Indigestion & Henry David Thoreau!

"Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our bad dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever glorious morning?" Not my words, Cyberpeepers, y'understand, but I trust that you too recognise something of yourself in them.

For sometimes, it seems, that Everybody's Runnin Round Town, Feelin Down, Feelin Oh, So Busted Flat! Pessimism IS growin! Bitterness IS showin!....But We at Stoned Holy Headquarters don't wanna hear no more of that crap! Apologies for the Double Negative are hereby extended to ye stick-in-the-mud kinda folks who are irked by such grammatical discrepancies but the S t o n E D h O L y B L o g G e r's got other mud pools tae wallow in.....and here's me glorying in the sticky brown stuff and thinking that when yi reach middle age as a Pop-Flop-Down-But-Not-Entirely-Out and have had to endure years of impoverishment and creative emasculation as well as seeing the bank balances of Westlife swell to untold millions, it can be quite hard to push down the bile and choke back a Primal Scream so ear-splitting it could Shake Lucifer! So it is sometimes you just can't stomach anymore of the chit chat 'bout this n that & everybody pushin in at the bar where everybody's moanin, groanin n dronin on & all you ever hear is Blah, Blah, Blah!! So, unless yiv got something good to say ; unless yiv got a heartwarming tale of bumping intae Mr.Smilesman just as you came ooty Gregg's the Bakers with a hot sausage roll in yir greasy little fingers ; unless yir gonna tell me about seeing a luminous sunrise this very Holy Beat Morning and realising life is a wave that must by necessity break upon the seashore, then just stay the hell away from me!!

Sometimes the awareness that you have failed to prosper in this world would just about be tolerable if it were not for the fact then of recognising the kinda dimwits n retards who have flourished in it at the same time! Oh, Brave New World, that has such people as Dappy From N-Dubz walking around with a full wallet upon its cobbled thoroughfares! It is in times such as these when the words of Mr. Henry David Thoreau, late of Concord, Massachusetts, which opened this monologue, can ring fairly hollow and dyspeptic belchings upon the sorry state of humankind can issue forth from yir gobhole!

In the meantime though, what to do but shut the front door firmly behind you and stride forth resolutely into the infinite bustle of hunting down n grubbing up a few meagre coppers just to get by and do it all again tomorrow. Sun Come Up. Bright Red Dawn. Time Go By. Day Has Gone. Some Folks Dead. Some Folks Born....and The Big Wheel Keeps Turnin' On! So, when you find yourself, as we all do, thrown into the necessary business of money, with all it's dreary machinations and alienating relationships, some other lines of  Mr. Thoreau's do seem indeed, all too prescient :

In the busy streets, domains of trade,

Man is a surly porter, or a vain & hectoring bully

Who can claim no nearer kindredship with me

Than brotherhood by law.

If I may be so bold, Gentle Readers,  can I recommend that when next you find yourself crawling into the familiar comfort of the home where it is you billet yourself away from the vicissitudes of life and the doings of humanity ; rather than reach for that bottle of Chablis or that fat dooby or whichever it is you use to self-medicate yourself, take an hour instead to peruse the works of Mr. Henry David Thoreau and the short essay that is "Life Without Principle" in particular. Enlightening and Enrichening Stuff! That cat Thoreau may not have been a mover & a shaker but he threw his pebble in the pond and knew it ever true that Love Radiates!! The Stoned Holy Blogger claims him as kindred and hereby lets it be known to the Vastness of the Digital Blogosphere  that his star is most assuredly fixed within the Heavenly Firmament & his name is now & forever more etched upon one of the fluted Ionic pillars that partially supports the mass of the Pediment of the Pantheon of Stoned Holy Rollers Gone Before!

Here Endeth The Sermon!....

& the Stoned Holy Blogger Exits Stage Left 

Upon Descending Wearily From The Pulpit!!

Going Gentle Into That Good Night!

Ah Youth! Entirely wasted on the young, of course, but what can a Pop-Slop-N-Flop Down n Out like the S t O n E d H o L y B L o G g E r do about the inexorable tick & tock that is the sound of the Tyranny of Clocks!!

But yes, it seems this rock n roll mallarkey is a young man's game :  For when better to play the game of 'making it' or being 'big in Japan' and yet be blissfully unaware of how tawdry and cynical a business it really is ; When better to devote your energies to the narcissistic business of climbing onto a stage and demanding people take you seriously ; When better to feel the burn of the sexual imperative in every fibre of your being ; when better to be willing to live on a diet of pot noodles and the assorted garbage that is available for consumption at motorway service stations & finally, when better to climb in the back of a van with the rest of the gang and tolerate endless hours of discomfort and beery farts!

But here, a word of caution - "Know This, O Young Ambition, All Mortal Greatness Is But Disease." Chilling lines there from the briny and melancholic pages of 'Moby Dick' but perhaps fortunately, most Rockin Rollin Young Bucks wouldn't know their Herman Melville from their Herman Munster!....

Surprising then, you may think, that the fires here at S t o n e d H o l y H.Q still burn and we play on! Broken Doon n Middle Aged maybeez but these Rollers are still Stoned n Holy....to a fashion! Yes, the waistlines have imperceptibly crept up a size or two, the hair thinned a little on the top of our Stoned Holy Noggins and yes, it does seem that we are indeed  Going Gentle Into That Good Night! And as for the Raging ; well, all apologies to drunken Welsh poets, dead n gone before they hit 40, but it's all very well writing about Raging when yir tanked up on whisky but some of us have still gotta go to the supermarket when we're low on muesli and Greek yoghurt! Lasagne doesnae put itself in the oven now, does it?!?! The car needs road tax renewing and petrol in the tank to run!!...So take that, Mr.D Thomas of Laugharne, Wales!!

But the Rage and the Righteous Indignation are there, smouldering away someplace inside. Somehow, impossibly, after all these years spent in the Sensory Deprivation Tank that is Home Town, the fires burn still. And that is why these feelings of Impotence and Frustration can still take hold and sting the heart within this mortal coil - When you find yirsel whiling away the dreary & penniless hours doing anything but actually playing music, all too aware of diminishing returns and the reality of the cold, cold grave creeping ever nearer as you struggle to strike a balance between the conflicting concerns of five or six middle aged losers and what they like to do in their spare time away from the mundane business of doing mundane jobs and paying mundane mortgages and mundane electricity bills! Oh for the heddy days of youth when childcare and the endless yawn of social functions never entered the equation. I grow weary, my friends. Someday, I hope to find me some place where I can lay me down & rest my head & ease my mind and sing the 
No Mo' Trouble Blues. A secret hideaway, a leafy bower of a kind, somewhere you can leave all your troubles behind.

 Who the fuck would choose the life of the Stoned Holy Roller? Only an idiot like me.............