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Although the pharmacology of isoergine (and even ergine itself) is not well studied, in other lysergic acid amides the iso epimers are generally inactive, at least when compared to the normal amides. Therefore, I still believe that ergine must be the species active at the receptor, but if the ergine/isoergine equilibration can occur at body pH and temp, then ergine could be generated in the brain from isoergine. This may be a key point, and you should go back and look at the Tetrahedron paper where they apparently did some kinetics on the process.
Thus, I think that isoergine would lack pharmacological effects. But… there is another factor to consider. Absorption and partitioning through the body and into the brain only occurs with the unprotonated forms of alkaloids. That is, ergine is an alkaloid that will be protonated, or charged, at body pH. As such, before it can be absorbed from the gut or cross into the brain, it must lose its charge, or give up its proton. In the uncharged form it will readily cross into the brain, but this fraction is relatively small, perhaps only a few percent of the total.
Because of the ability of the amide of the D-ring of isoergine to form a stabilizing hydrogen bond to the amine nitrogen, it can deprotonate very easily at body pH, giving a neutral species that will have a very high lipid solubility. The intramolecular hydrogen compensates for the energy cost of deprotonation and desolvation. Using semiempirical methods, I calculated the length of this hydrogen bond to be about 2.65 Angstroms. Somewhat long, but reasonable. The work you cite in Tetrahedron could be used for parallel discussion, but I don't have the paper here. The consequence of the hydrogen bond is that isoergine will be absorbed much more readily than ergine, and will penetrate the brain to a greater extent than ergine. Once inside the brain, however, facile epimerization of isoergine will lead back to an equilibrium that contains ergine, which is most likely the form of the molecule that I believe is active at the receptor. Importantly, however, I think the concentration of ergine could be much higher than if ergine itself was taken, IF epimerization of isoergine back to ergine can occur at physiological conditions. Thus, at the brain receptor where ergine acts, a much higher concentration will be achieved than if ergine had been administered originally. If isoergine did have significant pharmacological activity, something which I doubt, but without evidence, it could be there in pretty high concentration, compared to what would be there after pure ergine administration. So, the question is: if isoergine is placed in pH 7.4 at 37 degrees C, will a significant amount of ergine arise by epimerization in a reasonable amount of time?
This process is completely analogous to the proposal by G.P. Migliaccio, T.-L.N. Shieh, S.R. Byrn, B.A. Hathaway and D.E. Nichols, "Comparison of Solution Conformational Preferences for the Hallucinogens Bufotenin and Psilocin using 360 MHz Proton NMR Spectroscopy";, J. Med. Chem. 24, 206-209 (1981) to explain the high lipid solubility of psilocin, compared to bufotenin. In that paper, the authors proposed that an intramolecular hydrogen bond forms between the 4-hydroxy group of psilocin and the side chain amino group, providing enhanced penetration into the brain. Similarly, in isoergine, the hydrogen bond between the amide hydrogen and the unprotonated basic amine provides a very lipid-soluble, neutral substance that can easily be absorbed and penetrate into the brain. In pharmaceutical terms, we could consider that the "bioavailability" of isoergine would be much higher than that of ergine, following oral administration.
David Nichols - LSD Symposium transcripts? Posted here.
Thus, I think that isoergine would lack pharmacological effects. But… there is another factor to consider. Absorption and partitioning through the body and into the brain only occurs with the unprotonated forms of alkaloids. That is, ergine is an alkaloid that will be protonated, or charged, at body pH. As such, before it can be absorbed from the gut or cross into the brain, it must lose its charge, or give up its proton. In the uncharged form it will readily cross into the brain, but this fraction is relatively small, perhaps only a few percent of the total.
Because of the ability of the amide of the D-ring of isoergine to form a stabilizing hydrogen bond to the amine nitrogen, it can deprotonate very easily at body pH, giving a neutral species that will have a very high lipid solubility. The intramolecular hydrogen compensates for the energy cost of deprotonation and desolvation. Using semiempirical methods, I calculated the length of this hydrogen bond to be about 2.65 Angstroms. Somewhat long, but reasonable. The work you cite in Tetrahedron could be used for parallel discussion, but I don't have the paper here. The consequence of the hydrogen bond is that isoergine will be absorbed much more readily than ergine, and will penetrate the brain to a greater extent than ergine. Once inside the brain, however, facile epimerization of isoergine will lead back to an equilibrium that contains ergine, which is most likely the form of the molecule that I believe is active at the receptor. Importantly, however, I think the concentration of ergine could be much higher than if ergine itself was taken, IF epimerization of isoergine back to ergine can occur at physiological conditions. Thus, at the brain receptor where ergine acts, a much higher concentration will be achieved than if ergine had been administered originally. If isoergine did have significant pharmacological activity, something which I doubt, but without evidence, it could be there in pretty high concentration, compared to what would be there after pure ergine administration. So, the question is: if isoergine is placed in pH 7.4 at 37 degrees C, will a significant amount of ergine arise by epimerization in a reasonable amount of time?
This process is completely analogous to the proposal by G.P. Migliaccio, T.-L.N. Shieh, S.R. Byrn, B.A. Hathaway and D.E. Nichols, "Comparison of Solution Conformational Preferences for the Hallucinogens Bufotenin and Psilocin using 360 MHz Proton NMR Spectroscopy";, J. Med. Chem. 24, 206-209 (1981) to explain the high lipid solubility of psilocin, compared to bufotenin. In that paper, the authors proposed that an intramolecular hydrogen bond forms between the 4-hydroxy group of psilocin and the side chain amino group, providing enhanced penetration into the brain. Similarly, in isoergine, the hydrogen bond between the amide hydrogen and the unprotonated basic amine provides a very lipid-soluble, neutral substance that can easily be absorbed and penetrate into the brain. In pharmaceutical terms, we could consider that the "bioavailability" of isoergine would be much higher than that of ergine, following oral administration.
David Nichols - LSD Symposium transcripts? Posted here.
For some reason, I have this on a piece of paper.
30.04.2005: Joined Bluelight
21.04.2006: Mod of New Member Introductions
03.01.2007: Mod of EADD
17.04.2007: Left staff of EADD
05.11.2007: Left Staff of NMI
06.11.2007: Mod of Support
01.12.2007: Senior Mod (Support)
09.04.2009: Administrator
25.04.2011: Bluelight Crew
10.01.2012: Administrator
23.03.2012: Bluelight Crew
30.04.2005: Joined Bluelight
21.04.2006: Mod of New Member Introductions
03.01.2007: Mod of EADD
17.04.2007: Left staff of EADD
05.11.2007: Left Staff of NMI
06.11.2007: Mod of Support
01.12.2007: Senior Mod (Support)
09.04.2009: Administrator
25.04.2011: Bluelight Crew
10.01.2012: Administrator
23.03.2012: Bluelight Crew
Metro continued
Just before the subway entrance sits a teenaged girl, her head bowed in grief, her hair dangling confused and greasy, her arms holding her knees. In her lap, asleep, is a baby. It's wrapped in a soiled blanket. She sits on the dirty sidewalk, and next to her is a paper cup. In that little cup people drop money.
"Madonna with child" - as I wait for my assistant to arrive, many people passing give her money. They're doing the "Right Thing," helping people less fortunate. Many look emotionally relieved as they make their offerings, like they have been given a blessing. They're nice people unlike me or you. They will give the needy the shirts off their backs.
I've passed by the beggar girl for a month. I did not give her money. The operation is a scam. Every thing about her has been carefully engineered to arouse sympathy, guilt, and maybe even shame in the casual passer-by. In other words, she is a Mendicant, a highly skilled professional beggar. I know dozens like her by sight. It is interesting to watch them in action. They always wear the same dirty, ragged clothes. They always have body odor. They hold out a paper cup that only has a few copper coins on the bottom. People are always giving them money. And food, even to the fat beggars, and many are very fat, but people don't have common sense. This isn't Ethiopia in a famine.
Sometimes this particular girl has a baby. Sometimes a different older baby. Sometimes toddlers are with her. There are many more beggars like her. It seems like there is a child-beggar (who would normally be in high school or college ) on every street corner in the touristic areas.
There have been reports and criminal investigations into this. Picture Hell's Angels but with slavery and child abuse. The beggar business is operated by gangs who own luxery properties and expensive cars in Romania. The babies serve as props. A link has been reported between child trafficking and child begging. There are reports of child mutilation for the purpose of pity donations.
One man controls a large number of beggars in an area. He assigns each one a busy spot to work. He makes his rounds, collecting their earnings several times per day, and handing them their lunch, snacks, supper, etc.
I've watched them work - the child beggars working alone and women with or without a real baby (sometiems it's a fake baby, or if it's a real child, they rent babies by the day for this purpose, the baby appears to me to be unnaturally sleepy - reportedly drugged with heroin or fed cough syrup. Some are very aggressive and follow, push, and grab people (I assume as a ruse to distract them so they can pick pocket them, but I haven't actually seen them stick their hand in somebody's pocket. However, 1000s of people report being pickpocketed here each year).
Not only that, but when they are on a break from their begging, I have watched them brazenly steal things from shops.
I notice the beggar girl keeps emptying the cup into her pockets so only a few copper pieces are on the bottom for display. Although it was late morning and not so busy, within the 15 minutes I waited, about 20 people gave her money. Most were coins and some were cash. The smallest denomination of the Euro is a €5 note. So, she earned a minimum of 20€ in 15 minutes. And this is during a slow period after the morning rush hour and before the lunch rush. You can do the math. If she sits there long enough, all day, every day, and she does.....
Finally, my assistant Claudia arrives and we walk passed the beggar girl. She rattles the cup at us, " Please Monsier, My baby is hungry. Please..." Her voice trails away as we approach the stairs leading into the underground network of tunnels, trains, and rooms that make up the Metro. Somewhere down there, it connects to sewers, crypts, quarries, basements, caves, and catacombs. 6.1 million people ride the Metro each day. Paris has a population of more than 12 million people.
My boss asked me if Id every taken one before. I said, "a few times in San Francisco." San Fran has its own subway (BART).(, train, trolley, and bus systems but I've used them only a few times during emergencies). I might have written about one of those times on here a few years ago.
At the top of the stairs, I hesitated, breathing in what might be my last breath of fresh air for a long time. I usually walk or take a bicycle. My boss and Claudia walked down first. Dozens of people were going in and out. I finally felt hyperventilated and held a long deep breath and made a few hesitant steps down and was blassted by a stream of wet air. I cheated and sniffed a little without inhaling. It smelled like a melange of arm pits, strong perfume, crotches, cigarette smoke, shit, the chemical odors of scented soaps and body wash, and laundry detergent, rancid piss, puke. And it was so hot that it amplified the stench. I could see and feel the swarming clouds of airborne microorganisms germs and specks of filth getting into my lungs. Or maybe they were the black spots from oxygen deprivation.
I followed them down the stairs.
Just before the subway entrance sits a teenaged girl, her head bowed in grief, her hair dangling confused and greasy, her arms holding her knees. In her lap, asleep, is a baby. It's wrapped in a soiled blanket. She sits on the dirty sidewalk, and next to her is a paper cup. In that little cup people drop money.
"Madonna with child" - as I wait for my assistant to arrive, many people passing give her money. They're doing the "Right Thing," helping people less fortunate. Many look emotionally relieved as they make their offerings, like they have been given a blessing. They're nice people unlike me or you. They will give the needy the shirts off their backs.
I've passed by the beggar girl for a month. I did not give her money. The operation is a scam. Every thing about her has been carefully engineered to arouse sympathy, guilt, and maybe even shame in the casual passer-by. In other words, she is a Mendicant, a highly skilled professional beggar. I know dozens like her by sight. It is interesting to watch them in action. They always wear the same dirty, ragged clothes. They always have body odor. They hold out a paper cup that only has a few copper coins on the bottom. People are always giving them money. And food, even to the fat beggars, and many are very fat, but people don't have common sense. This isn't Ethiopia in a famine.
Sometimes this particular girl has a baby. Sometimes a different older baby. Sometimes toddlers are with her. There are many more beggars like her. It seems like there is a child-beggar (who would normally be in high school or college ) on every street corner in the touristic areas.
There have been reports and criminal investigations into this. Picture Hell's Angels but with slavery and child abuse. The beggar business is operated by gangs who own luxery properties and expensive cars in Romania. The babies serve as props. A link has been reported between child trafficking and child begging. There are reports of child mutilation for the purpose of pity donations.
One man controls a large number of beggars in an area. He assigns each one a busy spot to work. He makes his rounds, collecting their earnings several times per day, and handing them their lunch, snacks, supper, etc.
I've watched them work - the child beggars working alone and women with or without a real baby (sometiems it's a fake baby, or if it's a real child, they rent babies by the day for this purpose, the baby appears to me to be unnaturally sleepy - reportedly drugged with heroin or fed cough syrup. Some are very aggressive and follow, push, and grab people (I assume as a ruse to distract them so they can pick pocket them, but I haven't actually seen them stick their hand in somebody's pocket. However, 1000s of people report being pickpocketed here each year).
Not only that, but when they are on a break from their begging, I have watched them brazenly steal things from shops.
I notice the beggar girl keeps emptying the cup into her pockets so only a few copper pieces are on the bottom for display. Although it was late morning and not so busy, within the 15 minutes I waited, about 20 people gave her money. Most were coins and some were cash. The smallest denomination of the Euro is a €5 note. So, she earned a minimum of 20€ in 15 minutes. And this is during a slow period after the morning rush hour and before the lunch rush. You can do the math. If she sits there long enough, all day, every day, and she does.....
Finally, my assistant Claudia arrives and we walk passed the beggar girl. She rattles the cup at us, " Please Monsier, My baby is hungry. Please..." Her voice trails away as we approach the stairs leading into the underground network of tunnels, trains, and rooms that make up the Metro. Somewhere down there, it connects to sewers, crypts, quarries, basements, caves, and catacombs. 6.1 million people ride the Metro each day. Paris has a population of more than 12 million people.
My boss asked me if Id every taken one before. I said, "a few times in San Francisco." San Fran has its own subway (BART).(, train, trolley, and bus systems but I've used them only a few times during emergencies). I might have written about one of those times on here a few years ago.
At the top of the stairs, I hesitated, breathing in what might be my last breath of fresh air for a long time. I usually walk or take a bicycle. My boss and Claudia walked down first. Dozens of people were going in and out. I finally felt hyperventilated and held a long deep breath and made a few hesitant steps down and was blassted by a stream of wet air. I cheated and sniffed a little without inhaling. It smelled like a melange of arm pits, strong perfume, crotches, cigarette smoke, shit, the chemical odors of scented soaps and body wash, and laundry detergent, rancid piss, puke. And it was so hot that it amplified the stench. I could see and feel the swarming clouds of airborne microorganisms germs and specks of filth getting into my lungs. Or maybe they were the black spots from oxygen deprivation.
I followed them down the stairs.
Upon Waking
(It comes in softly, like morning light bleeding through a thin curtain, like night a pale lavender stain spreading into the sky, more perception than sight. And like illumination, or darkness, the world transforms around me but I feel heavy and unmovable. Maybe this is depression. I call it sadness because I want to cry and sometimes manage to. Sadness implies something contained within but this feels bigger, a vast wilderness. I find myself yearning for Ecuador.)
Memory: There is a bus on a winding mountain highway. I’m inside it, expected to get off because I rang the bell. Yesterday I must have bought a ticket, made this much of a plan. No one says a word—neither the bemused driver nor the sleepy passengers., No one asks where I am going, why I wanted to get off this far from town, no one obvious out there to greet me. Just me stepping off into the empty world with a few irrelevant belongings.
I want to sit down so I do. The bus heaves back out onto the black road, growing smaller like a leaf floating off down a river. Now it is just me and a dry wind. A huge sob wells up in me but at least there is no movie playing in my head. The sob seems completely unattached to anything and it floats off and now I am just sitting again. I couldn’t think if I wanted to and that is a relief.
I want to take my sandals off and let my feet touch the dust. I occupy a good amount of time picking lint out of the Velcro straps and then a few stray fears start buzzing around my head like gnats. Why did I get off the bus? What if the town is farther than I thought? What if it gets dark? What if someone is watching me?
I remember reading about Anne Frank’s father, how he and two of the Dutch helpers were the only ones to survive; how he didn’t know that yet when he returned to the city hoping to find at least his daughters. How do you go on into such ruin? Will I always live in this shattered world now? Will darkness and light keep up their incessant conversation around me as if I am not here?
Something is keeping me alive. I don’t have thoughts of death, only exhaustion. I feel like I have to keep moving every day in order to not succumb to this fatigue. I wonder what it would be like to have someone say, “I will take care of you. You can lie down as long as you want. You never have to get up again if you don’t want to.” That fantasy gives me a lot of comfort. I am probably just here to pretend that I can have that. No expectations. No responsibilities. No need to think or act. Just feel. Blessed land of pilgrimage, my heart trudging beside me like a burro, shouldering all the burden without complaint. Buying random bus tickets with my dwindling money, finding a bed, washing my underwear in sinks. Exquisite little happiness to find it dry in the morning.
(It comes in softly, like morning light bleeding through a thin curtain, like night a pale lavender stain spreading into the sky, more perception than sight. And like illumination, or darkness, the world transforms around me but I feel heavy and unmovable. Maybe this is depression. I call it sadness because I want to cry and sometimes manage to. Sadness implies something contained within but this feels bigger, a vast wilderness. I find myself yearning for Ecuador.)
Memory: There is a bus on a winding mountain highway. I’m inside it, expected to get off because I rang the bell. Yesterday I must have bought a ticket, made this much of a plan. No one says a word—neither the bemused driver nor the sleepy passengers., No one asks where I am going, why I wanted to get off this far from town, no one obvious out there to greet me. Just me stepping off into the empty world with a few irrelevant belongings.
I want to sit down so I do. The bus heaves back out onto the black road, growing smaller like a leaf floating off down a river. Now it is just me and a dry wind. A huge sob wells up in me but at least there is no movie playing in my head. The sob seems completely unattached to anything and it floats off and now I am just sitting again. I couldn’t think if I wanted to and that is a relief.
I want to take my sandals off and let my feet touch the dust. I occupy a good amount of time picking lint out of the Velcro straps and then a few stray fears start buzzing around my head like gnats. Why did I get off the bus? What if the town is farther than I thought? What if it gets dark? What if someone is watching me?
I remember reading about Anne Frank’s father, how he and two of the Dutch helpers were the only ones to survive; how he didn’t know that yet when he returned to the city hoping to find at least his daughters. How do you go on into such ruin? Will I always live in this shattered world now? Will darkness and light keep up their incessant conversation around me as if I am not here?
Something is keeping me alive. I don’t have thoughts of death, only exhaustion. I feel like I have to keep moving every day in order to not succumb to this fatigue. I wonder what it would be like to have someone say, “I will take care of you. You can lie down as long as you want. You never have to get up again if you don’t want to.” That fantasy gives me a lot of comfort. I am probably just here to pretend that I can have that. No expectations. No responsibilities. No need to think or act. Just feel. Blessed land of pilgrimage, my heart trudging beside me like a burro, shouldering all the burden without complaint. Buying random bus tickets with my dwindling money, finding a bed, washing my underwear in sinks. Exquisite little happiness to find it dry in the morning.
If you would care to take a listen...
Lead You On is an incredibly intense song about the fuckshit misery life that = heroin addiction.
"But my life has passed another year,
Why the FUCK is you in it?"
Every time I play this song at the parties, my drug family joins in, and we all sing it together with varying degrees of emotion. We just can't help but sing along; it's our anthem. One person occasionally starts crying. Spits out angry verses.
Music holds power over us all. It has the ability to make us regret what we've done, and what we're doing...
I still fucking hate myself when I hear this song. But I always turn the volume up.
Lead You On is an incredibly intense song about the fuckshit misery life that = heroin addiction.
"But my life has passed another year,
Why the FUCK is you in it?"
Every time I play this song at the parties, my drug family joins in, and we all sing it together with varying degrees of emotion. We just can't help but sing along; it's our anthem. One person occasionally starts crying. Spits out angry verses.
Music holds power over us all. It has the ability to make us regret what we've done, and what we're doing...
I still fucking hate myself when I hear this song. But I always turn the volume up.
The hungry baby scam is vary common. Today in Europe, the Mendicant's Guild (probably not the real name, but what I will call Gypsie-run criminal organizations. Picture the Hell's Angels but with slavery and child abuse) actually rents out babies by the day as props for professional beggars. They are kept drugged on cough syrup or heroin to make them lie still and not cry for the duration of the beggar's work shift. The best beggars typically earn €1000 or more per day doing this. I am not making this up. I mean, even I have seen the scam first hand.
That reminded me of this one time in South America, this scrawny emaciated girl accosted me in Spanish and asked for money for her baby. She said her baby was hongry. The beggar woman was skin and bones herself. She stood around 5 feet tall and looked like she'd been in a concentration camp with her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, etc. She couldn't weigh more than 50 pounds. She said she was 18 years old, looking at her, I knew she had some kind of problem. I was in a poor country, after all, where there is no social safety net. People really starve to death there. I didn't really believe that she was skinny for lack of money, but I was curious to find out.
I went into a mercado-mart grocery store and bought her a carton of milk and some bread or somethign for her. The next morning, I saw her begging outside of the hostel where I was staying. I asked about her baby, and she said "What? oh yeah, he is OK, come to my house and i will show you." This was all in Spanish, and I had learned Spanish on the fly - I had memorized a list of words and phrases on the airplane that took me there. So basically, I was doing a lot of guessing. Anyway, she looked very happy to see me, smiling and wide eyed. Her whole body vibrated with enthusiasm. Even the extreme dilation of her pupils suggested excitement. She grabbed me by the hand, and very excitedly led me to her house about 100 yards away down an alley. It was actually a motel rooM. I asked about the baby, and she pulled out a bag of cocaine.
In college, I used to enjoy injecting cocaine and even liked to mix it with heroin, but since college, I limit my cocaine use to once a year out of caution and I've lost interest. Heavy use is hard on the body. That and a lot of people seem to let it ruin their lives.
We started doing lines. That was the most pure yayo as she was calling it (Spanish for cocaine) I have ever had. Then she pulled off her shirt. In college, this guy I sometimes shot coke with used to take his pants off after his first shot. No idea why, but it didn't seem sexual. Without a shirt, her body was shockingly emaciated. Her body was like sticks held together with tight skin. I could see the ribs, arm bones, and everything else. Her stomach was sunken concave, and she had the chest of a five year old boy. Not my thing, but we kept doing coke.
We must have done a gram each within a few minutes, and I couldn't feel my face. My tongue was so numb from the drip, i could barely speak. Then this behemoth of a woman waddles out of the bath room and starts talking about prices. She was so fat taht I had a good idea who really ate the food I had bought the night before.
The coke is $20 a gram. The skeletal girl is $50. Then she makes me a cup of coffee. I took a sip. I really didn't want coffee after that coke, but i drink coffee every day and it's a habit so I took a sip. If it's in front of me, i drink it even if I don't crave it. Kind of like cocaine.
Why would somebody make you a cup of coffee when you already have cocaine? She seemed kind of eager that I drink it. I had heard the urban legend about the tourist who goes to a bar in Tiajuana or someplace in Mexico. He meets some friendly people who offer him drinks and get him drunk. Then he blacks out. He wakes up the next day in a bath tub full of ice with note pinned to his chest saying that he needs to go to a hospital because his kidney has been removed. Maybe it was only cocaine induced paranoia, but I jumped up and ran out the door. Skeleton Girl and Jaba the Slut ran outside after me and said she needed money for food for her baby and pay for the coke, etc
I didn't tell that story to my boss, but I said I would be careful. The morning air was chilly but fresh and clean from the rain. We arrived at Metro Luxembourg gate. The entrance is a big downward staircase beyond an open gate on the side walk. Above the gate is a wrought iron sign lettered METRO. The style of the lettering, all of this, looked very sinister. The script looked the same as that of Arbeit Macht Frei, the sign above the gate that leads into Dachau concentration camp. Or maybe Gateway to Hell would have been more appropriate.
That reminded me of this one time in South America, this scrawny emaciated girl accosted me in Spanish and asked for money for her baby. She said her baby was hongry. The beggar woman was skin and bones herself. She stood around 5 feet tall and looked like she'd been in a concentration camp with her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, etc. She couldn't weigh more than 50 pounds. She said she was 18 years old, looking at her, I knew she had some kind of problem. I was in a poor country, after all, where there is no social safety net. People really starve to death there. I didn't really believe that she was skinny for lack of money, but I was curious to find out.
I went into a mercado-mart grocery store and bought her a carton of milk and some bread or somethign for her. The next morning, I saw her begging outside of the hostel where I was staying. I asked about her baby, and she said "What? oh yeah, he is OK, come to my house and i will show you." This was all in Spanish, and I had learned Spanish on the fly - I had memorized a list of words and phrases on the airplane that took me there. So basically, I was doing a lot of guessing. Anyway, she looked very happy to see me, smiling and wide eyed. Her whole body vibrated with enthusiasm. Even the extreme dilation of her pupils suggested excitement. She grabbed me by the hand, and very excitedly led me to her house about 100 yards away down an alley. It was actually a motel rooM. I asked about the baby, and she pulled out a bag of cocaine.
In college, I used to enjoy injecting cocaine and even liked to mix it with heroin, but since college, I limit my cocaine use to once a year out of caution and I've lost interest. Heavy use is hard on the body. That and a lot of people seem to let it ruin their lives.
We started doing lines. That was the most pure yayo as she was calling it (Spanish for cocaine) I have ever had. Then she pulled off her shirt. In college, this guy I sometimes shot coke with used to take his pants off after his first shot. No idea why, but it didn't seem sexual. Without a shirt, her body was shockingly emaciated. Her body was like sticks held together with tight skin. I could see the ribs, arm bones, and everything else. Her stomach was sunken concave, and she had the chest of a five year old boy. Not my thing, but we kept doing coke.
We must have done a gram each within a few minutes, and I couldn't feel my face. My tongue was so numb from the drip, i could barely speak. Then this behemoth of a woman waddles out of the bath room and starts talking about prices. She was so fat taht I had a good idea who really ate the food I had bought the night before.
The coke is $20 a gram. The skeletal girl is $50. Then she makes me a cup of coffee. I took a sip. I really didn't want coffee after that coke, but i drink coffee every day and it's a habit so I took a sip. If it's in front of me, i drink it even if I don't crave it. Kind of like cocaine.
Why would somebody make you a cup of coffee when you already have cocaine? She seemed kind of eager that I drink it. I had heard the urban legend about the tourist who goes to a bar in Tiajuana or someplace in Mexico. He meets some friendly people who offer him drinks and get him drunk. Then he blacks out. He wakes up the next day in a bath tub full of ice with note pinned to his chest saying that he needs to go to a hospital because his kidney has been removed. Maybe it was only cocaine induced paranoia, but I jumped up and ran out the door. Skeleton Girl and Jaba the Slut ran outside after me and said she needed money for food for her baby and pay for the coke, etc
I didn't tell that story to my boss, but I said I would be careful. The morning air was chilly but fresh and clean from the rain. We arrived at Metro Luxembourg gate. The entrance is a big downward staircase beyond an open gate on the side walk. Above the gate is a wrought iron sign lettered METRO. The style of the lettering, all of this, looked very sinister. The script looked the same as that of Arbeit Macht Frei, the sign above the gate that leads into Dachau concentration camp. Or maybe Gateway to Hell would have been more appropriate.
I am writing while at least partially sober for the first time in weeks. This past month has been spent silently screaming at my constant waterfall of druggie debt. When you’re a heroin addict, -$250 in your bank account and no food on the table for a few nights seem like a necessary, damning part of life. I could say I’m done with it, but I’ve said it a thousand times and lit the foil up with no face of remorse half an hour later. I keep thinking that if I keep saying it, it might just come true, and I tell myself that it is not me walking to the gas station for more cash back that I don’t actually have; it is heroin. I also say to myself that I am not the one making the daily trek from convenience store to dealer’s house; that’s the heroin talking.
I write this as a cheap little weed pipe sits next to my computer, almost staring at me, asking me why it’s not accompanied by the $50 black tar bag from the night before last. I know it’s an inanimate object, but I feel that even this mediocre glass piece is judging me for going through a half gram of heroin in less than two days.
Crumpled foil and cached heroin remain on the coffee table. There is residue on all the baggies in my trash can, but I will not dig through the pathetic trenches of what should only be “normal person” banana peels and frozen dinner boxes. Dirty straws, leftover shooting supplies from my needle-loving cohorts, foil with black stains and soot and empty lighters; these comprise my trash collection, tucked neatly among the legal waste.
Listen to me; I’m talking about my trash can.
“Just one time!” Mr. Junkie Acquaintance throws a needle at me. His name is Tony. If he thinks a hit is shit, he’ll say so; “that dude sells the bunkiest of the bunk black, man.” Admittedly, for weeks I could not figure it if “bunk” was supposed to be bad or good. I didn’t waste too much time trying to get the meaning; Tony shot up every substance he found if someone told him it MIGHT be heroin. I’ve been seeing him a lot more lately. When I was buying my $50 bag a couple days ago, he was there trying to convince my dealer/part-time frenemy to trade an expensive stolen camera for a gram of the blackest drug.
“This camera’s worth $500, man. Look at how clear the pictures come out.”
The dealer in question, I’ll call him Donnie, decided to test that claim by taking a few pictures of himself, Tony and me. “Ooooh!!! This is nice!” Donnie said gleefully. Contrary to society lore, dealers are often not the smartest nor the most charismatic; many are simply the most addicted to their drug of choice.
Donnie didn’t take the camera. “I’m not made of black, dude; I’m sorry, but I’m going to bed now, and you’re going to have to go out the back door.” He then gave Tony a few farewell smokes off his tray and banished him to the outside world of No More Drugs.
After Tony left, Donnie turned to his video game console and continued his obsessive quest to be the best alien soldier in America. I took a few hits and then gazed at the dumb television screen. He shared some meth with me as well, so we got really excited and then he talked me into eating pasta with a side of salty chips. Sometimes I wish druggie life could be this easy all the time.
I remember when Donnie tried to pummel me, I remember the time he stalked me home, and I certainly recall his bouts of paranoia that make it hard for anyone to really be friends with him. But he gets at least five visitors a day: sometimes ten, sometimes twenty. They all say they’re his “friends.” I can see that they are not. They want the drugs that hide in the locked room upstairs, and they will do anything to get them.
“Just once! Just one time!” Tony’s teasing stuck in my mind. I recalled that he was there when I attempted to shoot up for the first time with a dirty needle. Only, I was told that I had horrible veins and that it would be a waste even trying on my arms or legs or feet. Whatever. Tony can make fun of me all he wants; he likes to do that. At least I don’t steal cameras and iPods from my rich parents’ cars, pretending to care about them all while snatching another tool for drug collateral. Tony does that, and sometimes I think he’s proud of it. Junkie with a lifeline, junkie with a bloodline, junkie with a direct line to the beyond-prized heroin heaven: valuables. MONEY.
But meh, wouldn't I do the same thing? Probably not.
I write this as a cheap little weed pipe sits next to my computer, almost staring at me, asking me why it’s not accompanied by the $50 black tar bag from the night before last. I know it’s an inanimate object, but I feel that even this mediocre glass piece is judging me for going through a half gram of heroin in less than two days.
Crumpled foil and cached heroin remain on the coffee table. There is residue on all the baggies in my trash can, but I will not dig through the pathetic trenches of what should only be “normal person” banana peels and frozen dinner boxes. Dirty straws, leftover shooting supplies from my needle-loving cohorts, foil with black stains and soot and empty lighters; these comprise my trash collection, tucked neatly among the legal waste.
Listen to me; I’m talking about my trash can.
“Just one time!” Mr. Junkie Acquaintance throws a needle at me. His name is Tony. If he thinks a hit is shit, he’ll say so; “that dude sells the bunkiest of the bunk black, man.” Admittedly, for weeks I could not figure it if “bunk” was supposed to be bad or good. I didn’t waste too much time trying to get the meaning; Tony shot up every substance he found if someone told him it MIGHT be heroin. I’ve been seeing him a lot more lately. When I was buying my $50 bag a couple days ago, he was there trying to convince my dealer/part-time frenemy to trade an expensive stolen camera for a gram of the blackest drug.
“This camera’s worth $500, man. Look at how clear the pictures come out.”
The dealer in question, I’ll call him Donnie, decided to test that claim by taking a few pictures of himself, Tony and me. “Ooooh!!! This is nice!” Donnie said gleefully. Contrary to society lore, dealers are often not the smartest nor the most charismatic; many are simply the most addicted to their drug of choice.
Donnie didn’t take the camera. “I’m not made of black, dude; I’m sorry, but I’m going to bed now, and you’re going to have to go out the back door.” He then gave Tony a few farewell smokes off his tray and banished him to the outside world of No More Drugs.
After Tony left, Donnie turned to his video game console and continued his obsessive quest to be the best alien soldier in America. I took a few hits and then gazed at the dumb television screen. He shared some meth with me as well, so we got really excited and then he talked me into eating pasta with a side of salty chips. Sometimes I wish druggie life could be this easy all the time.
I remember when Donnie tried to pummel me, I remember the time he stalked me home, and I certainly recall his bouts of paranoia that make it hard for anyone to really be friends with him. But he gets at least five visitors a day: sometimes ten, sometimes twenty. They all say they’re his “friends.” I can see that they are not. They want the drugs that hide in the locked room upstairs, and they will do anything to get them.
“Just once! Just one time!” Tony’s teasing stuck in my mind. I recalled that he was there when I attempted to shoot up for the first time with a dirty needle. Only, I was told that I had horrible veins and that it would be a waste even trying on my arms or legs or feet. Whatever. Tony can make fun of me all he wants; he likes to do that. At least I don’t steal cameras and iPods from my rich parents’ cars, pretending to care about them all while snatching another tool for drug collateral. Tony does that, and sometimes I think he’s proud of it. Junkie with a lifeline, junkie with a bloodline, junkie with a direct line to the beyond-prized heroin heaven: valuables. MONEY.
But meh, wouldn't I do the same thing? Probably not.
I recently decided to come back to Bluelight, as my curiosity had been piqued by a number of new research chemicals being offered by vendors across the 'net.
When I signed back in, I didn't expect to receive any messages from people I used to speak to. There are a great number of people here on Bluelight whose company I thoroughly enjoyed, back when I was shoveling benzodiazepines, opiates and alcohol into my bloodstream each day, in as large amounts as I could find.
Still, life has changed a lot in the past five years. I don't think I've changed much, but circumstances have - some for better, some for worse. So, I'd like to hang around and contribute whenever I can, though I don't have much free time.
For one, I've been feeling very tired lately, and wanted to read more about modafinil, which, according to Wikipedia, is a "wakefulness-promoting agent" that lacks the unpleasant body-load of amphetamines. This would be great for work, as both time and energy are limited. On the other hand, self-medication started me off down the very-short road to addiction, so I'm apprehensive. There are differences: my experience, and the fact that I've never liked stimulants.
Coming here brings back memories. I still miss wesmdow from time to time. I've found that friendships are more difficult to cultivate as you grow older, and it's partly because experience with poor friends raises your standards.
When I signed back in, I didn't expect to receive any messages from people I used to speak to. There are a great number of people here on Bluelight whose company I thoroughly enjoyed, back when I was shoveling benzodiazepines, opiates and alcohol into my bloodstream each day, in as large amounts as I could find.
Still, life has changed a lot in the past five years. I don't think I've changed much, but circumstances have - some for better, some for worse. So, I'd like to hang around and contribute whenever I can, though I don't have much free time.
For one, I've been feeling very tired lately, and wanted to read more about modafinil, which, according to Wikipedia, is a "wakefulness-promoting agent" that lacks the unpleasant body-load of amphetamines. This would be great for work, as both time and energy are limited. On the other hand, self-medication started me off down the very-short road to addiction, so I'm apprehensive. There are differences: my experience, and the fact that I've never liked stimulants.
Coming here brings back memories. I still miss wesmdow from time to time. I've found that friendships are more difficult to cultivate as you grow older, and it's partly because experience with poor friends raises your standards.
None of me makes sense when I am sad.
When I am feeling.
Perhaps that is why I can barely do my job.
Maybe if I ripped my cute fucking eyes out of their sockets, they would see the hideousness and pain inside, more than they already do, until everyone finally leaves me alone due to the grotesque appearance that would match my insane little spirit.
I looked towards the light once with actual hope; is that not funny? I smiled at the simple beauty of our world, only to find out that beauty was not meant for me. The loneliness cripples the heart while running away takes up all my body’s precious time.
At least for me. That’s the way it has always been.
I look at all the girls passing by, and I try to smile at them, and I want to talk to them, and I look at the boys, and I want to do so much more. But every time I fall in love, the hate and lust take over until nothing is left but a memory of the one I left behind.
Or, the one who left me behind.
Perhaps both.
I am chaos; only, I am not the important kind. Not the type that rips through the world like a tsunami; more so like a feral cat ready to shriek at any human who dares to take a glance.
When I am feeling.
Perhaps that is why I can barely do my job.
Maybe if I ripped my cute fucking eyes out of their sockets, they would see the hideousness and pain inside, more than they already do, until everyone finally leaves me alone due to the grotesque appearance that would match my insane little spirit.
I looked towards the light once with actual hope; is that not funny? I smiled at the simple beauty of our world, only to find out that beauty was not meant for me. The loneliness cripples the heart while running away takes up all my body’s precious time.
At least for me. That’s the way it has always been.
I look at all the girls passing by, and I try to smile at them, and I want to talk to them, and I look at the boys, and I want to do so much more. But every time I fall in love, the hate and lust take over until nothing is left but a memory of the one I left behind.
Or, the one who left me behind.
Perhaps both.
I am chaos; only, I am not the important kind. Not the type that rips through the world like a tsunami; more so like a feral cat ready to shriek at any human who dares to take a glance.
People dress up and go to their house of worship on the weekend to be told stories of the son of God who came to the earth to teach humans how to be better to each other. Is it any wonder we're so pitiful when it's been hammered into our heads that only people who can rise from the dead are truly capable of being decent?
Ever hear about that point in time after years of drug abuse. When you don't care about anything? When the things you cared about mean less or close to nothing to you?
I am at this point. I no longer care about anything. Family is meaningless. I don't try to hard in school and I am failing. I don't get my daily tasks done. Its been wake up, do drugs, go to work, do drugs, smoke weed, and sleep for ages now. I have always smoked weed. I am bipolar, but anxiety kills me the most.
Getting the money isn't as easy anymore, so I have fallen out of the game. I don't care about those who I have used or ripped off. I have become manipulative and edgy. I fight with everyone all the time who loves me. I don't care about what is at stake. All that matters is using.
When I use it is the best part of the day. I don't eat that much anymore. I have these days where I cry and hurt the ones I love with the things I am saying and make threats. I do whatever it takes to get money for my next fix. I go to work blasted out of my mind. I am not scared. I have gotten charges. The biggest downfall is Mania.
Drug use is a game. There is a point for everyone where it becomes NEEDING instead of wanting. I cannot get through any day now without smoking Weed, Heroin, or Meth. They are my demons but they sure can fucking swim. I cant ask for help. I am on my own. There is no turning back.
My life is passing me by. I am losing out on so much. I don't even remember what I did yesterday most days. I am forgetful. I kiss my guys ass for the stuff because I NEED IT. I get anxious, cry, nervous, shaky, cant eat, cant sleep, body aches, a fever, look flushed, and very irritable. I am scared.
I want to stop it all. I want to get better. But drug use always holds me back. I am scared to withdrawal. Rehab is not an option right now. I have to much to lose. I cannot keep living a lie though everything that I say is a lie to make sure that I get my fix now. It feels like time is standing still. It has been years. I cannot cope.
Is this it? Is this the end? Will I recover? It all started with just ONCE but then that turned into EVERY DAY. Hard drugs are no joke. Anyone can get addicted. Drugs do not discriminate. Some of us are weaker then others. Some of us have very little to live for.
Are you at this point? Everything is falling away from you. You lost control. The drugs DO YOU. Your worthless. Your a liar. How did you recover. Is this end? Should I be ready.... Will I be damned to live like this until my early death..
I am at this point. I no longer care about anything. Family is meaningless. I don't try to hard in school and I am failing. I don't get my daily tasks done. Its been wake up, do drugs, go to work, do drugs, smoke weed, and sleep for ages now. I have always smoked weed. I am bipolar, but anxiety kills me the most.
Getting the money isn't as easy anymore, so I have fallen out of the game. I don't care about those who I have used or ripped off. I have become manipulative and edgy. I fight with everyone all the time who loves me. I don't care about what is at stake. All that matters is using.
When I use it is the best part of the day. I don't eat that much anymore. I have these days where I cry and hurt the ones I love with the things I am saying and make threats. I do whatever it takes to get money for my next fix. I go to work blasted out of my mind. I am not scared. I have gotten charges. The biggest downfall is Mania.
Drug use is a game. There is a point for everyone where it becomes NEEDING instead of wanting. I cannot get through any day now without smoking Weed, Heroin, or Meth. They are my demons but they sure can fucking swim. I cant ask for help. I am on my own. There is no turning back.
My life is passing me by. I am losing out on so much. I don't even remember what I did yesterday most days. I am forgetful. I kiss my guys ass for the stuff because I NEED IT. I get anxious, cry, nervous, shaky, cant eat, cant sleep, body aches, a fever, look flushed, and very irritable. I am scared.
I want to stop it all. I want to get better. But drug use always holds me back. I am scared to withdrawal. Rehab is not an option right now. I have to much to lose. I cannot keep living a lie though everything that I say is a lie to make sure that I get my fix now. It feels like time is standing still. It has been years. I cannot cope.
Is this it? Is this the end? Will I recover? It all started with just ONCE but then that turned into EVERY DAY. Hard drugs are no joke. Anyone can get addicted. Drugs do not discriminate. Some of us are weaker then others. Some of us have very little to live for.
Are you at this point? Everything is falling away from you. You lost control. The drugs DO YOU. Your worthless. Your a liar. How did you recover. Is this end? Should I be ready.... Will I be damned to live like this until my early death..
Ever hear about that point in time after years of drug abuse. When you don't care about anything? When the things you cared about mean less or close to nothing to you?
I am at this point. I no longer care about anything. Family is meaningless. I don't try to hard in school and I am failing. I don't get my daily tasks done. Its been wake up, do drugs, go to work, do drugs, smoke weed, and sleep for ages now. I have always smoked weed. I am bipolar, but anxiety kills me the most.
Getting the money isn't as easy anymore, so I have fallen out of the game. I don't care about those who I have used or ripped off. I have become manipulative and edgy. I fight with everyone all the time who loves me. I don't care about what is at stake. All that matters is using.
When I use it is the best part of the day. I don't eat that much anymore. I have these days where I cry and hurt the ones I love with the things I am saying and make threats. I do whatever it takes to get money for my next fix. I go to work blasted out of my mind. I am not scared. I have gotten charges. The biggest downfall is Mania.
Drug use is a game. There is a point for everyone where it becomes NEEDING instead of wanting. I cannot get through any day now without smoking Weed, Heroin, or Meth. They are my demons but they sure can fucking swim. I cant ask for help. I am on my own. There is no turning back.
My life is passing me by. I am losing out on so much. I don't even remember what I did yesterday most days. I am forgetful. I kiss my guys ass for the stuff because I NEED IT. I get anxious, cry, nervous, shaky, cant eat, cant sleep, body aches, a fever, look flushed, and very irritable. I am scared.
I want to stop it all. I want to get better. But drug use always holds me back. I am scared to withdrawal. Rehab is not an option right now. I have to much to lose. I cannot keep living a lie though everything that I say is a lie to make sure that I get my fix now. It feels like time is standing still. It has been years. I cannot cope.
Is this it? Is this the end? Will I recover? It all started with just ONCE but then that turned into EVERY DAY. Hard drugs are no joke. Anyone can get addicted. Drugs do not discriminate. Some of us are weaker then others. Some of us have very little to live for.
Are you at this point? Everything is falling away from you. You lost control. The drugs DO YOU. Your worthless. Your a liar. How did you recover. Is this end? Should I be ready.... Will I be damned to live like this until my early death..
I am at this point. I no longer care about anything. Family is meaningless. I don't try to hard in school and I am failing. I don't get my daily tasks done. Its been wake up, do drugs, go to work, do drugs, smoke weed, and sleep for ages now. I have always smoked weed. I am bipolar, but anxiety kills me the most.
Getting the money isn't as easy anymore, so I have fallen out of the game. I don't care about those who I have used or ripped off. I have become manipulative and edgy. I fight with everyone all the time who loves me. I don't care about what is at stake. All that matters is using.
When I use it is the best part of the day. I don't eat that much anymore. I have these days where I cry and hurt the ones I love with the things I am saying and make threats. I do whatever it takes to get money for my next fix. I go to work blasted out of my mind. I am not scared. I have gotten charges. The biggest downfall is Mania.
Drug use is a game. There is a point for everyone where it becomes NEEDING instead of wanting. I cannot get through any day now without smoking Weed, Heroin, or Meth. They are my demons but they sure can fucking swim. I cant ask for help. I am on my own. There is no turning back.
My life is passing me by. I am losing out on so much. I don't even remember what I did yesterday most days. I am forgetful. I kiss my guys ass for the stuff because I NEED IT. I get anxious, cry, nervous, shaky, cant eat, cant sleep, body aches, a fever, look flushed, and very irritable. I am scared.
I want to stop it all. I want to get better. But drug use always holds me back. I am scared to withdrawal. Rehab is not an option right now. I have to much to lose. I cannot keep living a lie though everything that I say is a lie to make sure that I get my fix now. It feels like time is standing still. It has been years. I cannot cope.
Is this it? Is this the end? Will I recover? It all started with just ONCE but then that turned into EVERY DAY. Hard drugs are no joke. Anyone can get addicted. Drugs do not discriminate. Some of us are weaker then others. Some of us have very little to live for.
Are you at this point? Everything is falling away from you. You lost control. The drugs DO YOU. Your worthless. Your a liar. How did you recover. Is this end? Should I be ready.... Will I be damned to live like this until my early death..
My article will be published next week in JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association). It describes the work I've been doing on a widespread neurological disorder. I worked hard for a long time on that project, and in the rush to finish, I was miserable. I didn't sleep well, and my daily morphine intake went way up trying to deal with it all.
In the end, science is a truly thankless and unappreciated profession with poor compensation for the amount of work put in, the required amount of education and training, the constant devotion, and no job security. This applies mainly to anybody under the age of 50. As with many other professions, The Baby Boomers, had it easy if they wanted to become scientists; anybody of average intelligence and a college degree could easily become a tenured professor if they put in a little bit of effort until around 1990. If you are skeptical, most people probably remember some stupid, yet tenured, professors they had in college. But times have changed.
Today, there is no lack of STEM (college graduates with degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math) workers. The whole thing is a fraud perpetrated from the level of the President on down in the name of cheap labor. The truth is that there are roughly twice as many STEM graduates than available job openings per year. I discourage everyone from becoming a scientist. Don't throw away your lives.
Anti-biotic-resistant tuberculosis is re-emerging in the world as a public health threat. It has been found in Russia and eastern European and as many as 1 in 100 have it in some African countries and India. The bacteria that causes TB, mycobacterium tuberculosis, are airborne and infest densely populated parts of cities: apartment blocks, homeless shelters, hospitals, city buses, and subways - basically, crowded, dank, poorly ventilated, dirty environments.. The classic symptoms of active TB infection are constant coughing with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss.
Being away from civilization for a year in the desert sort of re-energized me. I needed a break from crowded city living. It was good to be away crowds. More and more, I'm reminded of why I like the desert.
The population of Paris and its immediate adjoining suburbs exceeds 12 million people. My work is in the center of the city in the Latin Quarter, and I hadn't been outside of Paris yet. I imagined distances to be on the scale of American cities where the edge of the city, especially big ones with 10 million people, like Houston or Los Angeles to be literally 25 miles or more away and unreachable by foot or bicycle (without being shot, robbed, hit by a car, or burned alive by the hot sun).
A few weeks ago for work, we needed to do something in Alphaville, a lab at the edge of the city. We would be taking the Metro today. Le Metro is the name of the Paris subway. As we walked toward the metro, the boss started talking about pickpockets and scammers that infest Paris. She reminded us, especially me since I was new to Paris and seemed to her to be as pure as the driven snow, to be careful. One scam she warned us about is very common; that is panhandlers who pretend to be homeless.
She had a female friend who used to give money to a "homeless" woman who begged at her metro stop every day. She would say, "I need money. My children are hungry. I have 4 of them - some milk money for my baby please." The female friend gave money to this one beggar every day for years. She would often ask about the children. One time, for whatever reason, the beggar woman had a blank look and said something like "oh yeah my children, they're OK. They're hungry give me some money please. i need to buy groceries for them."
So she gave money, but this time she became suspicious. One day, the bosses friend followed the beggar woman to what she expected was to buy food as she left the subway. Instead, the "homeless" woman sent to a bar and she spent hours sitting and drinking. When confronted, she admitted there were no hungry children in her custody, and she wasn't even homeless. The thing was a scam. Everybody has probably heard a similar story.
Like she said, the hungry baby scam is vary common. I mean, even I have seen the scam first hand. That reminded me of this one time in South America, this scrawny emaciated girl accosted me in Spanish and asked for money for her baby. She said her baby was hongry. The beggar woman was skin and bones herself. She stood aournd 5 feet tall and looked like she'd been in a concentration camp with her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, etc. She couldn't weigh more than 50 pounds. She said she was 18 years old, looking at her, I knew she had some kind of problem. I was in a poor country, after all, where there is no social safety net. People really starve to death there. I didn't really believe that she was skinny for lack of money, but I was curious to find out.
In the end, science is a truly thankless and unappreciated profession with poor compensation for the amount of work put in, the required amount of education and training, the constant devotion, and no job security. This applies mainly to anybody under the age of 50. As with many other professions, The Baby Boomers, had it easy if they wanted to become scientists; anybody of average intelligence and a college degree could easily become a tenured professor if they put in a little bit of effort until around 1990. If you are skeptical, most people probably remember some stupid, yet tenured, professors they had in college. But times have changed.
Today, there is no lack of STEM (college graduates with degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math) workers. The whole thing is a fraud perpetrated from the level of the President on down in the name of cheap labor. The truth is that there are roughly twice as many STEM graduates than available job openings per year. I discourage everyone from becoming a scientist. Don't throw away your lives.
Anti-biotic-resistant tuberculosis is re-emerging in the world as a public health threat. It has been found in Russia and eastern European and as many as 1 in 100 have it in some African countries and India. The bacteria that causes TB, mycobacterium tuberculosis, are airborne and infest densely populated parts of cities: apartment blocks, homeless shelters, hospitals, city buses, and subways - basically, crowded, dank, poorly ventilated, dirty environments.. The classic symptoms of active TB infection are constant coughing with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss.
Being away from civilization for a year in the desert sort of re-energized me. I needed a break from crowded city living. It was good to be away crowds. More and more, I'm reminded of why I like the desert.
The population of Paris and its immediate adjoining suburbs exceeds 12 million people. My work is in the center of the city in the Latin Quarter, and I hadn't been outside of Paris yet. I imagined distances to be on the scale of American cities where the edge of the city, especially big ones with 10 million people, like Houston or Los Angeles to be literally 25 miles or more away and unreachable by foot or bicycle (without being shot, robbed, hit by a car, or burned alive by the hot sun).
A few weeks ago for work, we needed to do something in Alphaville, a lab at the edge of the city. We would be taking the Metro today. Le Metro is the name of the Paris subway. As we walked toward the metro, the boss started talking about pickpockets and scammers that infest Paris. She reminded us, especially me since I was new to Paris and seemed to her to be as pure as the driven snow, to be careful. One scam she warned us about is very common; that is panhandlers who pretend to be homeless.
She had a female friend who used to give money to a "homeless" woman who begged at her metro stop every day. She would say, "I need money. My children are hungry. I have 4 of them - some milk money for my baby please." The female friend gave money to this one beggar every day for years. She would often ask about the children. One time, for whatever reason, the beggar woman had a blank look and said something like "oh yeah my children, they're OK. They're hungry give me some money please. i need to buy groceries for them."
So she gave money, but this time she became suspicious. One day, the bosses friend followed the beggar woman to what she expected was to buy food as she left the subway. Instead, the "homeless" woman sent to a bar and she spent hours sitting and drinking. When confronted, she admitted there were no hungry children in her custody, and she wasn't even homeless. The thing was a scam. Everybody has probably heard a similar story.
Like she said, the hungry baby scam is vary common. I mean, even I have seen the scam first hand. That reminded me of this one time in South America, this scrawny emaciated girl accosted me in Spanish and asked for money for her baby. She said her baby was hongry. The beggar woman was skin and bones herself. She stood aournd 5 feet tall and looked like she'd been in a concentration camp with her sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, etc. She couldn't weigh more than 50 pounds. She said she was 18 years old, looking at her, I knew she had some kind of problem. I was in a poor country, after all, where there is no social safety net. People really starve to death there. I didn't really believe that she was skinny for lack of money, but I was curious to find out.
Source: Wikipedia
The reversible binding to MAO-A by moclobemide allows amines such as tyramine to displace moclobemide from MAO-A allowing its metabolism and removing the risk of a hypertensive crisis that occurs with irreversible MAO inhibition.[86] 2300 people in multiple clinical trials who were treated with moclobemide in doses up to 600 mg with no dietary restrictions, none experienced a tyramine-mediated hypertensive reaction.[54]
The potentiation of the pressor effect of tyramine by moclobemide is only one seventh to one tenth of that of irreversible MAOIs.[88]
Reversible MAOIs were developed in the hope that they would exert efficacy in depressive disorders but with less of the toxicity of the older irreversible compounds; moclobemide's discovery and marketing brought the renewed interest in MAOIs due to an absence of dangerous tyramine food interactions and potent antidepressant effects.[7][113]
There is no need for dietary restrictions in contrast to people on irreversible MAOIs and apart from an important interaction with other serotonergic enhancing agents such as SSRI's and pethidine, there are few serious drug interactions
No significant rise in blood pressure occurs when moclobemide is combined with amines such as tyramine containing foods or pressor amine drugs, unlike the older non-selective irreversible MAOIs which cause a severe rise in blood pressure with such combination.[3]
--
86. Lavian, G.; Finberg, JP.; Youdim, MB. (1993). "The advent of a new generation of monoamine oxidase inhibitor antidepressants: pharmacologic studies with moclobemide and brofaromine.". Clin Neuropharmacol 16 Suppl 2: S1-7. PMID 8313392
54. Versiani M, Nardi AE, Figueira IL, Stabl M (1990). "Tolerability of moclobemide, a new reversible inhibitor of monoamine oxidase-A, compared with other antidepressants and placebo". Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl 360: 24–8. PMID 2123366
88. Zimmer R (1990). "Relationship between tyramine potentiation and monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibition: comparison between moclobemide and other MAO inhibitors". Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl 360: 81–3. PMID 2248084
7. Roth M, Guelfi JD (September 1992). "The efficacy of reversible monoamine oxidase inhibitors in depressive illness". Can J Psychiatry 37 Suppl 1: 18–24. PMID 1394027
113. Rudorfer MV (1992). "Monoamine oxidase inhibitors: reversible and irreversible". Psychopharmacol Bull 28 (1): 45–57. PMID 1609042
3. Fulton B, Benfield P (September 1996). "Moclobemide. An update of its pharmacological properties and therapeutic use". Drugs 52 (3): 450–74. PMID 8875133
The reversible binding to MAO-A by moclobemide allows amines such as tyramine to displace moclobemide from MAO-A allowing its metabolism and removing the risk of a hypertensive crisis that occurs with irreversible MAO inhibition.[86] 2300 people in multiple clinical trials who were treated with moclobemide in doses up to 600 mg with no dietary restrictions, none experienced a tyramine-mediated hypertensive reaction.[54]
The potentiation of the pressor effect of tyramine by moclobemide is only one seventh to one tenth of that of irreversible MAOIs.[88]
Reversible MAOIs were developed in the hope that they would exert efficacy in depressive disorders but with less of the toxicity of the older irreversible compounds; moclobemide's discovery and marketing brought the renewed interest in MAOIs due to an absence of dangerous tyramine food interactions and potent antidepressant effects.[7][113]
There is no need for dietary restrictions in contrast to people on irreversible MAOIs and apart from an important interaction with other serotonergic enhancing agents such as SSRI's and pethidine, there are few serious drug interactions
No significant rise in blood pressure occurs when moclobemide is combined with amines such as tyramine containing foods or pressor amine drugs, unlike the older non-selective irreversible MAOIs which cause a severe rise in blood pressure with such combination.[3]
--
86. Lavian, G.; Finberg, JP.; Youdim, MB. (1993). "The advent of a new generation of monoamine oxidase inhibitor antidepressants: pharmacologic studies with moclobemide and brofaromine.". Clin Neuropharmacol 16 Suppl 2: S1-7. PMID 8313392
54. Versiani M, Nardi AE, Figueira IL, Stabl M (1990). "Tolerability of moclobemide, a new reversible inhibitor of monoamine oxidase-A, compared with other antidepressants and placebo". Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl 360: 24–8. PMID 2123366
88. Zimmer R (1990). "Relationship between tyramine potentiation and monoamine oxidase (MAO) inhibition: comparison between moclobemide and other MAO inhibitors". Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl 360: 81–3. PMID 2248084
7. Roth M, Guelfi JD (September 1992). "The efficacy of reversible monoamine oxidase inhibitors in depressive illness". Can J Psychiatry 37 Suppl 1: 18–24. PMID 1394027
113. Rudorfer MV (1992). "Monoamine oxidase inhibitors: reversible and irreversible". Psychopharmacol Bull 28 (1): 45–57. PMID 1609042
3. Fulton B, Benfield P (September 1996). "Moclobemide. An update of its pharmacological properties and therapeutic use". Drugs 52 (3): 450–74. PMID 8875133
Blue as the gloomy sky. Blue like the dozens of tacky snowflake beads falling to the floor. Blue: the heroin addict’s face during the final overdose.
“I’m so blue… without you…” Another Christmas song comes to mind as I write advertisements for holiday companies too lazy to do the work themselves. “I feel so blue…” However that Elvis Presley song goes, it sticks in the mind, but what did he know about being blue anyway? He ate his peanut butter & banana sandwiches like a hog. The man grew rich as he gorged himself with the poison of fame. Did he ever stop to think about what his pathway to destruction meant, or was he fooled to the very end thinking that path was pure gold?
I was fooled every time I took that forsaken hit. I feel so old now and much too worn. I remember thinking I would keep doing this till I died. Nothing could ever match up to the euphoria from that last sticky trail on foil, an evil road to hell if there ever was one.
Then I died inside when I lost everything: apartment, family, and future. I guess dying on the inside was enough, because I’m clean as a whistle now as far as heroin habits go. I came out physically intact with a few facial scars and eternal insomnia, but I’m a changed girl, a new woman, right? Right?
Tell that to the girl who snuck out of her boyfriend’s house to meet some Mexican just out of jail, just for a few more, oh, the last hit, I SWEAR. I told him with a smile that I would be back later that day. Whatever. He was a cute dealer, and at the time, I figured I would be back.
Then I return to the house, locked out and as ashamed as a two-faced bitch like me could be. I started crying, but my tears are never real. I got a second chance.
“Use one more time,” They say, “and you’re out!”
“I’ve never known anybody to get off heroin.”
I grimace as they give me the lectures. I smoke cigarettes and sneak vodka to ease the need for blackest devil and best friend. I look at my painted toes, sparkly lies that say I’m still a little girl. Nothing more.
I am nothing more.
“Nothing but blue skies, all day long.” Jazz music sucks. I hate remembering such simplistic joy. The only blue I see is the coldest kind. Blue lips from death and blue veins from my barest survival.
My heart is frozen forever. Heroin cracked the ice and made dark aqua pools of blood gush out.
Everyone asks me, “Do you even care? Are you listening? What do you fucking live for, Crow, because it’s obviously not to love anyone but your DAMN self.” I sit there and stare. I agree with them, but I say nothing, for what could come of any arguments?
They’re humans. Stupid humans, just like me. I observe and see true love bringing them misery, one by one, every single time.
“I’m so blue… without you…” Another Christmas song comes to mind as I write advertisements for holiday companies too lazy to do the work themselves. “I feel so blue…” However that Elvis Presley song goes, it sticks in the mind, but what did he know about being blue anyway? He ate his peanut butter & banana sandwiches like a hog. The man grew rich as he gorged himself with the poison of fame. Did he ever stop to think about what his pathway to destruction meant, or was he fooled to the very end thinking that path was pure gold?
I was fooled every time I took that forsaken hit. I feel so old now and much too worn. I remember thinking I would keep doing this till I died. Nothing could ever match up to the euphoria from that last sticky trail on foil, an evil road to hell if there ever was one.
Then I died inside when I lost everything: apartment, family, and future. I guess dying on the inside was enough, because I’m clean as a whistle now as far as heroin habits go. I came out physically intact with a few facial scars and eternal insomnia, but I’m a changed girl, a new woman, right? Right?
Tell that to the girl who snuck out of her boyfriend’s house to meet some Mexican just out of jail, just for a few more, oh, the last hit, I SWEAR. I told him with a smile that I would be back later that day. Whatever. He was a cute dealer, and at the time, I figured I would be back.
Then I return to the house, locked out and as ashamed as a two-faced bitch like me could be. I started crying, but my tears are never real. I got a second chance.
“Use one more time,” They say, “and you’re out!”
“I’ve never known anybody to get off heroin.”
I grimace as they give me the lectures. I smoke cigarettes and sneak vodka to ease the need for blackest devil and best friend. I look at my painted toes, sparkly lies that say I’m still a little girl. Nothing more.
I am nothing more.
“Nothing but blue skies, all day long.” Jazz music sucks. I hate remembering such simplistic joy. The only blue I see is the coldest kind. Blue lips from death and blue veins from my barest survival.
My heart is frozen forever. Heroin cracked the ice and made dark aqua pools of blood gush out.
Everyone asks me, “Do you even care? Are you listening? What do you fucking live for, Crow, because it’s obviously not to love anyone but your DAMN self.” I sit there and stare. I agree with them, but I say nothing, for what could come of any arguments?
They’re humans. Stupid humans, just like me. I observe and see true love bringing them misery, one by one, every single time.
True to form, ahem, I wrote too much - tu tut! So this is just a testrun to see if it works... what are you supposed to put in a blog I wonder?
Source: Ram Dass lecture at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center: Part I. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, vol. 5, issue #1 (1973), pages 82–85. NOTE: Maharaj-ji is also known as Neem Karoli Baba.
At one point J was into my shoulder bag which I was carrying. I was looking in there and I found this little bottle of LSD. I had brought that to India. Not because I was particularly eager to take it, since I had taken it up to here as far as I was concerned, but because I thought I might meet somebody who I could give it to who would tell me something about what it was all about. I thought, after all, I'll give it to these holy men; and I'd give it to different holy men like a Buddhist monk and I'd say "How did it affect you, sir?" and he'd say, "It gave me a headache." I'd give it to somebody else and they'd say, "Well, it is good for meditation." Somebody else said, "Well, meditation is better than this." Somebody else said, "Where can I get more?" There was the standard set of reactions that you'd get in the West. You didn't have to go to India to find out all those reactions. So I found this bottle and I thought, "Gee, you know, this guy is going to know. I'll talk to him about LSD."
I go to bed. The next morning a message comes: Maharaj-ji wants to see you. We go over to the temple around 7:30 or 8 in the morning. I'm walking towards him. I'm about as far from him as that booth back there, and he yells at me, "Where's the medicine?" I'm not used to thinking of LSD as medicine, so I was a little confused. I said, "Medicine? What medicine?" He said, "The medicine, the medicine." I said, "LSD?" "Yes, bring the medicine." So I went to the car and I got the medicine and I brought it back and "Let me see." So I put it on my hand. I had all different kinds of things in there. "What's that?" I said, "LSD." "What's that?" "That's mescaline, that's Librium, and that's"—you know, a little traveling kit. So he said, "Does it give you siddhis?" Now siddhis in India means "powers." But I had never heard the word before. It means spiritual powers, and since I never heard the word before and they translated it as powers, I thought he wanted like vitamin B-12. You see, I figure he's an old man, he must be losing his power and he wants vitamin B-12 and I didn't have vitamin B-12, so I said, "I'm sorry, no, this doesn't give you that kind of power," and I put it back in the bottle. He says, "Nay, nay," and he holds out his hand, So I put one pill in his hand. These pills were 300 micrograms each. He looked at it. "Come on." So I put a second one—that was 600 micrograms. He looked, so I put a third pill on-that was 900 micrograms—which seemed like an adequate dose for anyone—and he went like that, see, took all three pills-and I was around him all that morning, and nothing at all happened. Like, "That's your medicine, groovy, that's interesting." Nothing happened at all.
Now it's interesting that I came back to America after that and I told many people and in fact published it and said that this man had taken 900 micrograms of LSD and nothing had happened. But all the time I was saying this, there was a gnawing doubt in my mind, Just a tiny little one that maybe, since I was so confused at that time, maybe what he did-he took the pills and he threw them over his shoulder, you know, and it was all a magical thing, and he'd never taken them at all. So it is interesting to follow the sequence through, since now we can see another round this time when I'm back in India. One day he calls me up to him and he says, "Say, did you give me any medicine last time you were in India?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Did I take it?" I said, "Well, I think so." "Did it have any effect on me?" I said, "No, I don't think so." He said, "Oh, Go away." So I went away and the next morning I received a call from him and he says, "You got any more of that medicine?" I said, "Yeah." "Bring it." So I bring it. I have what is comparable to 1500 micrograms. I put it on his hand, and one pill is broken and he gives that back to me. The rest he is holding in his hand, and this time, as if in response to my slight doubt, he takes each one—and he does it very carefully to make sure that I see that it is going into his mouth and he is swallowing it, you see. After he swallows all these pills, he looks at me as if panicked and he says, "Pani—can I take water?" And I said, "Sure." He asks, "Hot or cold?" and I said, "Either one, it doesn't matter." He's calling, "Pani, Pani, bring water, bring water." They bring a glass of water and he drinks it down. Then he says, "How long will it take to act? How long will it take?" I said, "Well, I don't know, about an hour or—something will happen in an hour, I'm sure." So he calls a man over and he has a man with a wrist watch and he's holding the man's wrist watch and he says to me, "Will it make me crazy?" And our relationship is very intimate so I said to him, "Probably!" So at this point he goes under his blanket, which is what he sits with, and he comes up looking absolutely insane! At which point I think, "Ugh, oh, what have I done? I've let this old man take this strong drug and now he's gone crazy—oh, what a terrible—it'll be an international incident, and it's terrible, and I've blown it again." Then he laughed at me—and at the end of an hour, just nothing had happened. And I was there all day and nothing had happened at all. At the end of the hour he says, "You got anything stronger?" I said no. "Oh." And he said these substances were known about in the Kulu Valley, long ago, but all that knowledge is lost now, Then he said, "It's useful, it's useful, not the true samadhi, but it's useful."
Then later when questioned about LSD by some of the young Westerners that were with him, he said, "If you're in a cool place and you're quiet and you're feeling much peace and your mind is turned toward God, it's useful. It's useful." He said it will allow you to come in and have the visit—the darshan—a saint, of a higher being of a higher space—higher consciousness is how you can translate it. But he says you can't stay there. After a couple of hours you gotta come back. He said, you know, it would be much better to become the saint, rather than to go and have his visit; but having his visit is nice. He said it strengthens your faith in the possibility that such beings exist. At the time he used Christ as the saint he was talking about. He said it allows you to have the visit of Christ but you can't stay with him. It would be better to become like Christ than to visit, and LSD won't do that for you. He said it will strengthen your faith but it won't make you into that. He said love is a much stronger drug than LSD medicine.
Input on this account given by another American who was there:
I fondly remember my first guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taking three tabs of Ram Dass’s Sandoz Laboratory acid in the late sixties and then throughout the day asking Ram Dass if and when it was going to have some effect. It’s really Ram Dass who went on a trip that day. It didn’t seem to change Neem Karoli Baba’s consciousness much.
Lama Surya Das (Jeffrey Miller). The Zen Commandements. Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedlics. Alan Hunt Badiner & Alex Grey (editors). 2002-2015. Page 185.
NOTE: A new edition of Zig Zag Zen is coming out on May 30, 2015.
http://www.synergeticpress.com/product/zig-zag-zen-buddhism-psychedelics
At one point J was into my shoulder bag which I was carrying. I was looking in there and I found this little bottle of LSD. I had brought that to India. Not because I was particularly eager to take it, since I had taken it up to here as far as I was concerned, but because I thought I might meet somebody who I could give it to who would tell me something about what it was all about. I thought, after all, I'll give it to these holy men; and I'd give it to different holy men like a Buddhist monk and I'd say "How did it affect you, sir?" and he'd say, "It gave me a headache." I'd give it to somebody else and they'd say, "Well, it is good for meditation." Somebody else said, "Well, meditation is better than this." Somebody else said, "Where can I get more?" There was the standard set of reactions that you'd get in the West. You didn't have to go to India to find out all those reactions. So I found this bottle and I thought, "Gee, you know, this guy is going to know. I'll talk to him about LSD."
I go to bed. The next morning a message comes: Maharaj-ji wants to see you. We go over to the temple around 7:30 or 8 in the morning. I'm walking towards him. I'm about as far from him as that booth back there, and he yells at me, "Where's the medicine?" I'm not used to thinking of LSD as medicine, so I was a little confused. I said, "Medicine? What medicine?" He said, "The medicine, the medicine." I said, "LSD?" "Yes, bring the medicine." So I went to the car and I got the medicine and I brought it back and "Let me see." So I put it on my hand. I had all different kinds of things in there. "What's that?" I said, "LSD." "What's that?" "That's mescaline, that's Librium, and that's"—you know, a little traveling kit. So he said, "Does it give you siddhis?" Now siddhis in India means "powers." But I had never heard the word before. It means spiritual powers, and since I never heard the word before and they translated it as powers, I thought he wanted like vitamin B-12. You see, I figure he's an old man, he must be losing his power and he wants vitamin B-12 and I didn't have vitamin B-12, so I said, "I'm sorry, no, this doesn't give you that kind of power," and I put it back in the bottle. He says, "Nay, nay," and he holds out his hand, So I put one pill in his hand. These pills were 300 micrograms each. He looked at it. "Come on." So I put a second one—that was 600 micrograms. He looked, so I put a third pill on-that was 900 micrograms—which seemed like an adequate dose for anyone—and he went like that, see, took all three pills-and I was around him all that morning, and nothing at all happened. Like, "That's your medicine, groovy, that's interesting." Nothing happened at all.
Now it's interesting that I came back to America after that and I told many people and in fact published it and said that this man had taken 900 micrograms of LSD and nothing had happened. But all the time I was saying this, there was a gnawing doubt in my mind, Just a tiny little one that maybe, since I was so confused at that time, maybe what he did-he took the pills and he threw them over his shoulder, you know, and it was all a magical thing, and he'd never taken them at all. So it is interesting to follow the sequence through, since now we can see another round this time when I'm back in India. One day he calls me up to him and he says, "Say, did you give me any medicine last time you were in India?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Did I take it?" I said, "Well, I think so." "Did it have any effect on me?" I said, "No, I don't think so." He said, "Oh, Go away." So I went away and the next morning I received a call from him and he says, "You got any more of that medicine?" I said, "Yeah." "Bring it." So I bring it. I have what is comparable to 1500 micrograms. I put it on his hand, and one pill is broken and he gives that back to me. The rest he is holding in his hand, and this time, as if in response to my slight doubt, he takes each one—and he does it very carefully to make sure that I see that it is going into his mouth and he is swallowing it, you see. After he swallows all these pills, he looks at me as if panicked and he says, "Pani—can I take water?" And I said, "Sure." He asks, "Hot or cold?" and I said, "Either one, it doesn't matter." He's calling, "Pani, Pani, bring water, bring water." They bring a glass of water and he drinks it down. Then he says, "How long will it take to act? How long will it take?" I said, "Well, I don't know, about an hour or—something will happen in an hour, I'm sure." So he calls a man over and he has a man with a wrist watch and he's holding the man's wrist watch and he says to me, "Will it make me crazy?" And our relationship is very intimate so I said to him, "Probably!" So at this point he goes under his blanket, which is what he sits with, and he comes up looking absolutely insane! At which point I think, "Ugh, oh, what have I done? I've let this old man take this strong drug and now he's gone crazy—oh, what a terrible—it'll be an international incident, and it's terrible, and I've blown it again." Then he laughed at me—and at the end of an hour, just nothing had happened. And I was there all day and nothing had happened at all. At the end of the hour he says, "You got anything stronger?" I said no. "Oh." And he said these substances were known about in the Kulu Valley, long ago, but all that knowledge is lost now, Then he said, "It's useful, it's useful, not the true samadhi, but it's useful."
Then later when questioned about LSD by some of the young Westerners that were with him, he said, "If you're in a cool place and you're quiet and you're feeling much peace and your mind is turned toward God, it's useful. It's useful." He said it will allow you to come in and have the visit—the darshan—a saint, of a higher being of a higher space—higher consciousness is how you can translate it. But he says you can't stay there. After a couple of hours you gotta come back. He said, you know, it would be much better to become the saint, rather than to go and have his visit; but having his visit is nice. He said it strengthens your faith in the possibility that such beings exist. At the time he used Christ as the saint he was talking about. He said it allows you to have the visit of Christ but you can't stay with him. It would be better to become like Christ than to visit, and LSD won't do that for you. He said it will strengthen your faith but it won't make you into that. He said love is a much stronger drug than LSD medicine.
Input on this account given by another American who was there:
I fondly remember my first guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taking three tabs of Ram Dass’s Sandoz Laboratory acid in the late sixties and then throughout the day asking Ram Dass if and when it was going to have some effect. It’s really Ram Dass who went on a trip that day. It didn’t seem to change Neem Karoli Baba’s consciousness much.
Lama Surya Das (Jeffrey Miller). The Zen Commandements. Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedlics. Alan Hunt Badiner & Alex Grey (editors). 2002-2015. Page 185.
NOTE: A new edition of Zig Zag Zen is coming out on May 30, 2015.
http://www.synergeticpress.com/product/zig-zag-zen-buddhism-psychedelics
I can't believe you Claire...
You know,
I quit drinking because of you.
Ever since that day, that day I came home and opened that bottle, you left tinychat.
Till this day it still haunts me.
You left me. You left me all alone.
From that moment on I vowed to never drink again.
You know,
I quit drinking because of you.
Ever since that day, that day I came home and opened that bottle, you left tinychat.
Till this day it still haunts me.
You left me. You left me all alone.
From that moment on I vowed to never drink again.
I've decided it's time to give up smoking white.. I'm sick of the mood swings, cravings afterwards, and the prospect of having disgusting teeth.. I don't want it to be the highlight of my day anymore, so fuck it. I've had my last blast off, a fat one, earlier, and have vowed for that to be my last.
I have a drugs test at the end of the month, and I want this to be out of my system by then. I plan on postimg each day, when I'm craving, to help remind me of why I'm giving it up instead of giving in. It's so readily available, and offered to me every day,but fuck it I can do it.
I have a drugs test at the end of the month, and I want this to be out of my system by then. I plan on postimg each day, when I'm craving, to help remind me of why I'm giving it up instead of giving in. It's so readily available, and offered to me every day,but fuck it I can do it.
Unexpected error: Error reading from file: Input/output error
Half my entry is gone. The USB drive where I was working on this entry is malfunctioning.
Ariadne found my name and email in a totally ordinary way. I would have been impressed if she had read it in a deck of Tarot Cards or drempt it. That's impossible, of course, but it is fun to imagine. She knows somebody who talked to me at the party, and they told her. The delay is because she had been skiing for 2 weeks in the Alps at Davos.
I've been seeing Ariadne since last week, and we seem to be hitting it off. This week, she had been trying to reserve a cabin for us at a resort within a few hours from Paris. My French isn't good enough to deal with reservations over the phone, and there was nothing on the internet, so it was nice of her to try. Anyway, slim chance at that because it's a holiday weekend and all Paris would be trying to do the same thing. We would take the train Friday night (yesterday), ski all day sat, sun, and half of lundi, then take the train back and be at work on Tuesday. Too late now, obviously. Everything was booked, and the weather is bad for skiing anyway. We will do something else for the holiday weekend.
Ariadne isn't her real name, I mentioned her real name in a previous entry, but I'm going to use Ariadne for the blog.
If there's an afterlife, my parents are probably looking up at me and gnashing their teeth in their own little pit in Hell. After my 3rd year of college, I realized I wasn't really happy with what I was studying. I had learned enough about the Corporate world and Clinical Medicine to question my path in college. I had straight As as an electrical engineering/neurobiology/preMed double major. (Premed refers to a concentration of electives and is not a full major.) I didn't want to become a YUPPIE working for 'the Man' and become an enthusiastic part of a morally corrupt system that I see as celebrating the shallow things in life, promoting unsustainable ways of living, and cheapening our existence. I wanted to earn an honest living and work to improve people's lives on a large scale. I don't buy into the type of feel good thinking that says that merely being polite, recycling, not farting in elevators, helping old ladies cross the street, or having your own children and teaching them to be "good people" is sufficient. I wanted to be active and invent something, come up with some idea, solve poverty, find a cure for AIDS or cancer or something that would bring about a big improvement in the quality of everyone's lives. (Currently, this is exactly what I am working on at the Institut. The project is probably too ambitious, and I won't make much of a dent in anything, but I'm trying). I knew I didn't know anythign about how to do this or even about the world in general.
Other than summer jobs, I didn't know what work was like. I had no male role model to emulate or follow. That alone made things very difficult, but it seemed like everything else was against me as well. My parents had never worked during my life, and they were uneducated to the point of being illiterate. My father was an abusive drunkard. With the dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he joined the Air Force, and when he didn't qualify to fly a plane but was instead assigned to work on the ground, he faked an injury. He was discharged and given "Disabled Veteran" status even though he had never been within 3000 miles of any conflict. That and he was awarded life-long disability payments. With no need to work, he didn't.
My mother only complained: the monthly handout was too small, it cost too much to feed me (I was so skinny and small for my age, my parents had investigated by Child Protective Services for that alone), she complained that my clothes cost too much (my clothes were 2nd hand and my shoes were $1 Bobos from Family Dollar.). She liked to complain about how much she had to spend in gas driving me to the hospital because I was sick all the time (medical care was free). I was a burden and she always pointed out how much more money she would have and how better her life would be if I had never been born. Despite that, she never got a job to improve our situation. She was content to be married to a monthly government check and let us live in poverty, the poverty of alcoholism and abuse. Even as a child, I realized that the only thing my parents would do in life was serve as examples to others of what not to do in life.
Without anybody to help me or give me advice, I decided to take a year off college, and I thought that wandering, writing in a journal, doing art, and working might be a good way to figure out what to do. The only problem is that I would be completely on my own. It wasn't 1950 anymore, and times had changed for the worse. Somethign like that was very hard to do in the 1990s. I had a full academic scholarship including living expenses, but my scholarship money would not come in for the year that I was taking off. I didnt have the safety net that parents owe their children, they were still alive, but they had never been "parents" to me in any way other than in the sense that they gave birth the same as stray cats and dogs in the back yard. I didnt have any savings. I had been completely on my own since age 17. So I had nobody to help pay rent for me, give me any advice, or in any way make this transition easier. I wasn't on good terms with grandparents or with my many aunts/uncles/cousins by default - they hated my parents. They also hated me, but I have no idea why. I had never asked them for money. I had been a straight A high school student (admittedly at a 23rd rate public school in a bad zipcode), and I had straight As in college, a top tier research university. I had never been in trouble with the police or had any behavior problems. I didn't use drugs very often because I had to concentrate on my studies, and when I did, it was low key.)
You could go nearly anywhere on Greyhound for $60 so I bought a bus ticket. The first place I went was New Orleans. While wandering around and hanging with gutterpunks and other homeless in the French Quarter, I ran into a friend from my home town, Monkey. He was nearly 10 years older than me and also living on the street. He showed me how to function on the street. He showed me a few squats, and my favorite was on top of a wall abutting an abandoned warehouse on the bank of the Mississippi just up stream from the French Quarter. It was high enough that nobody could see us up there. Other humans and pigs wouldn't bother you. The former rob you. The latter beat you, take you to jail, and sometimes shoot you if you are homeless. He showed me where to get food. There were several soup kitchens and feeding stations within walking distance of our squat. There was also a grocery store, Verti Marte, on Governor Nuchols in the French Quarter that sold a Po' Boy or a Meat and Three for $5. It was enough food to last all day. He showed me University of New Orleans on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. They didn't ckeck IDs at the university gymJ. We would blend in with the students, and go in and lift weights, but the main point was to take a shower and do a little laundry. The stalls had doors on them so I would wash my underwear and socks with shampoo.
The dream started as soon as I closed my eyes. There was no obvious transition in awareness. I noticed dream characters talking to me. Plots lines and back sotries unfolded to reveal different dream seauences very quickly. I'm standing on a city street on the edge of an ocean. There are a few pedestrians walking quickly. It's getting dark and a storm is moving in fast. I felt the urgent need to find shelter. Heavy storm clouds were over the ocean. The wind was picking up. I didn't have any money or anywhere to go. I didn't know anyone. In the dream, I remembered back to a winter I spent homeless in New Orleans. I remembered that Monkey had a spot on a wall next to an abandoned warehouse on the Mississipi river just upriver from the French Quarter. We would climb it and sleep on top. It was sheltered by an overhanging roof.
To my left (West) is a sea wall. It lines the sidewalk for 100 meters or so and ends against a brick building seven stories tall. The city extends to the east, but tall buildings block the view. I climbed the wall and looked down the other side. There was a pit, like looking down from the top of a hydroelectric dam where the water is pouring. It was very deep. A srip of land and another wall was on the other side and beyond that, the ocean.
The backstory to the dream popped into my head like a déja vu. I was on the planet Deneb gamma. It was a colony world of the Orion Arm Hegemony. I had been shipped here on a sublight transport ship, but there had been an accident during my cryosleep. My life support system had malfunçioned and fried the memory centers of my brain. I didn't know who I was or why I was there. All of my bank information, assuming I had any, had been lost. I didn't have any money. There was no Emergency Contact information on me.
At this point, the flow of the dream started to break up. Suddenly, I was on the other side of the pit, on the strip of land looking out at the ocean. Ragged black clouds, violent wind. Now I was standing on top of the far wall, and I could see the ocean.
A maelström miles across, turning very slowly. It looked like it would swallow the city on the edge of the sea. It was extremely deep and the bottom was hidden in blackness. It could have been a black hole. I was still lucid but was convinced that the dream was real. I really thought I was about to die. Now, I was on the lip of the maelström being tossed around in the water, feeling and hearing the raging wind and sea spray. I had already crossed the event horizon and was falling in. I would be annihilated.
Half my entry is gone. The USB drive where I was working on this entry is malfunctioning.
Ariadne found my name and email in a totally ordinary way. I would have been impressed if she had read it in a deck of Tarot Cards or drempt it. That's impossible, of course, but it is fun to imagine. She knows somebody who talked to me at the party, and they told her. The delay is because she had been skiing for 2 weeks in the Alps at Davos.
I've been seeing Ariadne since last week, and we seem to be hitting it off. This week, she had been trying to reserve a cabin for us at a resort within a few hours from Paris. My French isn't good enough to deal with reservations over the phone, and there was nothing on the internet, so it was nice of her to try. Anyway, slim chance at that because it's a holiday weekend and all Paris would be trying to do the same thing. We would take the train Friday night (yesterday), ski all day sat, sun, and half of lundi, then take the train back and be at work on Tuesday. Too late now, obviously. Everything was booked, and the weather is bad for skiing anyway. We will do something else for the holiday weekend.
Ariadne isn't her real name, I mentioned her real name in a previous entry, but I'm going to use Ariadne for the blog.
If there's an afterlife, my parents are probably looking up at me and gnashing their teeth in their own little pit in Hell. After my 3rd year of college, I realized I wasn't really happy with what I was studying. I had learned enough about the Corporate world and Clinical Medicine to question my path in college. I had straight As as an electrical engineering/neurobiology/preMed double major. (Premed refers to a concentration of electives and is not a full major.) I didn't want to become a YUPPIE working for 'the Man' and become an enthusiastic part of a morally corrupt system that I see as celebrating the shallow things in life, promoting unsustainable ways of living, and cheapening our existence. I wanted to earn an honest living and work to improve people's lives on a large scale. I don't buy into the type of feel good thinking that says that merely being polite, recycling, not farting in elevators, helping old ladies cross the street, or having your own children and teaching them to be "good people" is sufficient. I wanted to be active and invent something, come up with some idea, solve poverty, find a cure for AIDS or cancer or something that would bring about a big improvement in the quality of everyone's lives. (Currently, this is exactly what I am working on at the Institut. The project is probably too ambitious, and I won't make much of a dent in anything, but I'm trying). I knew I didn't know anythign about how to do this or even about the world in general.
Other than summer jobs, I didn't know what work was like. I had no male role model to emulate or follow. That alone made things very difficult, but it seemed like everything else was against me as well. My parents had never worked during my life, and they were uneducated to the point of being illiterate. My father was an abusive drunkard. With the dream of becoming a fighter pilot, he joined the Air Force, and when he didn't qualify to fly a plane but was instead assigned to work on the ground, he faked an injury. He was discharged and given "Disabled Veteran" status even though he had never been within 3000 miles of any conflict. That and he was awarded life-long disability payments. With no need to work, he didn't.
My mother only complained: the monthly handout was too small, it cost too much to feed me (I was so skinny and small for my age, my parents had investigated by Child Protective Services for that alone), she complained that my clothes cost too much (my clothes were 2nd hand and my shoes were $1 Bobos from Family Dollar.). She liked to complain about how much she had to spend in gas driving me to the hospital because I was sick all the time (medical care was free). I was a burden and she always pointed out how much more money she would have and how better her life would be if I had never been born. Despite that, she never got a job to improve our situation. She was content to be married to a monthly government check and let us live in poverty, the poverty of alcoholism and abuse. Even as a child, I realized that the only thing my parents would do in life was serve as examples to others of what not to do in life.
Without anybody to help me or give me advice, I decided to take a year off college, and I thought that wandering, writing in a journal, doing art, and working might be a good way to figure out what to do. The only problem is that I would be completely on my own. It wasn't 1950 anymore, and times had changed for the worse. Somethign like that was very hard to do in the 1990s. I had a full academic scholarship including living expenses, but my scholarship money would not come in for the year that I was taking off. I didnt have the safety net that parents owe their children, they were still alive, but they had never been "parents" to me in any way other than in the sense that they gave birth the same as stray cats and dogs in the back yard. I didnt have any savings. I had been completely on my own since age 17. So I had nobody to help pay rent for me, give me any advice, or in any way make this transition easier. I wasn't on good terms with grandparents or with my many aunts/uncles/cousins by default - they hated my parents. They also hated me, but I have no idea why. I had never asked them for money. I had been a straight A high school student (admittedly at a 23rd rate public school in a bad zipcode), and I had straight As in college, a top tier research university. I had never been in trouble with the police or had any behavior problems. I didn't use drugs very often because I had to concentrate on my studies, and when I did, it was low key.)
You could go nearly anywhere on Greyhound for $60 so I bought a bus ticket. The first place I went was New Orleans. While wandering around and hanging with gutterpunks and other homeless in the French Quarter, I ran into a friend from my home town, Monkey. He was nearly 10 years older than me and also living on the street. He showed me how to function on the street. He showed me a few squats, and my favorite was on top of a wall abutting an abandoned warehouse on the bank of the Mississippi just up stream from the French Quarter. It was high enough that nobody could see us up there. Other humans and pigs wouldn't bother you. The former rob you. The latter beat you, take you to jail, and sometimes shoot you if you are homeless. He showed me where to get food. There were several soup kitchens and feeding stations within walking distance of our squat. There was also a grocery store, Verti Marte, on Governor Nuchols in the French Quarter that sold a Po' Boy or a Meat and Three for $5. It was enough food to last all day. He showed me University of New Orleans on the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. They didn't ckeck IDs at the university gymJ. We would blend in with the students, and go in and lift weights, but the main point was to take a shower and do a little laundry. The stalls had doors on them so I would wash my underwear and socks with shampoo.
The dream started as soon as I closed my eyes. There was no obvious transition in awareness. I noticed dream characters talking to me. Plots lines and back sotries unfolded to reveal different dream seauences very quickly. I'm standing on a city street on the edge of an ocean. There are a few pedestrians walking quickly. It's getting dark and a storm is moving in fast. I felt the urgent need to find shelter. Heavy storm clouds were over the ocean. The wind was picking up. I didn't have any money or anywhere to go. I didn't know anyone. In the dream, I remembered back to a winter I spent homeless in New Orleans. I remembered that Monkey had a spot on a wall next to an abandoned warehouse on the Mississipi river just upriver from the French Quarter. We would climb it and sleep on top. It was sheltered by an overhanging roof.
To my left (West) is a sea wall. It lines the sidewalk for 100 meters or so and ends against a brick building seven stories tall. The city extends to the east, but tall buildings block the view. I climbed the wall and looked down the other side. There was a pit, like looking down from the top of a hydroelectric dam where the water is pouring. It was very deep. A srip of land and another wall was on the other side and beyond that, the ocean.
The backstory to the dream popped into my head like a déja vu. I was on the planet Deneb gamma. It was a colony world of the Orion Arm Hegemony. I had been shipped here on a sublight transport ship, but there had been an accident during my cryosleep. My life support system had malfunçioned and fried the memory centers of my brain. I didn't know who I was or why I was there. All of my bank information, assuming I had any, had been lost. I didn't have any money. There was no Emergency Contact information on me.
At this point, the flow of the dream started to break up. Suddenly, I was on the other side of the pit, on the strip of land looking out at the ocean. Ragged black clouds, violent wind. Now I was standing on top of the far wall, and I could see the ocean.
A maelström miles across, turning very slowly. It looked like it would swallow the city on the edge of the sea. It was extremely deep and the bottom was hidden in blackness. It could have been a black hole. I was still lucid but was convinced that the dream was real. I really thought I was about to die. Now, I was on the lip of the maelström being tossed around in the water, feeling and hearing the raging wind and sea spray. I had already crossed the event horizon and was falling in. I would be annihilated.
Recovery:
Just think of it as though you are walking down a frozen winter road,
and you can see a toasty, warm cabin up ahead.
You know you can make it there,
and it'll be so good and cozy once you get inside.
It's just a shitty walk,
and really windy,
but you can still make it there.
You have to make it to the cabin.
You have no choice or you will freeze to death.~
~Verri
Just think of it as though you are walking down a frozen winter road,
and you can see a toasty, warm cabin up ahead.
You know you can make it there,
and it'll be so good and cozy once you get inside.
It's just a shitty walk,
and really windy,
but you can still make it there.
You have to make it to the cabin.
You have no choice or you will freeze to death.~
~Verri
the worst days start waking up tired and stressed, running flat-out and forgetting hunger but remembering why i never took to stimulants, while sipping coffee – black.
the worst days start with dreams reprising memories i wish i could forget. i'll get up feeling knives in my neck and hope that i can get through the day without having to crack a smile.
the worst days start remembering that the hero is the biggest idiot in the room, then finding the mask in my pocket and learning that the idiot is me. the people know i'm fucking clueless, but they don't seem to care. whenever we're in the red again it feels like the only thing i can do is close my eyes, breathe deep and pray that someone will come and take the mask from me.
the worst days start with dreams reprising memories i wish i could forget. i'll get up feeling knives in my neck and hope that i can get through the day without having to crack a smile.
the worst days start remembering that the hero is the biggest idiot in the room, then finding the mask in my pocket and learning that the idiot is me. the people know i'm fucking clueless, but they don't seem to care. whenever we're in the red again it feels like the only thing i can do is close my eyes, breathe deep and pray that someone will come and take the mask from me.
Sorry, I've got to vent this shit. 2 weeks ago, I went to my pharmacy for my daily pickup, everything was fine, the next day, a Saturday, another pharmastist told me it was at the drug and rehabilitation centre, and I couldn't have it till I went there. They aren't open on weekends.. So, script gone. Nobody had told me till it was closed! No call, text, letter, anything from my 'care worker'.
(If you miss 3 days, you lose it. On Saturdays you get a take out for Sunday.)
Frustrated, I phoned the centre to explain on Monday. The clinic nurse blamed me, saying it was my responsibility to collect it from the centre every two weeks, and it had been there from Tuesday. I've never had to go there every two weeks, and I've been taking it for monthe. Nobody had informed me at my last appointment I had to be there every 2 weeks. She wouldn't listen, and went on, and on about it being my fault and responsibility. Now, I admit, I shouldn't of, but I told her it's also the services business, hers and my caseworkers, to return voice messages and their responsibility to inform patients when they need to be there.
Now, because of 'how rude' I was those 2 weeks ago, they ignored 7 calls from me last week. Instead of getting a script now, now I must several group meetings, 20 miles away from my house. I live in the countryside in the uk, no car.
Instead of being able to get clean ASAP, now I am screwed...
(If you miss 3 days, you lose it. On Saturdays you get a take out for Sunday.)
Frustrated, I phoned the centre to explain on Monday. The clinic nurse blamed me, saying it was my responsibility to collect it from the centre every two weeks, and it had been there from Tuesday. I've never had to go there every two weeks, and I've been taking it for monthe. Nobody had informed me at my last appointment I had to be there every 2 weeks. She wouldn't listen, and went on, and on about it being my fault and responsibility. Now, I admit, I shouldn't of, but I told her it's also the services business, hers and my caseworkers, to return voice messages and their responsibility to inform patients when they need to be there.
Now, because of 'how rude' I was those 2 weeks ago, they ignored 7 calls from me last week. Instead of getting a script now, now I must several group meetings, 20 miles away from my house. I live in the countryside in the uk, no car.
Instead of being able to get clean ASAP, now I am screwed...
I've been stuck in a room for months, years even.. sleeping for sometimes 18 hours a day, from exhaustion, and trying to avoid reality by being asleep. Pathetic. I've smoked heroin, day in, day out, trying to block being depressed and stop the anxiety. I have been fooling myself by thinking that 'next day' will be better, someday I'll magically change, or, when I'm down, reminding myself that I'll probably die soon from the recurring pneumonia or perhaps, pick up a needle and overdose.
I've been so brain dead inside and numb, trying to block my past and present, grim reality. I've been in denial for so long, as the alternative just seemed to be stuck with obsessive thoughts about suicide. I've built up a barrier in my head to not have to deal with what happened in the past... argh..
I'm struggling to make sense of things. Every time I think about my past, my suicide attempts and what led me to them, I just feel pain in my stomach, my brain goes blank. I then go back to my routine of trying to block it out, by smoking opiates, sleeping all day and getting absorbed into movies and television, getting absorbed into characters lives. I guess I have no fulfilment, excitement or fun, so I momentarily enjoy getting absorbed into the stories that do. Pathetic, I realise.. I am my own protagonist, I don't want this life any more. I am sick of struggling, of being depressed, constantly smoking h.
I have tried getting help, by opening up to numerous drug careworkers, seeking advice and support on how to deal with the problems that are causing the drug use, but they simply tell me to stop using, as if it were simple as that.
However, there is a catch 22. Flashbacks and vivid memories of suicide attempts, rape, domestic violence.. it is even hard to type. I just got stuck in one of those depressing gazes for far too long. I felt as if I were reliving the darkest of times again, and I can't concentrate on anything else..
God damn.. It's as if I've been waiting for some hoping of enlightenment, some kind of alternative, practical coping mechanism, or strategy to deal with these things, and -then-, I thought then I'll be confident in giving up heroin.
I understand now, I was excepting and asking for too much of them, to give advice on ways to live without drugs, how to deal with my problems that are causing the addiction. I need to find my own
I've been so brain dead inside and numb, trying to block my past and present, grim reality. I've been in denial for so long, as the alternative just seemed to be stuck with obsessive thoughts about suicide. I've built up a barrier in my head to not have to deal with what happened in the past... argh..
I'm struggling to make sense of things. Every time I think about my past, my suicide attempts and what led me to them, I just feel pain in my stomach, my brain goes blank. I then go back to my routine of trying to block it out, by smoking opiates, sleeping all day and getting absorbed into movies and television, getting absorbed into characters lives. I guess I have no fulfilment, excitement or fun, so I momentarily enjoy getting absorbed into the stories that do. Pathetic, I realise.. I am my own protagonist, I don't want this life any more. I am sick of struggling, of being depressed, constantly smoking h.
I have tried getting help, by opening up to numerous drug careworkers, seeking advice and support on how to deal with the problems that are causing the drug use, but they simply tell me to stop using, as if it were simple as that.
However, there is a catch 22. Flashbacks and vivid memories of suicide attempts, rape, domestic violence.. it is even hard to type. I just got stuck in one of those depressing gazes for far too long. I felt as if I were reliving the darkest of times again, and I can't concentrate on anything else..
God damn.. It's as if I've been waiting for some hoping of enlightenment, some kind of alternative, practical coping mechanism, or strategy to deal with these things, and -then-, I thought then I'll be confident in giving up heroin.
I understand now, I was excepting and asking for too much of them, to give advice on ways to live without drugs, how to deal with my problems that are causing the addiction. I need to find my own