Tidings of Comfort & Joy? Not Likely!!

'Snow is falling all around me. children playing, having fun.' These, the heartwarming if not intellectually stimulating, triflings sung way back in '85 by Shakin' Stevens, one time Elvis imitator and purveyor of  Pop-Slop....& long before the SToNedhOLybLOgGEr
finally bowed to bitter reality and, realising that
Pop Stardom would never be mine, settled down to life as a splenetic Punk Rock Dog casting a skeptical n sneering eye on the Inanities & Insanities of Evolution's Human Experiment! But let us shoogle free of Self Pity's Iron Hold, at least for now, for this is Christmas 2015, and it isn't snow that's falling but BOMBS!! British bombs falling on Syria! Children will most assuredly NOT be playing nor having fun!

Such was the depth of our democratically unelected leader, Mr. Cameron's concern for those poor Syrian people that planes were dispatched with almost indecent haste the moment the votes were in! Our Thunderous Instruments of Terror must have been in readiness on the runway, for soon they had 'Slipped the Surly Bonds of Earth', payloads heavy, the sound of M.P's cheering in their wake!!

Once the only thing moving across the skies above the Middle East was that fabled 'star of wonder, star of night'.....what would those Oriental Kings think today if casting their gaze heavenwards?  British jets coming not with Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh but Death, Misery & Destruction! It's lucky Joseph and Mary were looking for shelter when they were ; any young couple today looking for somewhere for the heavily pregnant wife to rest and pop out a babe in swaddling would find not only the manger and stable but the whole damn town reduced to rubble!

One must wonder how a man, who, not even a month ago, hung his head low in mock solemnity to show us all how he valued the lives sacrificed in two world wars, is now champing at the bit to send today's young men off to do or die. Though the Stoned Holy Memory Banks are by no means fully functional, due, it must be admitted, more to the ravages of time than any deterioration brought on by years of Rawkinrollin' excess, I can see the pudding faced, sanctimonious little shit now, standing at the Cenotaph with his poppy proudly displayed, his appropriately sullen expression showing us all how he, unlike that impious Corbyn fellow, fully understood what all those unimaginable lives had been lost over and the loss and anguish experienced by their families!!

Britain's youngest ever M.P, Mhairi Black, tweeted how she would "never forget the noise of some Labour and Tories cheering together at the idea of bombs falling." The same Parliament, it must be remembered, that also cheered the outbreak of the 1st World War. And yet, from our vantage point of almost a hundred years since the meaningless, mechanised slaughter of millions finally came to an end, I think most people would struggle to tell you what it was all about!  Perhaps, long years hence, when  Mr. Cameron himself and his vainglorious bullshit have long since departed this world and few are around to remember just how much of a puffed up, self-important, self-aggrandising little prick he was, Miss Black can cast a world weary eye back to these very days we find ourselves living through and try to explain what the hell was going on to incredulous students of history!

Such are the Prime Minister's appalling hypocrisies, that in little short of a month he will once again be in sombre mood as he marks the birth of a child in the Middle East.  Phrases such  as 'Joy On Earth' & 'Goodwill to All Men' shall tumble cosily from his mouth. They shall be of nothing! They shall be counterfeit! They shall be but a meaningless rote repeated parrot fashion by an empty headed, heartless, insincere bullshitter! The garbage doubletalk of a political chiseller and fraud!!

Perhaps 'Mr. Ca-Moron' could listen to Shakin' Stevens again to finally understand that Christmas is "the season for Love & Understanding...Merry Christmas Everyone!"  If a dodgy Elvis impersonator from Cardiff gets it, you'd think the privileged son of a stockbroker, who had the best education this rotten ship H.M.S Britannia can offer lavished on him at great expense, could do likewise!!

Let the last words go to neither Cameron or, indeed, Shaky but our Stoned Holy Roller gone before us, Brother Jimi Hendrix. A true Message of Love for any Christmas but poignantly, it seems, for this one especially ;

"When the Power of Love

Overcomes the Love of Power,

the World will know Peace!"

Hallelujah, Sweet Brother, Jimi!!

  

Save a Seat For Me, I'll Soon Be There!

The mercury inside the thermometer is dropping fast and the milliners and vendors of gloves and scarves know their tills will soon be ringing. Piss-cutting squalls are blawin' doon the damaged streets and lashing the grey tenements which crowd round StonedHoly HQ. Hard times ahead. I predict a Winter of Discontent! You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows!!

Yes, Winter approaches and it's gonna get cold. Especially so if you exist at the ragged, arse-end of society where the Politics of Alienation really bite! Where the Dogmas espoused by political elites about 'wealth generators' and 'trickle down effects' are spoken in a language you can't comprehend. Where the High Priests of the Cult of the Individual never go to see the true price of their Crippling Fetish. These are the places the 'Great and the Good' - or as I know them, the woeful, sociopathic, sorry-arsed excuses for human beings who play out the Pantomime of Power - never go ; the places their smug and deceitful, hollow, empty words can never acknowledge ; the places their 'intelligence', fostered by years at expensive and privileged schools, colleges and universities, can't penetrate and are unknowable to them ; the places their cankerous, malformed hearts never go out to, where their unseeing, visionless eyes look and yet see nothing, the places their stunted, rigid and spiritless minds can never even begin to imagine.

These are the spaces inhabited by those human beings who, unlike them, were not born into lives of pre-ordained position ; were not prepared and schooled for entitlement ; were not succoured by wealth and connections reaching back generations. These are the lives lived by those unfortunate enough not to have school ties and old boy networks aiding and abetting their predestined rise to heights long since prepared for them. The pillows long since fluffed up, the sherry long since decanted and brought to room temperature! No cliques, no camps, no cabals or coteries, no circles or cronies opening doors and whispering passwords for these losers of life's lottery. No Bullingdon Club larks for these destitute souls. No need ever to stick their prick in a pig's mouth, for they were never gonna get where that kind of camaraderie gets you!

These are the people who society has discarded. The people who have nothing and have nothing to do but to sit on pavements with their hand out. The people, yes, YOU & I both, walk past everyday! Maybe if it was just one person we could help them up....but it's hundreds, thousands, an army! Every street. Every town. Every city. We are left impotent by our inability to offer something. We become immured. We can't be reached or touched behind the walls we build round ourselves. We become inured, desensitised to walking past people and doing nothing! We invent our own narratives or blindly parrot the ones concocted for us - junkies, cheats, phoneys, scroungers, foreigners.

I can't fucking take it anymore!!! Not only am I affronted that it is I who is made to be the one feeling guilty for doing nothing but I am simply seething with resentment that it is I who has to step over people and not the corrupt, disgusting bunch of cunts n creeps in the lofty ivory towers and gated security bubbles ; not the bloated moneygrubbers who skulk the rotten corridors of power ; not the swaggering, callous fat-cats who sit in the boardrooms which top their towering palaces of steel and glass. It is I who has to actually walk past real people and not the people who created this sorry fucking dehumanising mess!! It is they who NEED more than anyone to actually SEE the real human cost of their grotesque, anachronistic, soulless game! It is they who simply MUST  look into the eyes of people their stunted, sick, diseased platitudes and orthodoxies have beaten down. It is they who SHOULD be made to countenance what they have actually created!! It is they whose perverse paraphilias have stripped these people of nearly everything!....But maybe the real reason I am more and more unsettled by the extent of Hobo Town is the realisation that I soon may be there!!

Brothers & Sisters, this World is off kilter...When Will It Be Righted?? Who the hell knows the answer to that one.....but Ah know the answer to one thing if Ah know anything....and that is that it's LOVE that's gonna get us there where we can start to putting things aright. The Healing Must Begin!

Here Endeth the Sermon!

Love Spreads......so Keep On Spreading!

LONDON CALLING!

John Keats was a London boy who paid a heavy toll for skulking poetically through the twisting alleyways of the capital. One imagines him stumbling & spluttering through the miasmic backstreets of the fast industrialising metropolis, sick with desire for a certain Miss Brawne of his acquaintance, who's bosom was even at that lovelorn moment heaving like two heavenly globes imprisoned, as they were, within the tightly laced confines of her corset!. Two centuries later, and with Keats and the quivering objects of his Lovesick Blues long dust, the S T o N e d H O L y b L O g g E R found himself in a city infinitely more populous yet with infinitely goodlier airs. Especially so in the commotion of Columbia Road, E2 where the aroma hungry citizens of Londonburg come to buy flowers. Not yet half past ten and market streets were clamouring with the clatter of  buyers and the chatter of sellers. The espresso machines were steaming noisily as the coffee vendors plied an already brisk trade. Their cappuccino trails wafted out open windows and joined the floral fragrance and warm diesel fumes to create a special kind of perfume.

Eau de Londonville bewitched the Stoned Holy Hooter whilst the Stoned Holy Peepers were enchanted with the vibrant colours of exotic blooms. Blooming of another sort was in evidence as pretty girls flounced in summer frocks. The Brick-Brown-East-End streets were host to an assortment of Runyonesque characters : Lenny the Pug squatted by the kerbside and was fawned over by cooing coquettes whilst his tongue flopped suggestively out one side of his mouth ; Pierre the Poet was there only to recite poetry through a loudhailer to the disinterested passers-by. I listened to Thomas Hardy in his sonorous Canadian drawl and was transported! In our waistcoats & trilbys, the  s  t O n e D H o L Y B L o g g e R and the Stoned Holy Bass Slapper Que Magnifique, Professor Juicy Clash, must have been viewed as some such escapees from a Runyon short story about two street punks busking for the folding to put down on a cuddy called 'Stewball' they had got the heads-up on from Mickey the Bookie! Hush-Hush on the Q.T and a guaranteed earner!

Pavements duly Rawked and pockets heavy with what London had tossed our way, we headed to Bethnal Green and curry before on to the Stoned Holy Sanctuary to divvy up the spoils. Choice ale in hand we basked in the sun, bullrushes swaying as green parrots flapped overhead and the lazy Lea glided by on it's way to a meeting with the Thames. Strange to think 10,000,000 human souls were hemmed in around us, blowing up & going down, creeping in & sweeping round their man made habitat in much the same way as their litter and rubbish!

And as the Sun disappeared out beyond the Westway the city took on it's nighttime aspect as the City of Shadows, A sea of yellow neon lights flickered on and flooded the hollow pavements of The City of Strangers. The shop-fronts of the Consumer Temples of Chelsea and Kensington beamed brightly out into the City of Cracked Dreams. The mock Louis XVI furniture, the stylish kitchenware and shoes sat patiently in the windows, waiting for people who already owned these things to come and buy more!

Meanwhile the Wild Colonial Boys were chasing alcoholic oblivion and the Kings of Cardboard City were bedding down for the night. The City of Refuge had nothing on offer but shop doorways and indifference. Even to it's own, The City of Stone offered only homelessness or exile. Somewhere in the City of Silence a penny was falling inbetween the cracks in the pavement. And the City of Vampires made room for one more jaded human husk underneath the bridge......... And all this whilst London whored itself out to the highest bidder. Stop!...Listen!.........London is Calling to the Zombies of Death!!!  

Musings Upon Being Thought Of As Disillusioned By A Young Fellow Of My Acquaintance!

"The Road of the Roller is Rocky

The Way of the Roller ain't Smooth

The Path of the Roller is Lonely

But the Word of the Roller is Truth"

These words were not inscribed on the frontispiece of  'The Book of Moron' or uncovered in any such similar volume found under a hedge by some credulous hayseed! They were not revealed unto some wandering fruitloop, half-crazed through lack of Viands & Vittals in the course of wanderings through the arid regions of the Middle East!! They were not given to my Animal Spirit Guide as words of Ancient Higher Knowledge from some metaphysical realm  for the Crass and Corrupted world gullible folks inhabit! They were not witnessed as a vision by three bored schoolgirls out for a stroll in some provincial Mediterranean backwater! Nor were they delivered via a dream to some moonstruck loon convinced The End of the World As We Know It is a week next Tuesday!

Perhaps if they had been then more people would recognise them. These lines were hewn by world weary Stoned Holy Hands aboard the 'Ship of Fools' which is currently rudderless and adrift in a vast, Godless desert of Time & Space!! Perhaps that life-cruishing emptiness accounts for the staggering ability of much the greater part of humanity to believe in any old shite and then fall into line, in a febrile army of believers. This never fails to Bewilder & Dumbfound we here assembled in The Church of the Holy Rollin' Rawkin'!! Whether it's  burning bushes, holy books or divine intervention into the earthly sphere through means of flood or pestilence or showers of amphibians from astonished skies, why is it, one may reasonably be permitted to ask, people are always ready to take aw this pish seriously!!   A recent approach to divine intercession has been through C.I.A trained and supplied gangs of embittered young men brandishing AK-47's! And how can we not mention the inspired use of fervent young believers carrying rucksacks weighted down with explosives assured that the instant they pull the cord they will be transported to someplace called Paradise where a surfeit of hymens ripe for the tearing and shiny baubles and silken robes to hang upon their person will be theirs to claim!. God does indeed, it seems, move in mysterious ways - Boom!

contemplating the
Duty of Civil Disobedience!

The long, long list of claptrap Homo 'not so' Sapiens has been, and continues to be, more than prepared to give credence to can surely not be anything but disappointing! Indeed, it can acutely colour one's discourses with one's fellows and severely damage in how much regard we are willing to hold them. This is a danger. Indeed, let's be honest here, it is a pitfall I myself am more than guilty of falling or, indeed, plunging willingly head first into, on numerous occasions!

But one must never conflate the multitude of idiocies that occur in this world or the many instances of downright cretins prospering in it, with the world itself! Therein lies embitterment and disillusion. We're all aboard the Ship of Fools, sure enough, but, O, the Seas are Majestic and the Spray is Invigorating! The raindrops falling into the limitless oceans are yours to make of as you will!



Perchance, O ye Parishioners of the Blogosphere, to be disillusioned you have had to have been sheltering under an illusion in the first place. Well, we'll have none of that mallarkey in the Church of Holy Rollin Brethrenness, thank you very much! We're all Dialectical Materialists here in the coldly rational and analytical chambers within Stoned Holy HQ. Though champions of reason and enlightenment we are, perhaps rather paradoxically, dreamers also
......and what the hell is so wrong with that?

unwashed & slightly dazed
after a week at Walden pond!

Dare to Dream! Dare to believe this Wonderful, Kaleidoscopic Riot of a World can be a place where not a one us is thirsty, not a one of us is hungry, not a one of us is homeless, not a one of us is illiterate, not a one of us is not afforded the opportunity to use their innate human creativity!! Why the fuck SHOULD we live in a world where a tiny minority of warped and debased failures dedicated to the craven, sick, paralysing, enfeebling, hollow, dehumanising fetish that is money control the lives of the rest of us???!!!  I choose to dream on and dream of a world to come where not a one, not the least of those amongst us need work for more than two days a week to enable them to provide the necessaries for a comfortable living. The rest of our time will be taken up with what we should've been doing all along since first we raised our sorry monkey arse onto two legs and developed a brain whereby synapses could fire and mouths could talk words of language, such as these very ones I'm using right this Holy Beat Moment of the Now - namely we shall be taking psychedelic drugs and fucking....or at the least, cuddling one another!!! Lemme Hear Ya Say 'YEAH'!!!

"You, May Say I'm a Dreamer....but I'm NOT the Only One!!" These words from our late departed Stoned Holy Brother John Lennon. Right on, Johnny Boy!....Our late lamented Stoned Holy Brother Henry David Thoreau said much the same thing when he said " Our Truest Life Is When We Are In Dreams Awake".....Beautiful, H.D, Beautiful! So.......

Dreamers Keep On Dreaming!
Disillusionment Blows!!!
Life's A Gas!
Strike Your Match!
Light Your Fuse!

Urbi et Orbi

It's Easter time...and I'm figuring, between mouthfuls of poor quality chocolate, that if the Pope in Rome can grumble n groan about his gripes with the world from his balcony on the Vatican, then the S t O n E D H o L y b L o G G e R  can grouse n grouch too! Admittedly my congregation may not number in the multitudes of the Pontifex Maximus, lost in the Cavernous Chamber of Tinternet Garbage as it is, but one feels this is surely a case of Quality not Quantity!

True, Easter Sunday has passed, but when it comes to dates n times we, here assembled, in The Church of Stoned Holy Brethrenness and Good Vibes are more lax in these matters than the Heavenly Father. It does not deem a team of 12 astronomers staring at the movements of heavenly bodies to decide the precise date of Easter as necessary : We merely observe the heavenly bodies strutting their stuff in the neon-lit, trashy, rockinrollin streets or the rosy cheeks of the girl working the checkout at the supermarket.....or, more pertinently, that the tender stems of the lenten lillies are dancing neath the overarching lattice of bare beech and sycamore branches ; we see too that May is already oot and cloots can be cast ; we note the shining buttery petals of the gorse blanketting the hillside ; we behold the darling buds already being shaken by rough winds. Easter is Everywhere!

Slip inside this house as you pass by, and you also, gentle reader may experience regeneration. Metaphysical authority figures in the sky are in no way required to explain the coming of this Springing time. The spinning of the Earth and the angle of its tilt must surely be seen, by any mind capable of Reason, to fully reveal what's really happening......and contrary to what many believe, especially those who rigidly cling to Bronze Age superstitions to lend some semblance of meaning to their lives, this in no way detracts from the Majesty and Magic of the Renewal!

Can it really be a coincidence that the Pope and his devotees celebrate the Resurrection in springtime? Look around you and you may bear witness to Resurrection happening right outside your window! See the saffron rays of dawn rising again and hear the poetry and word magic that cloaks the cults of Eos and Aurora, Ushas and Eostre, our pagan goddess of Spring. That point on the right side of the compass, 'East',  bears etymological testimony to the fact that The Dawn Goddess was revered & honoured countless centuries before some geezer in the Middle East got himself nailed to a couple of planks of wood for seditious preachings yet, reportedly, was seen two days later as right as the proverbial rain!

For adherents of The Rolling of the Holy Stone, chocolate eggs n greeting cards, fluffy bunnies n cute yellow chicks, hot cross buns n simnel cake, crucifixions and empty tombs just don't cut the Easter mustard. Here in the Stoned Holy Cathedral of Love supine fertility rites are more up our Easter street : Dark Delphic Mysteries whereby cavorting goat girls cloaked in gossamer robes with luxurious tresses tumbling sinuously from veils of silk invite you to ingest spicy and succulent comestibles from sacred salvers and drink lustily the unknown draughts and brews contained within holy goblets : States of sensual reverie and voluptuous abandonment : Initiations involving a surfeit of willowy and comely dancing damsels....you know the kinda thing! Anyway, before i get too carried away, green shoots are showing, things are sprouting, blossoming, budding, swelling, issuing, springing......let's hope that amongst all this fecundity there can be a Rejuvenation, a Rebirth, a Renewal, a Restoration, a Revitalisation. This RESURRECTION is not just for the S T o N E d H O L y b L O g g E R  alone (though heaven knows I could do with one!) but for us all!

Here Endeth the Sermon. Lemme Hear Ya Say "YEAH!"

Until next time, Pop-Pickers. Peace Oot XX

   

Oh, Bondage, Up Yours!

Well Cyberpeepers, here we are, dipping our delicate little toes in the icy waters that lap these virgin shores of 2015 ; like 'Cortes the Killer' standing on the unsullied sands of his New World, salivating at the prospect of all the lovely Conquering that lay ahead! Now, being a Pop Slop Flop Out the S t O n E d h O L y b L o G G e r  seldom gets to feel like anything as grand as a Conquistador.....but it's a Brand New Year and the Sun is shining and 2015 lies prostrate before me like Tenochtitlan of yore! And, yes, I know what you're gonna say next....you're gonna say "Wars May Rage & Seas May Boil, Empires Play Out their Pantomime'.....and, sure enough, Conquest is a tale told ten thousand times.......so here at Stoned Holy HQ oor advice is always Kick Over the Statues!

At this time of year it is fitting that as we look ahead, we look back also. And even a Splenetic Auld Shitebag like masel cannae help but get a little sentimental & dewy-eyed at times. So it was ah found masel welling up at the end of  'The Wizard of Oz,' which was televated across the airwaves just the other day. Luckily, for my hard won reputation as a hard nosed proponent of Objectivity, I was alone ; my inner slushy old sap could remain hidden behind the bluster of Withering Marxist Dialectical Analysis and Unflappable Spock-like Rationalism with which I rebuke, rebuff and refuse to give countenance to the various Distortions, Deceptions, Falsehoods, Frauds, Hokum & Hogwash which the World sees fit to lay before me! And B'Jaysus there's a bloody mountain of it!!

Anyway, after wiping my watery eyes and knocking back a few more tawny ports and mince pies I thought I'd give this new 'youTube' thingy a wee go......and soon I found myself enthused by Gene Kelly on rollerskates and Donald O'Connor bursting balloons with his dazzling, dancing feet! One thing inevitably leads to another and another.....and so it was I stumbled upon a gem marooned in a vast digital sea of crap. A virtual Easter Island in a boundless Pacific of Absurdity & Twaddle! And being one who has long held a desire to cut a Christmas album, I can't tell you how much of a sheer delight it was to happen upon 'Black Christmas' sung by none other than Miss Poly Styrene.

Seeing Poly in action, so sexy and vibrant, was made all the more poignant by the fact that she is sadly no longer with us. Of course, we're all here to go so I'm no here tae give you any crap about lives cut tragically short. I'm not here either tae give you a potted biography of her life, it's all out there in Computerland.  I'm just saying that Poly Styrene was one helloffa gal!....and if you've never heard 'Germ Free Adolescents' get out NOW and rectify that situation immediately! Its place in the Stoned Holy Top Ten Essential Punk Rock Albums is indisputably assured. In Lyrics, Voice and Style it perfectly captures what punk rock was supposed to be about - Individualism! There's a worn and scratched copy of it in the Stoned Holy Library and what an object it is. Just by looking at the cover you begin to suspect you're onto something. And when you pull out the inner sleeve with its bubble wrap imagery and lyrics printed in full you kinda already know that this is gonna be remarkable....and all this before you've heard a note! Watching on youTube or downloading an mp3 file can't come close to the excitement of finally placing the needle in the Glorious, Metal, Screeching, Exhilarating, Polypropylene, Art-I-Ficial Grooove!

Punk Rock, I'm here to tell you, Ruined Ma Life! It promised so much....and delivered so little. Furthermore, without it's raucous encouragement I might've been saved a life of Ploughing this Lonely Furrow as a Stoned Holy Roller!  But what was a working class boy from a council housing scheme on the south side of Nowheresville gonna do with his life anywayz? So what the hell, that's the way the dice rolls. But lets call it straight and face it - Punk Rock was a Blip, a tragic case of Donkeys led by Lions! Shine an interrogative light on its mohican styled orthodoxies and bubblegum revolt and 95% of it is revealed as brainless, worthless shit...but it's the 5% that shines out and reverberates still, decades on, as Vital and Inspiring that makes it all worth the admission fee! And its Promise, its Inspiration, it's Fire, its Intelligence and its Triumphant Snotty-Nosed Two Fingered Salute to all the forces and agencies that seek to Contain, Explain & Restrain, Confine and Define your life for you, can be best summed up by a couple of lines that introduced the debut single from X-Ray Spex. They were penned by a wonderful 20 year old Marianne Elliott, soon to be known to the world as Poly Styrene, Punk Rock Chanteuse!

"Some People Think Little Girls Should Be Seen And Not Heard....

But I Think.....

OH BONDAGE, UP YOURS!"

Aw shucks, It's enough tae bring tears tae a glass ee!.....especially an auld, sneering punk rock dog such as masel.......I'm welling up again, folks.....I better get the hell outta here......Sayonara Pop Pickers!! Oh, dinnae tell me the port's finished!!.......

...almost forgot, here 's the link tae 'Black Christmas'

Still your Beating Hearts, You Followers Of The Holy Rolling Stone!.....

Howdy, Pop-Pickers! Can I hereby offer my sincerest apologies to you, discerning denizens of the Blogosphere, who have waited with fingernails chewed to the quick, for this, your next dazzling installment charting the Ridiculously Self-Regarding & Funereal Descent into Stilted Mediocrity and Inescapable Anonymity of I, your Inimitable & Congenial Host, the S T o N e d h o l Y B L o G G e r! There are, may I assure you, several mitigating circumstances which go someway to explaining my extended absence from these virtual pages.

The 1st of these remittances is simply that, being the kind of browbeaten and dejected so 'n' so who is much given to loud hurrumphing and censorial finger-wagging as a means to absolve oneself of any culpability in their failure to prosper, I just 'couldnae be arsed!!' Opting instead to shelter my Wearisome Bones & Burdened Soul from all tumult and violent upheavals outwith the Glorified Halls of Stoned Holy HQ, which hang heavy, even yet, with sprigs of Holly & Ivy, and cosset myself by the bleezing Stoned Holy Ingle, sherry in hand and slippers on!

 Lately also, due, no doubt, to the ceaseless ravages of time upon the Stoned Holy Bod', I have suffered a bad bout of 'Cockney Lumbago'. This consists of the usual symptoms of pain in the lower lumber accompanied by the need to blurt out phrases such as 'Cor, lummy!' or 'Luv a duck!' in a cod Steve Marriott Lazy Sunday accent! Coupled to this, the Honourable Member for Stoned Holy Central hasn't been his eager and sprightly self of late. Though I acknowledge this may very well be a physical manifestation of my shortcomings and failures in the world at large, it has, undoubtedly resulted in a facial expression akin to a hyena chewing a toffee bar falling upon the otherwise angelic Stoned Holy Countenance!! Consequent to these afflictions, a Mood Indigo, not dissimilar to the kind that Nina Simone assured us go stealing down to your shoes, pervaded my daily discourse with the world and the downright dimwits and twits who populate it!! Bluntly put, I have been unmoved to pound the keyboard and knock off more of this execrable shit for the dubious pleasure of a ragbag of total strangers and loners out there in the shady basements, cobwebbed garrets and steaming wank-pits of computerland!!

Mercifully though, as you can clearly see evinced by the chipper mood permeating these very columns, my demeanour has lifted. The Miserable Old Git Scale reads level 2. The needle on the Crabbit-O-Meter has fallen back into the Green Zone - ie, posing no imminent threat to myself or any unfortunate souls who just happen to be part of the same queue in the Post Office as myself! The spring in my step has thankfully returned and once again I can be seen carrying myself with a rocking-rolling swagger through the slouching streets, bedecked in my dandified raiment!

The s t O N e d H O L y b L o G g e R posting Absent Without Leave from these pages can be further explained by remembering that there was, in these 'ere parts, the small matter of a referendum regarding Independence for Scotland. Tragically, maddeningly, mystifyingly, embarrassingly (and perchance, as many now believe, criminally!!) the vote was lost to the Soulless Forces of Fear and No Imagination! Lemme tell you folks, September 19th was a day of Stunned Disbelief and Dumbstruck Hopelessness! My own Stoned Holy Gibberbox rang hollow as my words tumbled out of it like sawdust!  We, the Dreamers, the Radicals, the Yearning, the Disgusted & Busted, played out the banal moments that fill the existential emptiness of all our lives........something as simple as getting on the bus was a pantomime performed by robots! But days have passed and wounds have healed. The Jocks Ain't Going Back In The Box!! Bitter feelings of division that put up fences between friends and family are now calmed with the realisation that the Political Shit-Storm blows up anew after the coming General Election and A Change Is Gonna Come!!

And lastly among these lame excuses for my extended furlough from these virtual walls and your glorious Hit of Curmudgeoness in the Mainline is perhaps the most telling.....in that I didn't have access to the Tinternet and its myriad of Steamy n Dirty Windaes affording one a grandstand seat viewing the wackiness and dark, mashed up, broken down heart of humanity! Oh t'is an arrow to my tender heart to think that you consider I have spent this period away from the Blogosphere doing not much of anything other than scratching ma Stoned Holy Bawbag and supping sundry real ales whilst fulminating on esoteric matters such as whether Trotsky was right to quash the Kronstadt Rebellion and could Scotland really have lifted the World Cup in 1978 under Ally McLeod!!!

So Still Your Beating Hearts you followers of The Holy Rolling Stone, normal service has been resumed....ahm back on line and in the groove. 2015 beckons.......

To The Toppermost Of The Poppermost!!  

Charles Bukowski : He Was a Fat, Old Man!

 Charles Bukowski once said 'The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills'....well, it's bloody lucky he never tried his hand at this Pop-Slopping mallarkey otherwise he might have said 'The Days Shuffle Past Like A Geriatric Tortoise with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease'!! Nowhere near as poetic or snappy, I'll be the first to admit, but more accurate!

The S t O n e D H o L y B L O g g e r must admit to feeling a close affinity to Charles Bukowski seeing as he too spent years buried in the Dead Letter Office swimming with intellectual minnows whilst punching 300 letters every five minutes into the Inward Primary Sortation frame! He too has frittered away years at low skill jobs taking shit from Soul Sucking Jerks just so he could, at the drop-of-a-hat, when dim lights, thick smoke & loud, loud music and fawning femme-types came knocking, tell the aforementioned jerk to 'Take this Job & Shove It!'  He has also cracked open many a fine bottled ale and enjoyed ham on rye!

Bukowski, in case you didn't know, was the beer-bellied, ugly son-of-a-bitch who, in the guise of his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, chronicled the lives of the barflies n gadflies, down & outs n roustabouts, soaks n jokes, derelicts n drifters who live out their lives of emasculated n disenfranchised desperation, drug addled ordinariness and kerbside glory at the dog-eared corners and singed edges of Society.  His is the voice of the gutterpup snarling at the hand that feigns or deigns to feed it! And the City of Lost Angels didn't skimp on dredging up the muck to keep his typewriter busy, being, as it is, a huge, sprawling mash-up of sexual & social inadequacies and corruptions!

Bukowski was also the man who, after a troubled youth scarred by chronic acne and years of neglect and disregard from the literary establishment, seized the day when renown and notoriety and post pubescent college girls came calling! Nonchalantly swigging beer and reciting poetry as the giggling coquettes fluttered round his filthy flame like fireflies, with their pert little ricecakes jiggling and wafting their honeymuff pheromones! Perchance, readers, there's hope yet for a one man Pop Slop Flophouse like the
s T O n e d h O L y b L o G G e r!!    A man can dream, can he not?!?! There was a time, it may interest you to know, when first I ventured down the perilous & unfrequented path of the STONED HOLY ROLLER, a time when Punk Rock Immortality awaited me as surely as night follws day, that I fancied myself quite the libertine and entertained such notions as voluptuary excess and sensual abandonment......but oh, such comfortless nights lay ahead!

But back to Bukowski ; Once, when asked as to his modus operandi regarding writing, he replied 'Don't Try! That's very important : not to try, not for cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait and if nothing happens, you wait some more.' The phrase appears on the stone which marks the spot where Mr. Bukowski is currently to be found in Green Hills Memorial Park, Los Angeles County, U.S.A. This once seemed like good advice to the S T o N e d h o L Y B L o g g e R.......but I've grown quite weary of waiting now for something or anything to actually happen after these long years, so Mr. Charles Bukowski can take his advice and shove it!!

And anyway, what gave this beer-bellied git the right to be so dyspeptic anywayz? He lived his life in L. A after all. Spending yir hours looking at horses (the ones that run round race tracks that is, rather than thems that speed away over hills!!) and in bars in chrome shiny, kick a buck, big breasted, speakeasy, 4-lane freeway America doesn't seem to be that bad a deal, does it?!!  I mean, 329 days of fukkin sunshine a year, for fuk's sake!! Imagine how miserable he woulda been had he been borned  in Scotchland!!

Still, be grateful he wasn't....otherwise nobody would've heard of him! And I don't care if he was an alcoholic bum running with the lowlifes because inside a warm, human heart was beating!.....and if yir passing Green Hills Memorial Park why not crack open a tin and pour the contents on the sod that covers him...it's what he woulda wanted, ahm sure!! Maybe that's the time also to recall these words "We're All Going To Die, All Of Us, What a Circus! That alone should Make Us Love Each Other but It Doesn't. We Are Terrorized & Flattened by Trivialities, We Are Eaten Up By Nothing!"

Seize the Day, Pop-Pickers....Seize the Day!!

.......maybe some day soon I should take my own advice!!