Notes from on High

There's more to say about this, but I'll do so after I've been for a walk ...

Why do I feel so much better when I’m high? So focused, and full of energy. Able to do things but more connected. When I don’t smoke, I have no withdrawal symptoms (I do, occasionally, particularly if I’ve had a drink as well, get irritated and find my mood swinging wildly from acceptance to irritation, but more of that below). Is this the ultimate consequence free drug?

I have a good friend who has also been something of a mentor. His name is Ray Cooper and he’s a longevity expert, with a focus on food, and how it’s grown, and the natural world, and how we treat it. He restored a 19th century mill just outside Kiltimagh and cleared the Glore River for about a mile stretch in front of the mill of shopping trollies, tyres, multiple types of other rubbish, including literally tons of bottles and broken glass. This is Ireland, after all. And I’m Scots, so I appreciate this relationship between the bottle and the human.

He said to me the other day that he had just read an article saying that only one glass of wine, or even a small amount of any kind of alcohol, already does damage to every cell in the body. Now, I don’t know how big the glass of wine he was talking about was, but I just said to Noel today, “Let’s see if we can have just one glass of wine tonight. Now, it can be a large glass … (and I thought about the goldfish bowl glasses we have, usually with G and T, and laughed)”. He said, OK.

Noel doesn’t have a problem with alcohol. I do. I always have had. I’ve practised Harm Reduction for the last few years. I’m basically addicted to anything. Inclined to become attached, as the Buddhists might put it! But some addictions (at the moment I’m addicted to doing 20,000 steps a day - again, possibly because this was Ray’s recommendation, but also, very weirdly, because apparently some time in the last five years, I must have inputted 750 active calories as my daily goal, and that equates to roughly 20,000 steps … and now I can’t change the setting … spooky, isn’t it?). We’ve practised harm reduction. Because, if alcohol is toxic to all cells, you don’t have to be an addict to be doing yourself serious damage.

How long has the alcohol industry known how harmful alcohol is, and how addictive? Why aren’t there the kind of dire warning pictures on bottles of booze as there are on cigarette packets? Why, indeed, is it legal at all?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not for prohibition. I think this is a personal issue as well as a political one (er, obviously, since it’s me with the addiction problem. I won’t tell you what else I’m addicted to. I’ll leave that to your imaginations. Suffice to say, I have some foibles …). Addiction is part of the human condition, isn’t it? So Gabor Maté argues. It is the ‘hungry ghost’ inside which has a huge appetite (yes, I’ve got a huge appetite. For life! For every aspect of it!)

I loved those 18th century aesthetes that gorged on pleasure. One of my favourite poets is Coleridge. Larkin, too, who was known to hit the bottle. Tim Morton likened our current dis-ease, our hunger to fill ourselves that cannot be satisfied, that continues to demand more feeding, whether sex, shopping, or serotonin (and dopamine).

My favourite drink is red wine. I love the symbolism, and I love the sensation of the first glass of the day, the sudden rush of blood to the head, the whole body relaxation, and sometimes, on the second or third glass, the urge to dance, or sing, or write poetry, or cook.

But it’s poison. I know it’s poison, because I feel it each morning after I have drunk. I take an alkaseltzer for the pain. The dry mouth. The regret at eating too much (my drunk brain thinks it’s wise to eat something like crisps or tacos to soak up the alcohol. It’s right - I’m right, of course).

Brain, or mind? What or who am I, this person that can look back at the self and wonder at its addictions, its machinations? Can even feel sad for it. I’m not sorry for myself! I don’t feel pity, exactly. What I feel is compassion, for this creature, caught up, like all of us, in the mesh of past, present and future events, of genes and politics, of history, language, culture, and also of the birds and beasts, soil and rain, that were the fellow shapers of my perspective. I’m sad to be killing myself, in other words. But I’m also deeply accepting of the fact that this is where I am. Harming. But much less than I did at earlier stages in my life. Significantly, I no longer have bulimia, which is a hell of a thing. A hell. A human cage, controlling all movements, all thoughts. Alcohol is a breeze after that! And now I have an implant, thanks to Noel’s support, which looks so much better than my broken crown which I had to have when my front tooth cracked. Bulimia’s not great for the teeth. And I probably had it for thirty years.

The I that’s looking back is some sort of metaconsciousness. It’s sapiens, self awareness, and it’s not an automatic state, but something that we sometimes, stumble upon, but which, if we manage to keep ourselves in this state, for however long, allows us to see ourselves in action. And it is exactly this that gives us access to compassion for ourselves, to seeing ourselves crawling along habitual paths like ants blindly following chemical instructions. Suddenly we short circuit the path, we wake up.

Meditators have been shown to be able, with much practise, to light up all areas of the brain at once, much as a baby’s brain once worked, with neural connections that subvert or bypass the habitual patterns of thought, with gamma waves, and to keep that pattern going even when they’re not meditating. This, I think, is what awareness looks like in the brain, this lighting up of all areas at once, a sort of electromagnetic reflection of an understanding of interconnection, beyond the brain, out through the body, and into every single interconnection with every single wave-particle in existence. What fear, then, of death? (Funny: I still fear death, but that’s for another day).

So, to go back to the beginning: if feeling stoned is not harmful, or relatively unharmful (I smoke the stuff, which is not exactly cannabis, but something like it), especially compared with some of the other substances available, like alcohol, or behaviours that hurt, like shopping (I buy almost all second hand clothes), or gambling, then why should I feel bad about doing it, guilty, or afraid? Since I’ve rather put my head above the parapet by writing all this, let me add some caveats: I do not think that this is a one size fits all by any standards. There are countless people for whom cannabis or its derivatives, LSD or other psychedelics (natural or synthetic, though the former are generally preferable) are highly unsuitable, for whom they are downright dangerous. Among these are people whose brains are not fully developed. There’s extensive evidence that young people are at much higher risk of psychosis as a result of ingesting weed, or its derivatives, for instance. There probably ought to be a limit of the age of 25 for all drugs. Including alcohol. So that the brain can develop and the individual have at least a passing chance of being able to learn how to look after themselves (that wouldn’t have worked for me: I was pretty broken by the age of 12. But there could be, potentially at least, interventions, like meditation classes, for people like me. I was introduced to yoga by my mother at 15 and it was the single best piece of medicine she could have given me, though neither of us knew it then, and it certainly didn’t stop me having another 30 years of bulimia. It probably kept me alive though. That, and running. Running away? Didn’t matter. I was sweating it all out, and that’s always been good, for me.

I was debating for a while about whether or not to put this up. As some of you might have realised, what I write is as much to allow myself to make myself vulnerable, as to explore the possibilities of writing, but the other side of that is that I’m something of a risk taker. And that includes putting up some things that are a little risque. I’m all for that sort of thing.

It’s a kind of perestroika for the mind.