TONGUE OF THE DAY

Jacked up on marijuana, she drops acid and is screamed at by a hot dog.

This is a 1969 educational film from Lockheed Aircraft. The horror. The horror …

EASTER TONGUES

HBO’s Bill Maher to Rolling Stone …

BM: I only smoke what floats up there 12 miles off the coast! It’s lucky that there’s so much intercepted marijuana coming in from Mexico that it is floating out there in the ocean, but beggars can’t be choosers.

RS: Why are you so out in front on the issue?

BM: Partly because it has been beneficial in my life, partly because I believe in freedom. What could be more private than what goes on inside your mind? You should be allowed to manipulate that as an adult any way you want. Is it one of our top 10 problems, to legalize pot? No, but ending the drug war would be a great way to save a metric fuckton of money.

Logic is so appealing.

Now, here’s something – When AOL took over Huffington Post a while back, they thought they could get all their paid freelancers to follow the HuffPo model and work for free.

So they sacked a whole bunch of their bloggers while telling them they were still welcome to submit content gratis.

That didn’t quite work out for them as well as they may have hoped. Eric Snider, one of their former writers for the now defunct AOL owned Cinematical blog, blows the whistle on the whole proceedings in this scathing piece. A must read.

And below, a contemporary interpretation of a traditional Easter lullaby. I do trust its gently lilting melody and touching tale of life, love and loss will resonate well with you over the next five days, uplifting your soul and nourishing your heart with the true meaning of health, wealth and true happiness. And if you ask it nicely enough, it may bring you a sausage …

I need a vacation.

JUST SAY NO … OR PERHAPS. WHATEVER.

Some fella I ain’t never heard of got hisself pinched t’other day for buyin’ a touchy-feely pill, and they’s a whole buncha other folks who’re feelin’ a mite het up about it all, if the letters page of today’s Sydney Mornin’ Herald is anything to go by.

Jack Marx had a fine ol’ rattle on about this matter yesterday, and I can’t think of anything more to add to that, so what I’ll do is repost this piece what I wrote for Groupthink back in October of 2009 about my own hellish experiences with illicit substances an’ shit …

MY DRUG HELL

Hi everybody!

My name is Ross! And this here’s the tale of My Drug Hell!

Now, there’s been times in my life when I’ve taken an illegal drug and even though I’m feelin’ rootin’-tootin’ right now, I’m pretty dang sure my past criminal behaviour and degenerate indulgences will come back anyday now and bite me somethin’ fierce on my ass. Why, this time tomorrow my whole body could erupt in a sea of festering ulcers and suppurating sores and boils spitting out stringy spumes of custard coloured pus fifty inches high and I’d have to spend the rest of my life sleeping on rubber sheets and use up all my retirement money on paper towels just cause I took some drugs back in the day.

Way it started was, during the 1970’s and 1980’s when I was a young fella, I used to go out most nights to see bands. Bands that play music? Back then, used to be you go to any pub or club anywhere at all any night of the week and there’d be a band playin’. Sometimes two or three. More on weekends. And there was this one band I used to see a lot and got to know. The girlfriend of the bass player, she used to bring pills along with her sometimes and one night she asked me, she said, “Ross, you want a couple?”

“Okay”, I said.

Diet pills, they were. Speed. Heck people, I was so young and foolish them days, livin’ hard, fast and dirty, I thought I was gonna live forever.

So I took a couple of these pills and later, after the band had finished their set for the night, I said to the girlfriend of the bass player, I said, “Thanks for that, see you next time”, and then I went home and went to bed.

Now, I can’t remember how many of these pills I took over time, maybe they’ve messed up my figurin’ skills and memory stuff, but I reckon there might’ve been as many as ten or fifteen pills over an entire year maybe until I wound up getting sick of this band I was seein’ and started seein’ another band whose bass player’s girlfriend didn’t hand out diet pills to punters at gigs.

I never took any speed again. Not that I found it unpleasant, I just never bothered with it after that. Never even thought much on it these last twenty-five years.

But then, I don’t know any bass player’s girlfriends anymore neither, and if you want my advice on it, neither should you. Once those bitc-, um, ladies get their filthy hooks into you, you’re Arthur one day, you’re Martha the next, wearing an apron and dusting cupcakes with icing sugar.

A few years later, I moved on.

Cocaine.

This is that whole “gateway” thing, yeah?

I’d arranged to meet this girl I worked with and a friend of hers at her flat, we’d have some food, then go see a band play at a club couple blocks away. So I’m there, we’ve had some food, and this girl I work with asks, she asks me, “Ross, you want some of this?” and she lays out a few lines of cocaine.

“Okay”, I said.

So I snorted two lines of that cocaine right then and there and we all went out to see the band play and when they were finished, I said to the girl I worked with, I said, “Thanks for that, see you at work tomorrow”, and then I went home and went to bed.

I never snorted cocaine again. Not because it was unpleasant or anything, it just never occurred to me to keep on doing it. Never has.

But then, I don’t arrange to meet girls I work with at their flats anymore and go see bands play loud music, and take it from a man who’s been there and done that, neither should you. One day, you’re working with someone, they seem nice, they seem fine, but the next day? The next day, you’re probably hanging ‘round their living room jonesing for a fix and maxing out the credit card on eBay buying death metal memorabilia.

But I managed to put that dark night of the soul behind me and move on in life, I did indeed.

Until a few years later.

L.S.D.

It was a party, everybody knew everybody else, we’d all been studying on a thing for a couple years and then it was over and we all decided to have a party to celebrate. There was a girl I was friends with, we’d worked together on a few things, and we were talking and she says to me, she says, “Ross, do you want to try this?” and she holds out this little square of thin cardboard.

“Okay”, I said.

You’ll know the day you’ve hit rock bottom is the day you start chowing down on random bits of cardboard thrust at you by friendly girls at parties and so help me Lord, I hope and pray you never go so far down that bolt-hole of loathsome self-hatred, I surely do.

But I took this L.S.D. and the girl I was with, we spent an hour or so laughing ourselves silly over nothin’ at all, laughing ‘til it hurt, and then I flirted with a few other girls for a bit and then I went for a walk down the beach and sat there looking at the water and the sand and the lights from the shops behind for a long time and then I went home and went to bed.

I never took L.S.D. again. Just that once. Not that it was unpleasant or anything, it’s just that I don’t think on that stuff and haven’t had a mind to all these years through.

But I don’t hang around at parties with girls I’ve been doing courses of study with anymore neither, and if you’ve got so much as a lick o’ sense in that head of yours, neither will you. One minute you’ll be working on a thing together, an assignment, everything’s all gee, gosh and golly, and next minute you’re at a party sucking somebody’s stationary and laughing yourself stupid for no good reason and then going down the beach for a quiet ponder.

It’s a wonder I weren’t bashed up down there at that beach, the state I was in. Yes, it’s a genuine wonder I weren’t bashed up by a gang of darkly foreign hoodlums of African or Middle Eastern appearance, thrown to my knees and forced to do demeaning things upon a person’s private bits with my eatin’ hole. But I weren’t. Praise be.

I’ve smoked pot, too. Marijuana. I smoked a whole bunch of it at various times, yes’m, and ain’t I sorry to say it? I surely am.

Way it was, I shared houses with people for about a dozen years of my life, various people, various places. And I’ll tell you this truth, Sonny Jim and Mary Jane, there’s no greater hell a once humble soul can tumble into than the one where you come home after a hard day’s work and the flatmate lights up a spliff and passes it over and you listen to some music then fix yourself a feed and watch some television and go to bed. Sometimes you wouldn’t even get to bed ‘til well after 11.30 in the p.m. on a weeknight ‘cause you’d been gripped by that devil weed so bad you had to slink off to the café up the road for a piece of cake and a cup of coffee. That’s the type of desperately pitiful pit of despair you find yourself in and it ain’t pretty, I’m telling you straight up.

So listen up now, I ain’t gonna sugarcoat this none ‘cause I ain’t a sugarcoatin’ kind of man, but you find yourself carrying on like that, coffee and cake at 11.30 in the p.m. on a weeknight, you be in a whole new world of pain, my friend, and that’s a world you don’t wanna be gettin’ familiar with.

I’m a livin’ testament to that, amen I am. A livin’ testament to the decrepitatin’ effects of deviant substances and the deviant behaviours they encourage.

There’s a reason illegal drugs are illegal and it’s a damn good reason too.

Because it’s the law, that’s why.

And laws are laws because lawmen reckon they be good laws and that’s why we got ‘em.

We start messin’ around with the natural order of these things and afore you know it, the women’ll start wantin’ to wear pants to work.

Men wear pants.

That’s a fact, goddammit.

And don’t you let anyone be tellin’ you any different, you hear?

WILLIE NELSON’S TEAPOT PARTY

Hell, why not …

The recent arrest of music legend Willie Nelson for marijuana possession by the US Border Patrol in Texas has sparked a new national political effort called The Teapot Party.

Rather than stay quiet about the 11/26/2010 bust, Willie sent an email to Steve Bloom of CelebStoner.com: “Let’s start a new party. There is the Tea Party. How about the Teapot Party? Our motto: “We lean a little to the left.” Tax it, regulate it, legalize it. And stop the border wars over drugs. Why should the drug lords make all the money? Thousands of lives will be saved.”

I suspect it may be somewhat of a mellow-natured movement not much given to the type of furiously stupid cant and bluster we’re getting from the Teabaggers, so fuck yeah, bring it on …

Willie Nelson’s Teapot Party, their other motto is “Fair and Hazy”.

WIREAHOLICS ANONYMOUS

I’ve just spent the better part of the last two months watching a 66 hour long movie. And when it was finished, I went back and watched it all over again. Then I watched the episodes with commentaries.

This movie came in five volumes and each volume comprised ten to thirteen chapters. Like the best of books, you come to the end of one chapter and think, “Just one more”.

Hello. My name is Ross and I’m a Wireaholic.

I hate “The Wire”.

I hate it because it’s made it damn near impossible to watch any cop show or cop movie (even though it is not a “cop show” in any traditional sense), any television series of any kind and not think, “Yeah, it’s okay, but it’s not “The Wire”” or “They wouldn’t do it like that on “The Wire””, or “No, that’s not credible, I know so from “The Wire”, or “This is a limp-dick puddle of piss in a desert, “The Wire” had depth, for Chrissakes” …

I can’t think of anything I could possibly add to the plethora of material that has already been written about this extraordinary series.

During the height of my immersion, I spent many a lunch hour cruising through the streets of East and West Baltimore courtesy of Google Maps streetview.

Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, who plays “Snoop” Pearson in series 3 through 5, used to sling drugs from this corner, North Montford and Oliver …

Pearson has written a book about her life and experiences. I’ve yet to read it, but I fully intend to. I haven’t read any books by George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane either, three of the series’ regular scriptwriters, but they’re on my “must-do” list as well.

If you were to ask me a year ago what the capitol of Maryland was, I don’t think I would’ve been able to tell you. If you were to ask me where Maryland was, I would’ve thought for a moment and said, “One of those small states clustered around New York? East coast?”

But if I ever manage to get to the States (something I’ve always wanted to do, but I’m crap with money, always have been, my fault entirely) I’d like to visit Baltimore. Not to roam around those means streets of the East and West which would be patently stupid, but to see the good of the place.

Perhaps to eat a “lump crab cake” at Faidley’s (mentioned a number of times in the series), even though it looks like a deep-fried stomach cancer.

Here are a few “Wire” and Baltimore related resources I’ve enjoyed recently …

There’s a wealth of material available on The Guardian and Steve Busfield has an excellent episode-by-episode blog there covering all five seasons which is well worth digging into. It starts here and has links galore (also spoilers, so take care if you’ve not worked your way through every episode yet).

Irvine Welsh and a few other crime novelists look at the series. Also from The Guardian, Jon Wilde pronounces it the “greatest ever television drama”.

From “The Atlantic”, Mark Bowden profiles David Simon, “The Angriest Man in Television”.

I’m not surprised he’s the angriest man in television, considering that, over five seasons, not one single actor from the programme was so much as nominated for an Emmy or a Golden Globe. What on earth did this man do to piss people off?

Sociologist turned Baltimore police Peter Moskos has a blog, “Cop in the Hood”. Moskos is an advocate for drug legalisation and regulation and a member of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition).

The Baltimore Sun and UK’s The Independent have swapped crime reporters to look at the different ways crime is reported and dealt with in both countries.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the possibility of change on Baltimore streets due to the ReWIRED for Change programme.

The New York Times highlights a few of the nicer aspects of Baltimore life and entertainment.

And a big “fuck you” to Warner Home Video Australia who, for some inexplicable reason, have yet to see fit to release season 5 locally even though it’s available everywhere else on the fucking planet. And thanks to the friend in Sydney who “lent” me her, er, “copy” of it, which I have subsequently “lent” to two other friends I’ve hooked into the series. If you’re losing money fellas, it’s because people are buying it from Amazon or ripping the bloody thing from the web, so wake the fuck up.

MY DRUG HELL

Smelly Tongues blogs at Groupthink …

Hi everybody!

My name is Ross! And this here’s the tale of My Drug Hell!

Now, there’s been times in my life when I’ve taken an illegal drug and even though I’m feelin’ rootin’-tootin’ right now, I’m pretty dang sure my past criminal behaviour and degenerate indulgences will come back anyday now and bite me somethin’ fierce on my ass. Why, this time tomorrow my whole body could erupt in a sea of festering ulcers and suppurating sores and boils spitting out stringy spumes of custard coloured pus fifty inches high and I’d have to spend the rest of my life sleeping on rubber sheets and use up all my retirement money on paper towels just cause I took some drugs back in the day …

Continue reading “My Drug Hell” at Groupthink …