded that long term effects of cannabis on the brain structure and neuropsychological functions in humans may mediate processes involved in the generation of psychosis. The book notes that one of the clinical conundrums of cannabis is the discrepancy between the benefits reported by cannabis users and the expression of schizophrenia noted by clinicians. The possibility that genetic predispositions to psychiatric disorders like Schizophrenia coupled with heavy marijuana use could lead to the development of schizophrenia in certain individuals. The book also explores the impact that cannabis has on depression and bipolar disorder, stating that it has been found that cannabis can help or hurt those suffering from those disorders. I’m the end, it is noted that the effects marijuana has on schizophrenia and other psychological disorders are “acute,” meaning they are minor. The author also takes a look at the impact of pubertal exposure to cannabis by examining animal studies. It also discusses the implications of marijuana legalization on mental health services, health education, and public policy.

Rojas, Andrea S. Marijuana. [Electronic Resource] : Uses, Effects and the Law. Nova Science Publishers, 2011.EBSCOhost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat07712a&AN=flc.234873&site=eds-live.

In this book, Rojas examines the uses, effects, and the laws surrounding marijuana use in the United States and other parts of the world. She first notes it’s medicinal issues, but then writes about marijuana use and it’s a correlation with developing schizophrenia, especially in those suffering from mental health issues. Rojas raises concerns about the increasing potency of cannabis and less safe ways of cannabis consumption coupled with increased rates of cannabis misuse disorders. She clarified that cannabis misuse disorders are characterized by consumption/smoking methods and purchasing habits. Rojas also considers cannabis use and adolescents, when she writes that in societies where marijuana use is heavily dissuaded, teenagers are more likely to abuse marijuana. She uses Italy as an example, where Italian adolescents are among the most likely to consume marijuana in Europe. The book also delves into some of marijuana’s history. It is noted that Cannabis sativa was one of the first plants cultivated by man and was used to great a plethora of illnesses and was used by adherents of some religions. Rojas then lists the many physical effects involved with marijuana consumption, including dry mouth, tachycardia, and psychomotor retardation. It is worth noting that all of these effects normally subside after coming down. She also lists psychological effects like anxiety, drowsiness, and depression which also normally subside. Rojos writes that there is no pharmacological treatment for marijuana misuse disorders and that psychosocial interventions are of great importance in the treatment of marijuana misuse.

Rowe, Peter. “For Moms Fighting against Drug Policies, a New Year’s Resolution.” San Diego Union-Tribune, The (CA), 5 Jan. 2018. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=2W61287194246&site=eds-live.

This article raises many arguments contrary to common beliefs held by parents. Rowe, the author interviewed Gretchen Burns Bergman, a mother, and co-founder of A New Path (Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing). Bergman argues that the War on Drugs is destroying families. This is the case in many communities of color across the United States. In these communities, people of color are far more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, despite white people using drugs at the same rates. Drug laws and disproportionate policing been detrimental to communities of color because even misdemeanor drug offenses can impact employment, which in turn affects economic mobility and security. This has only exacerbated poverty seen in many communities of color caused by hundreds of years of systemic racism and oppression. Bergman claims we need a therapeutic, rather than punitive, approach to drug treatments. She also calls against “zero tolerance” policies and schools in workplaces, saying that that they become a pipeline to prison. She claims zero-tolerance programs should be reoriented away from punishment, and instead focus on treatment for substance abuse. As a society, we need to decide if we would rather help and uplift struggling communities, or just expand our nation’s already massive prison population. Bergman also provides some anecdotal evidence as to why zero-tolerance policies are so bad. She states that her son fell into heroin addiction after being arrested for possession of marijuana when he learned how to shoot heroin behind bars. Many see prison as a cure-all for the delinquent, struggling members of society, but this is not the case.

Vasquez, Margie. Marijuana : Medical Uses, Regulations and Legal Issues. Nova Science Publishers, Inc, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1226236&site=eds-live.

In this book, Vasquez takes a pretty in-depth look at the medical uses, regulations, and legal issues surrounding marijuana. She first gives the reader some background information about cannabis Sativa and how it works in the brain. She also explains that according to Achievement Motivation Surveys and results on the Apathy Evaluation Scale, that marijuana use has no significant impact on one's motivation, which is contrary to popular belief. Many perceive marijuana users as lazy and not motivated. She then dismantled the DEA’s argument that marijuana has no medical use. She states that studies have shown that marijuana can control chronic pain, nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy, wasting syndrome associated with AIDS, and a plethora of other health conditions. Vazquez also notes that the studies showed that the alleviating benefits outweighed any negative side effects of the drug. She also makes the point that patients have a right to all beneficial treatments and it is a violation of human rights to deny them. The long term effects of marijuana consumption are becoming more of a concern as more and more states legalize the drug. However, federal laws restrict research into marijuana, so there is a huge deficit in information regarding its long term effects. Vazquez states that some studies show a risk of long term cognitive marijuana impairment while other studies show no correlation between marijuana use and mental and physical difficulties later in adulthood. Regardless, more research needs to be done. The federal government needs to change the laws just so the medical community can effectively research its effects, so we can create more, just laws surrounding the drug.

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kroccies · 5 years

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3 Smoking Smoking Everyone knows that smoking is harmful to health. However, every smoker thinks that the consequences of smoking will not affect him, and he lives today, not thinking about the diseases that will inevitably appear in him in 10-20 years. It is known that sooner or later you will have to pay for each bad habit with your health. Smoking is associated with up to 90% of mortality from lung cancer, 75% of bronchitis and 25% of coronary heart disease among men under 65 years of age. Smoking or passive inhalation of tobacco smoke can cause infertility in women. Atrophy and destruction of the white matter of the brain and spinal cord with multiple sclerosis is more pronounced in patients who smoked at least 6 months during their life compared to never smoked patients.Tobacco addiction can be either psychological or physical. With psychological dependence, a person reaches for a cigarette when he is in a smoking company, or in a state of stress, nervous tension, to stimulate mental activity. With physical dependence, the body’s demand for a nicotine dose is so strong that the smoker’s attention is focused on finding a cigarette; the idea of smoking becomes so obsessive that most other needs go by the wayside. It becomes impossible to concentrate on anything other than a cigarette; apathy and unwillingness to do something may occur.2 Alcohol Alcohol Alcohol is present in almost every person’s life. Someone drinks only on holidays, someone likes to relax with a drink of alcohol on the weekend, and someone abuses the alcoholic constantly. Under the influence of ethanol, which is found in alcoholic beverages, everything collapses, primarily the nervous and cardiovascular systems. Weak muscles, blood clots in the vessels, diabetes, a shrunken brain, a swollen liver, weakened kidneys, impotence, depression, a stomach ulcer are just a partial list of what you can get from regular beer consumption or something stronger. Any portion of alcohol is a blow to the intellect, to health, to the future.A bottle of vodka drunk in an hour can kill you on the spot, in the literal sense. Next time, before you drink 100 grams, imagine your body dying slowly under the influence of ethanol while you have fun. Imagine that your cells are slowly suffocating, that the brain, saving itself, blocks a lot of brain centers, because of which there is incoherent speech, violation of spatial sensation, impaired coordination of movements and memory lapses. Imagine how your blood thickens, forms deadly blood clots, how the blood sugar level goes off scale, how the brain structures responsible for intelligence and quickness die, how alcohol burns through the walls of the stomach, forming non-healing ulcers.1 Drugs Drugs The use of drugs leads to severe violations, primarily the mental and physical functions of the body. In modern society, few people do not know about the dangers of drugs, but, despite this, they still attract people, becoming destructive for many. People who use drugs have insomnia, dry mucous membranes, nasal congestion, trembling hands, and the pupils become unusually wide, not responding to changes in the brightness of the eyes.A drug is poison, it slowly destroys the human brain, its psyche. They either die from a broken heart, or because their nasal septum becomes thinner, which leads to fatal bleeding. When using, for example, LSD, a person loses the ability to navigate in space, he has a feeling that he is able to fly and, having believed in his abilities, jumps from the top floor. All addicts do not live long, regardless of the type of drug used. They lose the instinct of self-preservation, which leads to the fact that about 60% of drug addicts, during the first two years after becoming familiar with drugs, attempt suicide. Many of them succeed.12 most bad habits of man Bad habits prevent a person from successfully realizing himself as a person. Most of these habits negatively affect either a person with such a habit, or people around him. In any case, you need to try to cope with this problem as quickly and efficiently as possible so that it never again bothers you or those around you. In this ranking, we will talk about the most harmful habits and addictions.

12 Profanity Profanity To some, profanity may not seem like such a bad habit, but just an element of the language, which has recently been used by more and more people. Even on the airs of many programs you can hear the “kick” of the mat. Using obscene language not only shows disrespect for those present, but can also become a habit when obscene words slip through every 5-6 words. Such behavior is unacceptable in a cultural society, and even more so in the presence of children who repeat everything after adults.

11 Coffeemania Coffeemania Coffee is a very popular and beloved drink by many, but its frequent use can also be called a bad habit. Coffee is able to exacerbate hypertension, some gastrointestinal diseases, is absolutely unacceptable in most cardiovascular diseases and with damage to the retina. But all this is true only when coffee is clearly overdoing it. You definitely can’t drink coffee with alcohol and mixed with tobacco smoke. This is a big hit for the cardiovascular system. In general, as with any other meal, coffee should not be overdone. Everything is good in moderation.

10 lack of sleep Lack of sleep Sleep is a vital necessity. Its absence leads to serious health problems. Symptoms of lack of sleep can be: dark circles under the eyes, slight swelling of the face and loss of skin tone throughout the body, the occurrence of unjustified irritability, low concentration and distraction. There may also be a jump in blood pressure, a fast heartbeat, loss of appetite and stomach problems. A person completely loses an adequate reaction to what is happening around. The protective function of the body is weakened, a delayed reaction to external factors occurs, which provokes low productivity. Gastritis, stomach ulcer, hypertension, and sometimes even obesity - these are companions of those who are forced to stay awake for a long time.

9 Diets Diets The harm to diets lies in the fact that after sitting for some time on them, the body will restructure its work and slow down metabolism, and when a person starts eating again, fat is deposited not only where it was before, but also in new places, in organs, which harm them . It happens that a person goes on a diet without taking into account his health, than he harms his body. Due to the constant changes in the body, the functioning of the heart, joints and the immune system can suffer from our nutrition. Often, because of diets, spending money on foods and time on their preparation increases. In terms of psychological stress, diets are also very harmful. Possible suffering from failure, the associated feelings of guilt and shame, the pain inflicted by ridicule by colleagues and family, the feeling of weakness, inability to pull myself together. All this is difficult to experience and sometimes leads to depression to a greater extent than the very presence of excess weight and the associated inconvenience.

8 Uncontrolled use of drugs Uncontrolled use of drugs More than 30 thousand people die of various resistant diseases every year. The unreasonable use of antibiotics leads to an increase in mortality, as the number of severe forms and complications of infectious diseases increases due to the developed resistance of microorganisms to antimicrobials. In fact, antibiotics simply lose their effectiveness. For example, at the beginning of the antibiotic era, a steptococcal infection was treated with penicillin. And now streptococci have an enzyme that decomposes penicillin. If earlier it was possible to get rid of some diseases with a single injection, now a long course of treatment is required. Disease resistance to antibiotics is due to the fact that these drugs are affordable and cheap, sold over the counter. Therefore, many people buy antibiotics and take them for any infection.

Many interrupt the course of treatment prescribed by the doctor immediately after the symptoms are removed, and those microorganisms that have become resistant to these antibiotics remain in the body. These germs will multiply rapidly and pass on their antibiotic resistance genes. Another negative side of the uncontrolled use of antibiotics is the rampant growth of fungal infections. Since drugs suppress the body’s natural microflora, those infections that our immunity had previously not allowed to multiply begin to rampage. 7 Internet addiction and computer games Internet addiction and computer games Computer addiction is a broad term for a large number of behavioral and drive control problems. The main types that were identified in the research process are characterized as follows: an irresistible attraction to visit porn sites and engage in cybersex, addiction to virtual acquaintances and redundancy of acquaintances and friends on the Web, playing online gambling and constant purchases or participating in auctions, endless travels on the web in search of information, an obsessive game of computer games.Gambling may seem like a bad habit for adolescents, but it is not. Adults are equally affected. Network reality allows you to simulate a creative state due to the limitless possibilities of searching and making discoveries. And most importantly, surfing the net gives you the feeling of being in a “stream” - complete immersion in action, turning off from external reality with the feeling of being in another world, another time, another dimension. Since there is no official diagnosis of computer addiction, the criteria for its treatment have not yet been sufficiently developed.6 Gambling gambling addiction This disease is associated with addiction to all kinds of gambling, such as casinos, slot machines, cards and interactive games. Gambling can manifest itself as a disease and, which happens much more often, as one of the symptoms of another mental illness: depression, manic states, even schizophrenia. The main symptoms of gambling addiction are an obsessive desire to constantly play. It is impossible to distract a person from the game, more often than not he forgets to eat elementary, becomes closed. The circle of communication is sharply reduced, and changes almost completely, and human behavior is changing, moreover, not for the better. Often there are all kinds of mental disorders. Usually, initially a person experiences a sensation of an upsurge of strength, later they are replaced by terrible depression and decadent moods. The disease of gambling, as well as other diseases, is treatable. Although getting rid of it is incredibly difficult. This may take even years. After all, gambling has a similar psychological nature to smoking.5 promiscuous sex life Promiscuous sex life Some men and women are not at all ashamed of having a sex life, so they, by all means, try to get sensual pleasure, having sex with different partners. One researcher, studying the sexuality of adolescents, noted that in personal conversations with many adolescents who have an erratic sex life, it turned out that, in their opinion, they live without a goal and are not very happy with themselves. In addition, he found that promiscuous young people suffer from “self-doubt and lack of self-esteem” the next morning. Often, those who have entered into an unlawful sexual relationship change their relationship to each other. The young man may find that his feelings for the girl are somewhat cooler and she is not even as attractive as he thought. In turn, a girl may have a feeling that she was treated as a thing.Promiscuous sex life is often the cause of sexually transmitted diseases. The vast majority of patients become infected as a result of their own sexual licentiousness, entering into casual sexual relations, promiscuous sexual life, that is, in violation of the established norms of socialist morality. As a rule, a person prone to premarital and extramarital sex, is not demanding of himself in other respects: he abuses alcohol, is selfish, is indifferent to the fate of his relatives and to the work performed.4 Malnutrition and gluttony Malnutrition and gluttony For many people, overeating is a real problem. In severe food dependence, the advice of a nutritionist is sometimes not enough, the support of a psychologist, the supervision of a therapist, an endocrinologist and other specialists are required. The causes of overeating are often difficult to identify and diagnose. Overeating leads to the fact that all organs and systems are overstrained. This leads to their wear and provokes the development of various diseases. Overeating and gluttony always turns into problems of the gastrointestinal tract. Overeating inevitably affects the condition of the skin, on which acne, blackheads appear. Needless to say, the overeating person is useless not only for those around him, but also for himself. As a result, the desire to move, to talk disappears. There can be no talk of any sport. I just want to go to bed and nothing more. 3 Smoking Smoking Everyone knows that smoking is harmful to health. However, every smoker thinks that the consequences of smoking will not affect him, and he lives today, not thinking about the diseases that will inevitably appear in him in 10-20 years. It is known that sooner or later you will have to pay for each bad habit with your health. Smoking is associated with up to 90% of mortality from lung cancer, 75% of bronchitis and 25% of coronary heart disease among men under 65 years of age. Smoking or passive inhalation of tobacco smoke can cause infertility in women. Atrophy and destruction of the white matter of the brain and spinal cord with multiple sclerosis is more pronounced in patients who smoked at least 6 months during their life compared to never smoked patients.Tobacco addiction can be either psychological or physical. With psychological dependence, a person reaches for a cigarette when he is in a smoking company, or in a state of stress, nervous tension, to stimulate mental activity. With physical dependence, the body’s demand for a nicotine dose is so strong that the smoker’s attention is focused on finding a cigarette; the idea of smoking becomes so obsessive that most other needs go by the wayside. It becomes impossible to concentrate on anything other than a cigarette; apathy and unwillingness to do something may occur.2 Alcohol Alcohol Alcohol is present in almost every person’s life. Someone drinks only on holidays, someone likes to relax with a drink of alcohol on the weekend, and someone abuses the alcoholic constantly. Under the influence of ethanol, which is found in alcoholic beverages, everything collapses, primarily the nervous and cardiovascular systems. Weak muscles, blood clots in the vessels, diabetes, a shrunken brain, a swollen liver, weakened kidneys, impotence, depression, a stomach ulcer are just a partial list of what you can get from regular beer consumption or something stronger. Any portion of alcohol is a blow to the intellect, to health, to the future.A bottle of vodka drunk in an hour can kill you on the spot, in the literal sense. Next time, before you drink 100 grams, imagine your body dying slowly under the influence of ethanol while you have fun. Imagine that your cells are slowly suffocating, that the brain, saving itself, blocks a lot of brain centers, because of which there is incoherent speech, violation of spatial sensation, impaired coordination of movements and memory lapses. Imagine how your blood thickens, forms deadly blood clots, how the blood sugar level goes off scale, how the brain structures responsible for intelligence and quickness die, how alcohol burns through the walls of the stomach, forming non-healing ulcers.1 Drugs Drugs The use of drugs leads to severe violations, primarily the mental and physical functions of the body. In modern society, few people do not know about the dangers of drugs, but, despite this, they still attract people, becoming destructive for many. People who use drugs have insomnia, dry mucous membranes, nasal congestion, trembling hands, and the pupils become unusually wide, not responding to changes in the brightness of the eyes.A drug is poison, it slowly destroys the human brain, its psyche. They either die from a broken heart, or because their nasal septum becomes thinner, which leads to fatal bleeding. When using, for example, LSD, a person loses the ability to navigate in space, he has a feeling that he is able to fly and, having believed in his abilities, jumps from the top floor. All addicts do not live long, regardless of the type of drug used. They lose the instinct of self-preservation, which leads to the fact that about 60% of drug addicts, during the first two years after becoming familiar with drugs, attempt suicide. Many of them succeed.

0 notes