Upon the shore of The Icy Sunless Sea

"You maniacs, you blew it up! Ah, damn you, God damn you all to hell!"

Col. George Taylor, Planet of The Apes

Yesterday I spoke to a Dutch friend that I hadn't spoken with since last August. It was not a happy conversation. I had been hearing a lot about the Dutch talk of changing the marijuana laws, and not for the better, but I hadn't really believed they'd do it. But according to Joop, the maniacs of the far-right party have finally gone and done it: already in the south of the Netherlands, city by city, falling like dominoes, they are starting to shut the coffeeshops. By 2012, no longer will foreigners be able to buy marijuana. Only adult Dutch citizens will be allowed, as members (with drastically limited memberships) of a single dispensary, to purchase marijuana.

Joop was terribly despondent, very bitter. I sympathized with all my heart.

For years, the Netherlands were a bright and shining city upon a hill at the heart of civilization. Marijuana, the most harmless of all "drugs", was, in that singular corner of the world, a something, like chocolate, or a hammer, or gasoline, a commodity that you could simply walk into a store and purchase. Known, indeed proven, to be less deadly than aspirin; study after study showed that legalization not only brought no harm, but actually proved beneficial to society on many levels. Chocolate, hammers and gasoline are more dangerous.

It was a golden moment in the otherwise grim 20th century, that swell hundred years that brought us The War To End All Wars, followed right on its heels by one of a magnitude worse by far, Fascism, Nazism, totalitarian dictatorships, genocides on a scale unimagined in history, the atom bomb, all those joys of man's progress. In the early 20th century, zealots and pinheads had stripped people of their rights to alter their conciousness as they would, culling the options one by one until leaving us the worst of the worst, alcohol and tobacco. Out of all of the world's pharmaceutical options for pleasure, they've left us with a legal poison and an addictive carcinogen. 

The Netherlands defied them and said "we can do better" and they did, for all the world to see. But now a retroactive tide is lapping at their shores like the higher ocean waves of global warming upon their below-sea level country.

The door had been closing even when I last lived there in 2006. The year after I moved, they finally, after a series of every increasing restrictions, had done away with mushrooms, that safe bastion of the psychoactive open doors of perception. No matter what concessions and appeasements the reactionaries got, they were never satisfied. 

Fools might consider this a mere pothead's lament, but this much more to those with understanding, another symbol of the rising dark tide in our world. As Joop said, "It's like your country, despite everything they know, allowing a group of small-minded ideologues to turn back the clock to Prohibition in the name of a false morality. How can you justify turning backward?"

Now, at last, truly I understand. I had not, in my heart of hearts, believed they would do it. The Dutch are cheap, and I couldn't believe they'd abandon the vast inflow of pot tourism money that pays for so much of their socialist paradise. But they let ideology triumph over rationality, and they're really doing it. And if they're willing to do that, then the underpinnings of what I believed people will and will not allow are sea changed.

I'm like a priest who's lost his faith. There really is nothing safe or sure in this world, no hard-won progress that madmen may not successfully conspire to snatch from our grasp. 

If this can happen, what can't? Now at last I see that we're just one slip of a sane grip away from the re-banning of abortions, of the reopening of debtors' prisons, of legalized slavery, of burning witches. I finally understand there's nothing these people wouldn't bring back upon us all in the name of their beliefs.

Sound crazy? As crazy to me as recurtailing marijuana, even in the face of the financial, social, medical benefits it offers. 

Joop said the voices of the Netherlands who talk of the negative aspects of marijuana tourism, have, typically of those types of people, blown the issue all out of proportion, much like the rabid but clearly loony brand of moralism of the pro-lifers ("we've got to kill the abortionists to save the babies!") espouse.

My world is shaken. To think, I could have invested years in building a life there, in what I thought was a place of permanent reason, only to have it snatched away. I would have been as deluded as a Jew who stayed in Germany after Kristalnacht, each time thinking, "well, this must have finally been the worst of it, things will not decline further."

My complacency is gone. As in the famous Pastor Niemoller quote, when the housing market collapsed, it didn't matter to me because I didn't own an house. When the economy sank, it didn't matter to me because I didn't have any investments. When the jobs dried up and unemployment soared, it didn't matter to me, because I didn't have a job. Before all that, no tsunami drowned me or hurricane flooded me or earthquake killed me, because I wasn't there, I was elsewhere. Safe.

But now, no place is safe. How stupid I've been. Everything I have could disappear in an instant, in the blink of an eye. Tomorrow gas could be $10 or $20 a gallon and the grocery store shelves could be empty, and not only because of an untrustworthy earth but because of evil men, of wicked Powers and Principalities. Having weed will be the least of my worries. Starvation, disease, war, they could all be here overnight--it's happened all throughout history, time and time and time again. Now is neither special nor blessed against the past.

After this conversation, I thought these thoughts and became despondent. Joop, unlike Americans who claim every time a president they disagree with is elected that they're "by God moving!", is putting his mouth where his heart is. He's in the process of moving to Portugal. The only laugh I got was the fact that he's furious that he's put up with shitty Dutch weather all these years because of his patriotic belief in the progressive thinking of his country, its people and the politicians. 

Our shared disillusionment.

I slept poorly with dark dreams.

Today, for the first time in weeks, I really wanted a drink. Not a drink: a lot of drinks. I wanted to get stinking, shitfaced drunk and drown my sorrows. This afternoon, driving past the liquor store, my eyes were hungry and ferverish. But I've resisted. I know that the only thing booze drowns is hope; sorrow, like shit, floats.

Now what? This is no doubt a sign of the times of Europe, of the world. Goddamned European Union: many cooks spoil the soup, and nowhere does the soup stink as much as in Brussels, that heart of the bureaucratic plague spreading across the continent. Bless the Greeks, fighting back against the theft of their birthright, their independent native land, defying the threat of the imposed IMF yoke upon them. 

I'm to old to be a soldier or to fight in the streets, but the trigger finger of my hot heart still yearns to shoot soulless bureaucrats down like zombies in a movie. 

To my credit, I warned every European who would listen, an American Cassandra, that the euro was bad news and they'd come to regret the EU. I laughed sourly at the expression on the Dutch pusses when prices shot up 50% overnight when the euro actually became the currency. 

I think the only thing that has kept them from bitching as openly is the Europeans are frequent and long travelers and their strong euro has, as much as it has wrecked their economies at home, made the whole rest of the world ridiculously cheap for them. 

I feel like it's the early 1930s again, the depths of the depression still unplumbed and the war clouds over the horizon yet unacknowledged, but there nonetheless. Just waiting. 

If nothing else, I should thank the Dutch for their idiocy. It has quashed my long delusional love of Europe and my silly plots to someday return. Old Europa is dead, New Europe lives, and I am not anymore, nor probably ever will be again, a lucky resident or happy transplant. The EU and 9/11 have conspired to make life there off-limits anymore, barring some improbably fluke of life-changing luck, like winning the lottery or having a European woman fall in love with me, a marriage and relocation. So I'm ungratefully grateful for the eye-opening. Barring the wildly improbable unforeseen, the dream is dead.

Wrestling with my own mind

For a long time, drugs and alcohol substituted for introspection. What little self-examination occurred was bleary, cavalier and self-justifying. There's a theory that homo sapiens developed its intellect in order to provide rationalization for its actions.
For the last six months, I've been giving the old noggin a real going over. I have a serious problem with reality. My moods and emotions color every aspect of my perception; my mind is like the shifting rainbow of an oilslick on a puddle. It's very frustrating when clarity is the goal. What seems solid one moment is ephemeral the next. Memories blur, fade or reconfigure themselves.

I've thought sometimes that the inside of everyone's head is different, with this analogy: some are like office buildings, functional partitions into places of business and commerce. Some are like homes; some cozy and comfortable, some austere mansions. Some are banks, some are libraries, others are churches, castles, garages, prisons. The symbolic gamut of human endeavor.
Mine, I think, is a carnival, with its funhouse, its hall of mirrors, its freakshow.  And beyond the lights of the midway, the music of calliope and laughter, the dark empty silent fields surround it in the night.

A friend told me recently that I've said many times that I was quitting alcohol and pharmaceuticals. I was surprised: I don't remember any real efforts at it. I was all talk, no action. That, perhaps, is this difference this time; I'm not speaking of what I will do, but of what I have already done.

When I stopped the SSRI and the rest, the melancholia of old came back, but fleetingly. I wouldn't call myself jolly, but neither am I depressive. Some of it I attribute to my focus, my preoccupation with an attempt to clear the Neptunian fog the pervades my thought processes.
I don't think I'll ever be able to bring it under control. At best, I can divert my imagination to more productive channels. Then maybe I can achieve some degree of perspective in my day to day life.

Neuroplasticity

I won't go into history of man's conception of the mind and how it functions; that's available with minimal research. But historically it was believed, once the mechanics of the brain were rudimentarily understood, that the brain was fixed after the pliability of childhood.
Modern neurological science has killed that concept. The brain continues to grow, to change, which gave rise to the idea and the word itself, neuroplasticity.
From birth, experience alters the structure of the brain. Addiction theory is being revised by new understanding of how the brain functions and adapts to changes in consciousness.

The rain of life's experiences falls on the plains of our minds, cutting channels as we learn to think. Rivers form in our consciousness, cutting into the slate of the tabula rasa. Ruts begin and every new moment either joins the stream or forms new paths.
We can change the way we think by merely thinking differently but it requires effort, a Corps of Engineers of our cognizance.

But there's a terrible caveat. As water follows courses already carved, so does our new input tend to follow the old riverbeds that have eroded into our awareness, our way of thinking. If we don't exert the effort to divert our new experiences from the hollows of our old patterns, they dig them deeper, out of habit and convention. We respond to the new with the old.

And that's the struggle I'm undergoing. I have realized it is time for the great undertaking of the reshaping of my mind, of the way and flow of it. Because the old paths aren't serving the new times.

Now not only must old habitual thinking be forced into new channels, to carve new neural pathways, I need new experience in order to shock the old rivers of ritual thinking into new realms of conscious behavioral modes. You can remake your brain and mind by merely thinking about it; science has proved it.
That is the challenge. By merely acknowledging the need, I take my first step on the new roads. El camino nuevo. 

Fin de siècle

It's the end of a long cycle. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to reconnect with my old friends. I don't know if they feel it; maybe it's not so much the same for them, or perhaps they're just oblivious to it. Some are aware it, they've told me so.
Times they are a'changin', in a profound way. A way that won't be obvious except in retrospect from the perspective of the future. The generations to come will acknowledge that we lived through the Chinese curse of "interesting times".

"There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."
- Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene 3

Tempus semper fugit, ergo carpe diem.

I'm not big on metaphysics, although the more I learn of quantum mechanics, the more I understand how blind we are to the fundamental nature of reality. If there's anything history has shown, humans and their science are inevitably always proven wrong in retrospect, especially when they're most confident that they've understood it all.

In the summer of 2009, a friend received a call on a lazy do-nothing day while we were lounging around the farm: there was an Indian (subcontinental, not Native) at her friend's work, doing "readings".

"Let's go!" she said, and I said sure. We jumped in her Prius and drove down to Santa Rosa.

He was a wizened dusky little man, doing what amounted to fortunes, but he brooked no skepticism. If you weren't worthy, you got sent away. He accepted no money. It was peculiar, I couldn't figure his scam. He really didn't seem to have one.

He told both my friend and her friend things, privately, that they took seriously, and didn't discuss afterward, or maybe they did and I just don't remember it. When I sat down, he asked my birthdate, if I knew the time: I did. He sketched quietly for a moment, consulting a book in Hindi. 

"For the next two years," he said, "you are better off than nine persons out of ten."

"After that?" I asked. He was right--I was riding high, flush with cash, sedate and secure in my position at my job that I loved doing. 

He circled his hand in an impatient "wrap it up" motion--"then it is a time of endings, before new beginnings. The old will pass away, it is the end of a great cycle, of many years. Make peace and prepare. All will be changed for you, and the many." 

"Avoid investments in property," he added cryptically, and that was it. 

And so it has come to pass. Everything is in flux. I'm ending my job, and many aspects of my life. Whether they are over because I decided it or it was just going to happen without my choice in the matter, I don't know. I should be glad I'm rolling with the tide, having chosen before it was decided without consulting me. 

I haven't been back here in three years, and haven't been back to City Zero in six. City Zero is entirely transformed, though the bones of it are starkly visible against its new skin. 

I suspect as much for all my old haunts, even Desolation City, where I have never returned since I left in 1997. Ah, but perhaps it t'was not the city that was desolate, but I that dwelt therein. 

First, six months ago I quit drinking. Then, I figured that while I was at it I might as well stop the Prozac and tricyclic antidepressant and the tranquilizers and the sedative-hypnotic sleeping pill. Why do many little cold turkeys when I could just do the big one. It wasn't as rough as I thought it would be, in the short term, though the long term readjustment to being my old self has been traumatic. After a couple of weeks without drinking, it occurred to me that I had probably done some considerable long term damage over the years with the booze and the pills and the weed. Perhaps some "smart drugs" were in order, something that would boost my battered neurons back to life, revitalize my poor abused grey matter. I started taking piracetam and hydergine (they are reputed to work synergistically to revitalize the brain). The research states that the combination "counteracts degenerative vascular cerebral pathology" and "improves the symptoms of mental deterioration through increased metabolic cerebral function." Just what the doctor ordered.

It was a kick to the hornet's nest of my memory banks. A dam broke in my head and the past flooded my mind. The world took on a frightening clarity. Still I hung on. The waves of the open sea were a good analogy: the come and they pass. You just have to ride them out, crest by trough. But for the last few months, I've been awash in memories, haunted by them, even.

I think the worst of all is I don't sleep like I did. I took long deep effortless sleep for granted. Not anymore. Sleep is shallow and uneasy with unpleasant dreams that are troublesome at best, ferocious nightmares at worst. 

I started running desultorily in 2009 but since I quit drinking, I committed to it in a big way. As hunger is the best spice, so the best sleeping pill is exhaustion. As a part of the general scheme, I wanted to get into shape, and I needed sleep. I haven't been this fit since the early 90s, whippet thin, pounding out ten miles every morning, minimum. More if I'm agitated, and that's often. I have my old 30 inch waist again (something I never thought I'd see again since high school) and weigh 165 (though weight is irrelevant--it's how much muscle you have as opposed to fat). My old fighting trim. Gaunt again. 

A summer storm just whipped through, and I went out and stood in the rain and watched the lightning thrash the sky as the warm wind tore wildly around me. It felt good. 

Time for a nice glass of chamomile and decaffeinated green tea, ready for bed.

  

Weary old bones

Getting old is hell, but, as they say, it beats the alternative (by which I assume they mean the grave rather than some other positive theoretical option like eternal youth).

I'm in the process of getting back in touch with old friends after a six year hiatus, except for my oldest friend whom I've always been in touch with, if sporadically. Hey, can't an old friend be forgiven a psychotic lapse of friendship? I just want to let bygones be bygones and keep in touch for however many years are left in our allotted spans. John Donne's bells are tolling. I'm not the grudge holder I once was, and it was my fault anyway. 

After multiple computer crashes, I'm combing through email accounts for photo attachments for pictures I sent that would have otherwise been irrevocably lost. Just scraps here and there, but better than nothing. One of my favorites that sums up so much of my life:

This photo says everything about me that can be said. It really is quite definitive, literally a thousand words if not more. A snapshot of the soul, a lifetime conveyed in an instant.

Here I am, back again

I thought I'd rather just use this old one than set up a new one.

I'll be updating it regularly now that I'm back online in a reliable way. I opted for a netbook instead of a smart phone, since wifi is everywhere. Hell, this thing is only slightly larger than a smartphone, and I can make calls with Google and Skype for free instead of fucking with the cellphone companies and their onerous contracts.

I'll describe the past few years and the lacunae thereof.