What Happened

I HAVEN'T BEEN AROUND FOR A FEW DAYS: I have been indisposed. It all started out at the weekend, when I tripped on a root. No I have not been pestle-&-mortaring "shamanic" Amazonian herbs. I mean I literally fell over on my chin, nearly broke my nose off and got bruises all over me, because of an inexpertly shorn-off 2" stub of root sticking under an evergreen by the library. I could barely move for 15 mins I was seeing so many stars. And I had headache all day and felt sick. People told me to go to Accident and Emergency but why bother? Last time I went and definitely did have concussion I got discharged! Then spent the next week wandering around not knowing what I was doing!

Then three days afterwards, I realized this pain in my side that got worse after I got up and it clicked notably and then I poked it really hard like a disbelieving doctor ~ it really started to hurt then and I realized I might actually have broken a rib!

So now I have to write to the local council telling them they're lucky I'm not an old age pensioner because I might be on a drip now if I was. I mean what kind of idiot person gets rid of humungous fricassing bushes and then thinks ~ o no! I can't be bothered to pull that last bit out. I'll just leave a 2" high stub and another section trailing like a tripwire. That'll make my employers REALLY HAPPY!

Hmmm... Yes and there's more. A couple of days later the phone rang. It was an old acquaintance offering a free sample of some "legal high" thing he said was "like E(cstasy) mixed with coke ~ you'll love it". Well I did try it. 0.2g of a white powder that smelled uncannily of candy. I snorted half up each side of my nose because he said swallowing it produced more uneven effects among different people and snorting was more reliable. But it killed my nose! Then just three minutes later the most incredibly pleasant high started off. It was far nicer than snorting cocaine and way quicker than MDMA (ecstasy) ever came on up my nose. 20 minutes later I was diving deep in my own brains and feeling like Buddha, a feeling that lasted a good 2 hours, followed by about 4 hours of quite some speediness. I took it at 6:30pm and got no sleep till nearly 5am.

Now of course I feel more run down than ever before. And I don't even know what that stuff was. He said it's called "Rush" ~ I suspect he selected that name as virtually Google-proof. And I'm not at all convinced it's legal.

When I was much younger and far more impressionable I shelled out £20 or so on a vast tome called PIHKAL by Alexander Shulgin. The title stands for Phenylethylamines I Have Known And Loved. Phenylethylamines are drugs in the ectstasy-mescaline category and run a spectrum from quite speedy (MDEA) to very entactogenic or empathogenic ~ or even entheogenic ~ as they like to say (MDMA) to trippy (MDA) to very trippy (2CB, mescaline et al). This man had a licence from the United States Government to manufacture for personal use and experiment with these otherwise illegal substances. There are about 150 of them. He tested all and wrote up notes, complete with dosages and remarks. Now I suspect this stuff was a rarer one of these. I know that stuff called PMA (paramethoxyamphetamine) was going around in the 1970s, and it was then, long before MDMA ever became an issue, that the entire family of these drugs were banned in Britain.

Phenylethylamine, the substance after which this entire druggie family's named, naturally occurs in chocolate. It's also known as PEA. Women's magazine articles will cite this and it's supposed high-inducing properties. But Shulgin found it to be orally inactive in any dose...

... (Unless, that is, something else in chocolate kicks the stuff in!!)

And also, I just realized, of course, he's a MAN ~ it's WOMEN who get off on chocolate... so maybe that's our PEA-mystery ....

Now I've little more to say, and apart from all this I've been totally absorbed in my book. I read the entire thing; now I'm ploughing back through with dictionary and notebook, so I can read yet again ~ and every single word with which I was unfamiliar's been translated ...

And how was YOUR week ..??!?

PS If you're interested in any of those mysterious substances mentioned the best place to read about them is EROWID.

PPS: read Dr Shulgin's write up on PEA, the supposed "active" ingredient in chocolate here.

MADONNA TUNE
The UK top 20 was playing last night and MOST of the tunes had this Ibiza-trance sound. I've never heard the British charts sound so ridiculously similar ever ...

And all else I can say is: Madonna, you're a 50-year old woman. Really!

CELEBRATION