A Dangerous Legal High?

It would be easy to dismiss Ben Walters as just another casualty of illicit drug use. The 18-year-old student died at a house party in the small English town of Berkhamsted earlier this month after taking a stimulant known as Mephedrone.

But Walters hadn't consumed a banned substance. The white powder he reportedly took – which produces a euphoric high similar to Ecstasy – is legal in Britain and sold openly on hundreds of Internet head shops.

"Over the past year, the quality of MDMA that I was getting got worse and eventually dried up completely," says clubber Andrew. "I see Mephedrone as a way to get MDMA-like effects without having to go through the hassle of trying to get good MDMA."

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So many new drugs out there now but most are chemically similar to many of the old drugs. What from I understand this mephedrone is similar to "Cat" that people used to steal from Vets. It wasn't ever on my list of drugs to try but I saw some people using it. MDMA just won't go away. In manageable doses there is nothing wrong with it. People will always try to bend the laws to put it in the underground market and ideally one day make it legal.

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New John John Jesse Interview!

John John Jesse is one of the first artists I fell madly in love with via the internet several years ago. From the rough NYC punk scene of the 70s and 80s, John is now living and working just outside Philly and he was recently interviewed at his home.

I hadn't seen anything new from him in a long time and have never seen such an in-depth interview about JJJ so this is a super "get" by J.L. Schnabel. Go see the rest of the photos.

Wikipedia | Website

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Doing the B-12 Shuffle

I'm proud that I've been drug-free since 1991 except for the occasional blunt. Some would say that marijuana is a drug but I consider it a medicinal plant.

Normally when I need a pick-me-up I use caffeine or an energy drink but caffeine's not doing it anymore and I'm never going back to drugs or prescription pills. So what's an addict to do?

This morning at brunch with friends I got a few energy boost suggestions that I may try out.

One friend dug into her purse and handed me a small bottle of 5-Hour Energy, grape flavored. On the listed ingredients, it has B-12 - 8333%, 500 mcg. According to my daily Centrum, 6 mcg is the suggested daily amount so I don't know about this one.

Another friend swears by Gummy Bears B-12 Vitamins. She chews one in the morning and buzzes along all day. She got them at CVS so I'm going to try those as well.

What gives you a boost, mon ami?

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Exit Through The Gift Shop - A Banksy Film

Banksy, the renowned British graffiti artist, whose artworks are often satirical diatribes on topics such as politics, culture, and ethics, is shocking the independent film world with what may be the greatest film prank of all time. “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” billed as “A Banksy Film” , will have its world premiere Sunday night (tonight) at the Library Center Theater as part of Sundance’s Spotlight Surprise. {via}

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Bittersweets™

VALENTINE'S DAY CANDY FOR THE REST OF US

Unlike other candy hearts, ours are stamped with bitter musings and mockeries perfectly suited to the dejected spirits of those who will spend the holiday alone, or wishing they were.

"Dumped" sayings include:

I GOT SOBER | HE FIT U FAT | U LEFT SEATUP | USED U 4 FUN
JUST A FRIEND | BACK 2 KENNEL | DORKA PHOBIC | U HAVE A BLOG
RUSSIAN BRIDE | CELEB8 THX2U | DOG IS CUTER | TRADIN YOU IN
FORGET WE MET | KISS A FROG | SHE IS 22! | HE HAS A JOB

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Anti-Valentines Day

If you're not a big Valentine's Day fan, maybe Dirty Rotten Flowers can help you celebrate Anti-Valentine's Day.

This Morticia arrangement is one option. I think one dozen decapitated roses ought to do it. Valentine's Day's alright but these decapitated roses just may work in some cases, especially since Mick and Keith had a lot of success with a song they wrote about Dead Flowers.

When you don't care enough to send anything resembling the very best you might want to send dead fish. WTF? Visit Payback.com and see revenge at its best.

Why did I never think of something clever to do when I experienced a painful breakup? Slut that I am was, I probably thought sleeping with their best friend was enuf.

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My Two Special Diet Substitutes

I want to keep boldly claiming good health so I'll shame myself into sticking with it this time.

I got off to a great start last year but started straying by the summer and fall. Oh hell, by the holidays I was the Tasmanian Devil slamming into the refrigerator and shit, leaving nothing behind but a greasy spot.

Not this time. I've been making fairly good choices and substitutions over the past years but now there is no room for being an idiot anymore. There's just not.

So no more cola. That's a tough one. I've always loved Coke. (Both kinds.) But now I just drink diet coke.

No more alcohol. Which hasn't been a problem in years and years but even having one cocktail a week is off.

So sugar, no fat, and no Cheerios.

Now, those two special diet substitutes?

1) Stevia - Stevia is a South American herb that has been used as a sweetener by the Guarani Indians of Paraguay for hundreds of years. The leaves of this small, green Stevia rebaudiana plant have a delicious and refreshing taste that can be 30 times sweeter than sugar. It's the best sugar substitute I've found and even my podunk grocery sells it and I've just started on it this week.

2) Brummel and Brown - Instead of butter or yucky tasting low-fat margarine, this has ½ the fat and calories of butter, no cholesterol and 0 g trans fat per serving. It's made with yogurt but it just tastes like your regular Parkay or Land O' Lakes margarine. Half the calories and tastes the same? I've been using it for maybe 10 years now.

What are YOUR healthy eating tips?

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Good Results on Blood Work

Thanks for your kind words, dear friends.

I got back some relatively good news from four different tests. Yay!

1) My liver is good, slight elevations but not enough to worry about. Was REALLY sweating that. I had slight elevated levels 17 years ago and thought I was due for Hep C to rear it's evil head and develop like it's done on everyone else I knew back when with my drug history.

2) My pancreas is good. More good news I was sweating.

3) My sugar level is at 95, which is great.

4) But my triglycerides are dangerously high. Too much carbs, high cholesterol? Stress will also bring it up. The doctor said it could lead to pancreatitis or something, if not treated and could also lead to heart disease. So, what to avoid is colas, cakes, cookies, crackers, chips, and fat. No problem, I think. Sweet fruits and fruit juice will be sorely missed.

So I now have medication for the triglycerides and another checkup in 6 weeks.

A giant audible sigh is still wafting over these mountains.

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George Leonard, Voice of ’60s Counterculture, Dies at 86

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: January 18, 2010

George Leonard, a former journalist who foresaw the countercultural tides of the 1960s, then dived into them when he helped define the human potential movement at its de facto headquarters, the Esalen Institute, died on Jan. 6 at his home in Mill Valley, Calif. He was 86.

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A Little Personal Note

I've not felt my usual chipper self lately so my doctor is running a battery of blood tests on me tomorrow and I'm a little concerned.

He's checking my blood sugar, my pancreas, my liver functions, and one more thing that escapes me at the moment, oh yeah, my cholesterol levels.

I'll have the results by Wed or Thur so I hope if there's anything wrong that it's easily and swiftly fixed.

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Your S.P.O.T.

The tragedy in Haiti is trying to cloud my spirit so I call upon some extra chanting, light, incense, bells, gassho, and meditation to retain my peace of mind. It works for me.

Some Buddhists and others have what's known as a SPOT: "Special Place Of Tranquility" and it translates well to anybody no mater what your spiritual level. (S.P.O.T.)

Basic SPOT items are:

prayer or meditation beads, amulets, candles, incense and holder, bells, crystals, and flowers. Incense takes the center of the alter, shelf, or table, with a candle and a bell on the right and flowers on the left. Your SPOT should have a universal flavor that can also be individually customized.

You can chant, pray, meditate, or do a reading while lighting the candle, ringing the bell, or using the prayer beads in any order or rhythm that fits you. A minimal SPOT visit could just be ringing the bell and doing gassho (bowing with palms together), and you could have a more involved SPOT visit when something other than routine rolls around or mood dictates it. It can be as basic or grandiose as you wish.

[MORE...]

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The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

In 1960, Timothy Leary set up an infamous institute at Harvard to experiment with psychedelic drugs. An exclusive excerpt from Don Lattin’s new book on how lifestyle guru Andrew Weil and other freshmen started tripping.

“Yes,” Leary said, “Huxley was the trailblazer. You know, I didn’t have a clue as to the potential of this research until I had my own experience with psilocybin mushrooms over the summer. At its core, you have to understand that this is not an intellectual exercise. It is experiential. It is, and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, religious. But it is more than religious. It is exhilarating. It shows us that the human brain possesses infinite potentialities. It can operate in space-time dimensions that we never dreamed even existed. I feel like I’ve awakened from a long ontological sleep.”

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. By Don Lattin. 272 pages. HarperOne. $24.99.

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Aya Avatar - Drink the Jungle Juice

Erik Davis of Techgnosis explains the Avatar connection.

"Call it ayahuasca lite."

In paradoxical and altogether predictable terms, James Cameron’s ravishing Avatar sets a blue man group of mystically attuned forest dwellers against the aggressive and heartless exploitation that characterizes the military-industrial-media complex, with its virtual interfaces, biotech chimeras, and cyborg war machines.

The paradox, of course, is that a version of this latter complex is responsible for delivering Camaron’s visions to us in the first place.

To wit: before a recent screening of the film at the Metreon IMAX theater in San Francisco, we hapless begoggled ones were barraged with military ads, not to mention a triumphant techno-fetishist breakdown on the Imax technology that would soon transport us to the planet Pandora almost as thoroughly (and resonantly) as the handicapped jarhead Jake jacks into his computer-generated avatar body.

But those are behind the scenes ironies. With its floating Roger Deanscapes and hallucinogenic flora, the manifest world of Avatar instead spoke another truth: that the jungle pantheism that now pervades the psychoactive counterculture has gone thoroughly mainstream. Of course, noble savage narratives of ecological balance and shamanic wisdom have been haunting the Rousseau-mapped outback of the western mind for centuries.

That said, Avatar represents some important twists in that basic tale. The most important of these is that the Na’vi’s nearly telepathic understanding of their environment is grounded not only in ritual, plant-lore, and that earnest seriousness that now afflicts PC Hollywood Indians, but in an organic communications network: the fibrous, animated, and vaguely repulsive pony-tail tentacles that not only allow the Na’vi to form direct control links with animals but also, through the optical filaments of the “Tree of Souls,” to commune with both ancestors and the Ewya, the biological spirit of the planet whose name resonates with Erda, our own Earth.


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“Create Your Own Bodhisattva Vow”

It IS the mother of all compassion.

There are numerous forms bodhisattva vows can take, depending on which Buddhist tradition one practices, but the essence of all of them is the desire to devote one’s life (and all future lives) to helping other beings end their suffering and reach Enlightenment.

Most of us walk around thinking about gaining happiness for ourselves. You may even think, “I would really like other beings to be happy.” A wish for their happiness. In the Buddhist framework, this translates to engaging in virtuous action either so that you’ll have a good rebirth in your next life, or, to gain personal enlightenment.

What sets the Buddhist bodhisattva path apart from this orientation is that rather than simply wishing for others to be happy, you decide that you personally are going to take responsibility for creating others’ happiness, for leading them to Enlightenment. And you will keep being reborn in this human realm time and again, so that you can help beings achieve that. And only when every last being has done so will you, too, retire to your own Buddha paradise.

...the thing about bodhisattvas is that their every action, because it’s motivated by this boundless love for beings, is a help for beings. The ways in which they can help are endless. They say that even the bodhisattva’s act of giving a tiny seed to a bird becomes a seed for enlightenment because of that great compassion.

To give you a more poetic idea of the bodhisattva’s approach to his or her work, I’ll quote “The Way of the Bodhisattva”, by the 8th century Buddhist master Shantideva. This teaching, which Shantideva presented orally, lays out how the bodhisattva lives and practices and works. These verses, from the chapter “Commitment”, are my favorites from the whole book:

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,

A guide for those who journey on the road.

For those who wish to go across the water,

May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.



May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,

A lamp for those who long for light;

For those who need a resting place, a bed;

For all who need a servant, may I be their slave.



May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,

A word of power and the supreme healing;

May I be the tree of miracles,

And for every being the abundant cow.



Like the earth and the pervading elements,

Enduring as the sky itself endures,

For boundless multitudes of living beings,

May I be their ground and sustenance.



Thus for every single thing that lives,

As boundless as the limits of the sky,

May I be their livelihood and nourishment,

Until they pass beyond the bounds of suffering.”

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Brahma-Viharas

I seldom talk religion here except for Buddhism. And it helps me to de-stress when I study it so onward through the fog...

Brahma-Viharas or "sublime attitudes," are the Buddha's primary heart teachings — the ones that connect most directly with our desire for true happiness.

The four Brahma Viharas are translated as the four heavenly abodes and are also called the four immeasurable minds. They are four aspects of true love; four qualities of the heart. They are also the name of a group of concentration meditation practices that can help cultivate these qualities. The Brahma Viharas include Metta (lovingkindness), Karuna (compassion), Mudita (sympathetic joy), and Upekkha (equanimity).

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Take A Trip With Me...

It took years and years and years but I know now that there are other wild and progressive people just like me in this world and I'm still beyond thrilled when I get the chance to meet them-- in real life or online. For probably the first 16, 17 years of my life I thought that I was the only odd ball in the universe.

In the first two years of high school, yardsticks measuring our skirt lengths was very normal. It was the mid-sixties and girls wanted to emulate fashion models Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy and Mary Quant was the makeup maven. London was the hip city to look to for style and music and the Brits could do no wrong.

We were teasing our hair up high to the sky or ironing our hair stick straight on the ironing board. Painting on black eyeliner and applying vanilla frost lipstick. And smoking in the bathroom like the cool girls.

Then girls finally got the okay to wear pants to school instead of skirts and dresses. Yes, I'm that damn old. We protested our way into that in 1968, maybe?

I became the odd one out in the straight world when I began searching for my identity during puberty. Everyone around me was super straight and I began pulling away from the herd. I was the teenage hippie chick who drove her sun, moon and stars VW bus and carried her 12-string guitar everywhere she went.

It sounds so normal now but being a hippie was odd enough if you're the only one in your small town doing it. I stopped traffic because of the way I looked. I had long, wild, wavy hair, wore tons of jewelry, leather, fringe, and my boots with a long skirt or patched, embroidered, bell-bottomed jeans (thanks, Mom). This was a look I cultivated at age 16 but I was made fun of a lot.

I was an outcast. A square peg in a round society. I didn't care so much that I didn't fit in, I just wanted acceptance, not ridicule.

Flash forward to a free styling mother of grand who still loves to sing and play guitar and still marching to the beat of her own damn drum. Still a square peg but acceptance be damned. The world needs to fit my mold, not the other way around.

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Gratitude

Sitting here in this old house looking out onto a blustery January day I'm feeling mighty grateful for my online friends. I get to visit with you today.

xoxo

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Beaker Burgers

Scientists around the world are working to invent a viable way to engineer in-vitro meat – that is meat grown inside a test tube from animal muscles and tissues without using live animals in order to form a simplified version of meat. Besides being a healthier option for humans (due to the decreased amount of saturated fat), it also provides a more sustainable alternative for the environment by reducing carbon emissions produced annually from the meat industry.

As a show of support, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has offered a $1 million prize to the first team who can "produce an in-vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike; and manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially... at a competitive price," as noted to the article.

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{{shudders}}

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Saturday Morning Me

saturday morning me//
milk thistle/ginseng jelly/valerian/a & c & d & e/b-6 & b-12/multi/
green tea/nibbling walnuts & dried fruit/wheat bagel/
long dress over yoga pants/shawl/vintage dingo boots/
3 ivory candles twinkling/sandalwood incense /
listening: fanfarlo/watching: lightly falling snow--brrr/
so how about you?/

Quote of the Week: "The pure love of one person can offset the hatred of thousands." --Mahatma Gandhi

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New Year's Resolution?

Is anybody committing to a New Year's Resolution?

Well, I don't know about that. The only ones I ever managed to keep were the: 'nod face first in the mashed potatos at the family reunion' resolution, and there was the 'late night call for wrecker fee & bail money' resolution, and who could forget (Lord knows I've tried) the 'marry a knuckle dragger by the family christmas tree while my mother's still sleeping' resolution.

Thankfully those days are long gone. So long gone that I just might commit myself to another New Year's resolultion. Um, I'll have to get back to you next year.

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