A Dopey Story

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 The Wedding Cake

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I have a lovely friend. He is so talented and bright. He meditates and says he is a Buddhist, pacifist and a tolerant geyser. Both his parents were doctors and he did politics and chemistry at Uni!?!

He taught himself to play jazz guitar and wrote some very unusual and interesting stuff. He wrote lyrics for some of the tunes as well.

We were not lovers. He is an 'opposite/opposite' in Japanese Nine Star Ki* and that's difficult for relationships, if you are straight.

One of the things we used to like to do was improvise together. So he would play some of his riffs and I would listen and make up lyrics on the spot about what I heard and what I was looking at, at the time, - wherever we were. Unfortunately it didn't work the other way that he could support my pre-written lyrics by inventing tunes that worked for them, but no matter, we had a great time doing what we did, by the riverside on summer days and at home, and we recorded some of it on MD.

Then he went off to South America to the Rio Conference. He spent a whole year in South America seeing as much as he could. He wrote some songs about what happened there and what he saw, and when he came back we went into the studio and his best friend engineered some tracks for him and I sang a lyric in Portuguese and English.

This was great fun for me as it was completely different to anything else that I sing or write. That's saying something because I have six hours of everybody else' s repertoire from Pavarotti to Piaf, Gershwin to Gates, Morcheeba to Marion Montgomery, Sting to Streisand, Ella to Denver, Annie Oakley to Madam Butterfly, Antonio Carlos Jobim to Jack Jones, and two hours of my own stuff that ranges through ecstatically lyrical and cosmic to cutting edge extreme social comment and satire.

We did a few gigs as well, but didn't have a big enough overlap of repertoire to really go down that path... but in any case he had a much bigger dream than just having a band, and that I thought was really exciting. He wanted to build an eco-home with a straw bale house and recording studio, using permaculture and eco loos and solar and wind power, in a warm climate somewhere and he went to help people on lots of sites to learn how to do all that, and showed me the builds on his laptop.

This was where I was really excited. – I am extreme-eco and haven't had a rubbish bin needing emptying for 6 years. Everything gets composted or recycled. I have no detergents whatever in my home, and aftershaves and petro-chemically based perfumes are banned! I don’t drive. I won’t burn Gas. Electricity is from new wind investment with Sir Dale Vince’s EcoTricity - the only real investors in new local stuff. I use charity shops and freecycle and cycle!

His parents had gifted him money to buy land with water and fruit trees and I happily imagined the profits of their pharmaceuticals going to create this eco-paradise!!! He was even able to buy the latest electronic water and atmosphere cleansing 'state of the art' technology gadgets.

When he was in UK he would sometimes base himself with me, and stored loads of stuff behind the sofas and under the table. He slept on the king size futon in the sitting room as we had a house full of other folks at that time. The computer was in the sitting room too, and the kitchen got a lot of use.

I have some friends who are a gay couple and they were getting married and I was going to make them a special, personal  wedding cake and take it to the hotel where the reception was, so they would have it in their four poster suite to snack on in the middle of the night, when all the hotel food was gone and kitchen closed, and after an early dinner and all the drinking, one is starving at 3 am!

So this time, my friend came back from a four day music festival in the woods somewhere, and he was in an altered state. When he arrived in the evening, we sat talking for a while and I would have offered him food - I always offer food. He is a vegetarian. I explained that next day I was going to make this Delia Smith virginally draped coconut cake for my friend's wedding present and that as there were four parts of it, the cake itself, a filling and 2 parts to the topping, that I needed all the kitchen to do it, and I had to leave for the wedding at a certain time as I had a long way to travel with everything.

I don't think we went to bed late. Anyway, next day I got up and made my breakfast quietly and made sure I didn't disturb him, sleeping soundly in the sitting room, in total comfort, lots of pillows and duvet and clean cotton sheets, music through lovely speakers if you want it to drift off to -  I believe in comfort!

I prepared the cake tins with buttered greaseproof paper linings  and got out all the bowls and ingredients ready, stacked up at the side of the table, but I didn't want to whizz the beaters and wake him, and I didn't want to roll into full mode until he had a chance to use the kitchen and eat some breakfast if he wanted it. I used my time well, to prepare my gown and jewelry and makeup and overnight kit.

Eventually I knew I had to begin or it wasn't going to happen. So at about midday, I went and sat down near him and gently said, “Would you like me to bring you something to drink and eat in bed?- (he already had water with vitamin C of course anyway!) - before I start making the cake, as I need to commandeer the kitchen now, and you won’t be able to cook in it for a while once I start”. His consciousness surfaced and he said, “No thanks, don't worry about food for me”, and went back to sleep.

I was half an hour into the cake and he drifts into the kitchen with a bemused smile on his face. Of course he can make his herb tea - and he took it into the garden, so he could also smoke there.

While the cake was baking I took a tea out to the garden too - to say “Hello - how are you doing ?”. He was stock still, tranquil, staring at the moss and weeds at his feet in utter fascination.

I have seen him meditate before and do wonderful Tai Chi movements in the morning sun on the lawn. On a previous visit, I watched, learned and did some with him  But it’s the kind of thing you are alone with yourself with - focusing on your own inner energy and your cosmic connection, and not like for example, circle-dancing or two and three person yoga or two to six person massage!

Anyway, I finished my tea quietly because any conversation was inappropriate, and went back to the cakes.

I had to wait for them to cool before I could split them, fill them, ice it and decorate it. So every kitchen work top and the table was occupied with bowls of filling, and topping, and cooling cakes. He wanders in and says “ I really need to eat something now”. Fine, the frig is there, and there's a shop over the road. I don't remember what other options I had that would be quick and easy and cold except organic non-homogenized milk and my home-made bread – (always) – and eggs and tomatoes and butter and pickles e. t. c. - but he eats a lot of nuts and dried fruits - which the shop over the road sells.

I said, “Well I am busy now, mixing the fillings etc. and running late and getting anxious, so you can sort yourself out something can’t you?”  “Oh yes” he says. As I beat, add, mix, grate and squeeze, I watch out of the corner of my eye as he drifts around slowly and squeezes past me to get in and out of the frig. He took a pan, found the olive oil nearby, heated my home-made bread in the sandwich toaster, made more tea and then fried eggs and tomatoes and looked around almost, at the ceiling for somewhere to put his things, and finally put the pan down on the only spare bit of worktop, still hot and I later discovered it had burned a big hole in the formica… Why couldn’t he have put it back on the hob he’d just used!?

I was not a happy bunny. I think the boundaries of hospitality had been breached. I didn't mind keeping quiet for him. I didn't mind not being able to use the computer or play music all morning. I was delighted to supply organic eggs, home-made bread, milk, oil, butter, tomatoes and tea. I did mind the insensitivity and selfishness on his part. I didn't shout, I didn't get cross. I didn't even comment, I just asked him to please arrange to move his things stored here somewhere else. 

A few weeks later the friend he went to the festival with and who is also the sound engineer, came - on his own!? - and took away a whole car full of stuff that was ferreted away here.

We have not spoken since.

I have trodden the line of tolerance for many years, and if you read the other dopey stories you will know why, and they are all much more serious than this one..

I don't like drugs of any kind. My intuition always said NAAAAHH!... Don’t need them! I did try them a few times - persuaded by lovers or friends I was missing out on what was really special and cool, and feeling an old-fashioned spoil sport and all that. I was always ill and felt terrible and couldn't understand what on earth they got out of them.

People say to me  “Alcohol is a drug, and you drink”

This is true but what needs to be looked at more carefully here, is the quality and spacing of the imbibings!

The alcohol mixes in bottles with colours, - and the blue may well be cobalt (highly toxic) - I would not touch with a barge pole. Jack Daniels has that Benzeney aftershave kick and that’s what the kids are getting that they are unfortunately glue-sniffingly addicted to, by programming and marketing. There is Benzene in all alcohol of course and I take it out with a pinch of Vitamin B2. Clear plastic bottles give you Benzene and I never buy or put alcohol in plastic lined cans or plastic bottles.

There is a brandy from South Africa that has loads of 'flavour' and top note - called 'Spear', but it smells and tastes synthetic to me and I don’t trust it.

Old ways of doing things were safer - apart from DTT and a few other more recent horrors of course.

I love Laphroaig whiskey and believe everything they say about the taste of the rocks, the streams, the water, the  earth, the plants and herbs and sea and ozone in it. I took some in a glass bottle to an outdoor party and offered it to friends. One - who is a very sorted out guy - smokes a bit but doesn't drink too much and likes ‘real’ ales, - smelled it before tasting it and said -” Oh!- Paint thinners”!! I laughed and smelled it in a new light - if you know what I mean - and had to agree with him, and it's spoiled Laphroaig for me!!

My gut feeling about drugs of any sort is that if it’s addictive, it’s not helpful. Certainly alcohol is very bad for your liver, but I think the additives and colours are worse.

When I was in Zambia we drove through villages where they were brewing up maize beer in a bath and asked us to stop for their fiesta. It looked like vomit and I couldn't even taste it! This fiesta would last as long as the alcohol lasted. But they didn't do that every day as we in the West are able to do - and encouraged to do. Alcohol should be a special occasion thing, with a special meal or for a celebration, not every day or even every week. But now the West has abused oil to truck in commercial alcohol and if nothing else, there's a bar in every village and the indigenous people are getting very addicted and wasted.

Dervla Murphy even ended up choosing beer for breakfast in the heat of 'Cameroon with Egbert', but a good well-made beer can put your pH right and that could be important in the heat and it’s only one, not getting drunk on it. Apple cider vinegar corrects your pH too. I think in that Cameroon situation, that the bottles of beer would be healthier than bottled pop or coke and safer than the local water supply. Fluids in that situation are best from fresh fruits and coconut water. Water in those scrunchy clear plastic bottles gives you Benzene again, and bugger all minerals anyway! It's a complete con. But unfortunately the West has truckled out the TVs to the villages too, to waste their time, destroy their own singing and dancing and poetry and culture and sell them junk.

Elephants like to get drunk, they eat the fallen Fece fruits that are rotting under the tree and the fruits ferment in their bellies and the elephants are on a three day binge!. But only once a year, in Fece fruit season. Like honey season in the forests of the Bacu.

It would be interesting to find out if the elephant's personal brewery makes Benzene with that alcohol or if the Benzene comes from the processing we do. Dr. Hulda R. Clark to the rescue for an answer maybe ?        (info@drclark.net )                    Anyway, respect and balance is all.

The legal drugs are harder to quit than the illegal ones, but they are all bad.

Someone said that the hallucinogenic Peyote is cleansing. Maybe so, but anyway you don't do that on a regular basis.

Sting and David Icke did a similar thing with something special in the jungle, I can’t remember the name of it. But I don’t think they make a habit of it.

People say that the techno computer breakthroughs of silicon valley would never have happened if it was not for mind enlarging substances.

I say that you can do all that with meditation, connecting with your angel guides and a clean, calm, respected and healthy body.

I want you to see the programming. Dope is only one herb, and there are thousands of herbs that could just as easily help your respiratory problems or relax you. - The problem is that it's addictive, so you will look at any 'fixed' angles to justify your fix, and that’s no good. The bigger problem is that it is cut with toxic junk, g,m,o'd, hydroponicked and fed toxins for a harder hit. That’s all absolute crap.

Now there is a Hawaiian chill out herb called Kava Kava which is banned! - because it’s so damn good, and it’s not addictive! With this you can choose to sleep or choose to work and you don't  become blinkered and selfish and locked up in another world from people who aren't on it...(A player only loves you when you're playing!) There is a problem with it in Western society though, as mixed with alcohol, it's euphoric and dangerous. And we have too much alcohol washing around everywhere in Western society to perhaps make it safely available. I'll lovingly give them the benefit of the doubt on this decision, meanwhile looking at the profits on alcohol sales tax!

Anyhow, even though Eckhart Tolle says - in the most helpful book I've ever read to deal with the pain of relationships - (by working on your 'egoic pain body') - that he believes there would be terrible violence if there were not stuff-downs of all sorts for our pain, I have zero drug tolerance, and encourage you to stop trying to get out of your bodies and enjoy being truly in them and make lots of tantric love and stay in the valley orgasm and state of ecstasy from clean, healthy, natural, uninhibited, heart- directed, chakra-unifying, moon-sensitive love making, with no drugs, and heal the Love Famine this world has. Come on we can do this!

Your partners are a very special gift to you, and sometimes rare gifts! So never play games and trash those gifts.  And use the Ki to make sure you are not into adrenaline and control and the wrong sort of excitement in your relationships. That will disappoint you in the end and divide you from the laughter and nurture that cooperation with others brings.

'They' are legislating against touch. See my sketches 'Cell Talk - an Inside Story’, 'The Coil' and 'A Nappy Changing Tragedy!

Ask yourself why are they doing this? - and return to Gaia's gift of sensual ecstasy. We can cure 'The Love Famine' and live in paradise again.