Tuesday 11 September 2007

Our Antipodean friends

So as I trawled through the world of internet television, I was flicking through some video content, one of the pieces was about an Australian girl, who got into smoking marijuana and it became an addiction, she woke up, did a bong, got up had a coffee and smoked a blunt at the kitchen table, then met up with her hippie friends and drove to someone's house and smoked until she came home at midnight. She continued to do this until one day she heard a voice telling her to jump out the window, then another few voices telling her to do all sorts of crazy, religious and dangerous things. She had developed schizophrenia. The girl checked herself into a mental hospital that deals specially with cases involving severe aural and visual hallucinations brought on by psychotropic drugs and where the average stay is 3 weeks. She was there for 6 months. Possibly because she was crazier than a shithouse rat, and the drug was the trigger for her mental breakdown. Or it was because she simply did smoke too much. I watched in horror as her life fell apart and she couldn’t even walk down the street as the buildings closed in and her father (in her mind) worked for the CIA and was going to have her "taken care of". I left the programme as I had decided to continue to apply myself to the project I had been working on the previous day, the complete ransacking, tidying and clearing out of my "office". So as I drew the task to a close, I found a small bag of grass on the table under my keyboard. Instead of immediately thinking of my Australian hemp smoking pseudo artiste friend, I plunged headlong into construction of a powerful mind altering joint. Having 12 personalities was low on my list of importance as I scanned the desk for a lighter and lit the top of the perfectly made cone. I sat for a moment allowing the smoke to fill my lungs and my mind to slowly empty of coherent thought as my body slipped into the chair. Quiet filled the room and sun shone in the window. For a few seconds I had complete relaxation, but my moment of peace, serenity and utter abandon was shattered almost immediately with the sound of a posh English voice filling the room, "are you going to paass that or must i have to aaask". I must have frozen in my chair for what seemed like an age and then slowly swivelled to face the voice. A well dressed middle aged man with a thin ginger moustache and a wide brimmed hat sat cross-legged on the couch facing me, his left foot bobbing up and down and his highly polished shoe dangling from his toes. I gazed down at my hand. The joint had gone out. I lit it again and leaned forward towards the man and extended my fingers towards him. He plucked the joint from my hand. "Splendid" he cooed. There was a long pause. "Hallucination" I finally replied. He reclined in the seat and moved the hat back onto the crown of his head, the joint pointing upwards from his thin fingers. "Well dear boy, I wouldn’t normally be an advocate of it, but you should have listened to the bloody Australians"