The Noggin, the Napper, the Nut ; this is where Reality is constructed. Sadly perhaps, cultural orthodoxies are loathe to leave us be and snipe at our heels incessantly like salivating dogs! There is, alas it seems, the tiresome business of actually dragging our sorry arse through the 'real world' around us regardless of what subjective paradigms we inhabit in the undulating folds of the cerebral cortex. Even if you are one of those blithe spirits who has soared angelic after ingesting LSD-25 and decided, like Roky Erickson, that you didn't 'ever want to come down,'' the 'real world' does seem to have the nasty habit of getting hold of you and kicking you hard in the seat o yir breeks!! I'm damn sure Roky can't have been best pleased with his time inside the Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane! If you are one, such as Syd Barrett who has waved Auf Wiedersehen to 'Reality' and crawled into the Dust Bowl of your own Psyche after, say, protracted exposure to the T.H.C onslaught of the New Super Heavy Skunks developed by Stoned, Dutch Hydroponic Boffins, you will still find the 'real world' sticking it's nose in your business and insisting on pigeon-holing or pathologising you! Brian Wilson may very well have strolled down Golden Strands of Californian Sand beneath Shining Sapphire Skies inside his nut-box but to the rest of the world he was just a man with a sandpit in his living room who liked to butter his head and put it between two slices of toast!! Julian 'can't' Cope got fried and Screaming Jay Hawkins could hear voices - when he wasn't impregnating enthusiastic female members of his fanbase - but they still had to exist, to a fashion at least, in a world of bank statements and out of date MOT certificates, council tax payments and putting the bins out on Wednesdays! Yes, it's all very well singing "Every Day Can Be A Magic Carpet Ride," whilst you're playing in jingly-jangly rock bands, smoking puff and banging hippy girls......but, cmon, if you live on the 18th floor of a crumbling 60's tower block just off the Paisley Road in Glasgow and yiv just had a letter fae the DWP informing you you've been sanctioned again, Ahm guessing the chances of you regarding life as a fantastical and enchanting excursion across the Heavens on a rug which can defy the Laws of Newtonian Gravity are slender to say the least!!
The S T o N e d h o L y b L o G G E r though, is contented that, no matter how ramshackle his affairs in the world of actually walking about with real spending money in his pocket, somewhere, deep in the inner workings of the Stoned Holy Brain Box where the gears & cogwheels grumble n grind, there is a Land of Milk & Honey wherein he walks on Gilded Cobblestones along Paths of Glory where Gamine Dancing Girls in Diaphanous Drapery await at the roadside with Goblets of Frothing Ale & Sundry Comestible Delights, ready to bear him forth to Secluded & Languid Pools hung with Eglantines and Woodbine. Here, these Darling Creatures can Balm the Wearisome Traveller's body and initiate the Seeker into Goaty Mysteries of Pan and his Dark & Ancient Woods!!
Meanwhile, back in the everyday realm where money and the people who take its tawdry illusions, venal hustlings & sordid corruptions seriously holds sway - where most of us are forced to spend most of the waking hours of our lives complying to its Conventions, Constructs & Codes - the world is overseen by boring, lifeless, pernicious, self-seeking little turds who play their stupid little games whilst telling the rest of us it's a 'serious' business they're engaged in. This World of Politics and Politicking is the ultimate revenge of the dweeby and nerdy little shits at school, who though academically gifted had no empathetic intelligence to utilise with regards to their relationships with their fellow human beings! Theirs is a world where tender & fragile souls, like Syd or Roky, don't 'cut the mustard' and are left to flounder as the artistically bereft crack on with the money making business at hand, exploiting their fellows and cocooning themselves in objects and things as their dehumanising fetish demands!! These are the people who have held us back since day one ; these are the people who populate the corridors of power ; these are the people who command armies ; these are the people who sit in boardrooms ; these are the people we are told to look up to and admire...Are these the people who are defined as 'Sane'?
