cluster fuck post script
by
captain mission

the physical laws of duality state that for every force there is an opposite and equal one. the cluster fuck at it's most destructive cannot stop the manifestation of it's opposite. and those that occasionally navigate the clusterfuck will experience this in the aspect form. the aspect form will not be immune to the cluster fuck but it will harbour protection and love to the wounded, it heals. the rest is up to you.
remember the only thing that you can change is yourself.
the universe is truly magickal.

cluster fuck protocols updated and final report

the cluster fuck will try it's best to defeat you. it has to fulfil it's program. it can't undo it's own instructions so destructive is it's force.
despite the outcome love is the only way to meet the cluster fuck, fear it and it will generate more nefarious strategies, love it and it will have to self destruct. ultimately no one escapes including the cluster fuck. it's a complex relentless suicide bomber impregnated with self loathing and fear and it has to destroy you because your not. it will seek its own oblivion by seeking other cluster fucks in which to incrementally raise it's power. this way no one gets out alive.
this is how the world will end and humanity be dust. and the universe will not miss us, those that learnt how to hack it will be at peace.
it is advisable to avoid cluster fucks unless you take the warrior code of love and don't fear death. bodhisattva code.
the count down begins 2012, the universe is right on track. stocking up on food and diamonds won't help you.

captain mission 1st december 2010

i'm so confused by my humiliation and anger i run my situation via two people as hypotheticals, what they say affirms my own reality, although this don't influence me in any great way it does make me validate i am certainly justified in my feelings. both people were furious about it. actually they were more severe in their responses than i have been and were absolutely disgusted, yeah it was pretty cruel. the saddest thing is i miss my times with her, i was just on the cusp of something, something that would have healed us both but she miss cupcake just sees me as another flower. yeah it was funny the french dude always said that to me, 'she's like a butterfly hopping from flower to flower.'
'yeah well i'm a tree.'
and here i am, growing taller, closer towards the light. i tied to be a good friend to you miss cupcake, i really did want you just to be alive and happy and part of me not the other way around, because you surround yourself with corrupting influences who always bring you down, you always have done this because then you actually look good, more functional, together and in control of those more damaged than you. you fell for the maya, you degraded and humiliated me not from hate not from love but because that's your nature, fear, and i feel so saddened and disappointed that you failed to believe in my nature your opposite but i don't want to hate you, punish you or feel anything other than love for you and your child. i don't wanna submit to the weakness of my own nature, so i forgive you and your friend. and i leave you with this as a friend.

the karmic bonds you pass to your children will surprise you in your life, you will have to deal with yourself through your child and i hope you have a captain around who can help you do this because you're going to need one to keep yourself in check.
i only wish you the very best miss cupcake, i don't think i will see you again in this incarnation.

the clusterfuck gets us all in the end but the nature of clusterfuck is they take themselves out, t's loose loose when you're in the clusterfuck.

2 hours of sanctuary
you smell good, naturally feminine.
you have soft eyes, bright like a horses intelligence.
you have very interesting feet and the hands of a artist.
and you speak the truth, no forked toungue.
you have a great big heart, maybe like an octopus you have three big hearts
and you have added bonus points...
peace
safety
softness
a nice feminine smell
inviting arms generously offerring snuggles and cuddles in a warm cozy bed
where i can just fall asleep in her arms.

it's not love but if feels like i'm liked and that is enough for me. i'm tired, i'm tired of kicking against the pricks, what a fucking hellish thing to put me through. after everything. you must really hate me but i really thought you may just actually like me this time around.

what's a man gotta do these days, it's not like i want much outta life, just find my girl and take the easy way home, kids, cake, joy and laughter, a smoke at the end of an easy day. it's been a easy days night but when i get home to you i find the things that we do make everything easy alright. simple, two peas in a pod. i don't wanna control ya baby, i'm digging what we have, it's okay, i'm not after anything less than respect and you always gave me that, respect and kindness. you're more evolved than any fucking girl i know, more switched on and more sexier and i saw your sassy smart side today, yeah, you got me. very cool.
we are both special cos we want one another to be free and happy. we will keep them stupid idiots at bay with our moon guns and the kids can have lemonade pistols and custard pie guns.
.

i miss my opiates, even my codeine would have worked last night, she would have sent me into embryonic bliss safe and away from this hellish feeling. anyway's a very poor substitute would have to suffice in caffeine as time makes me jump through hoops this week, every second being locked in by some thing or the other or some one. the day is torn up already by the awful rain and wet, the cluster fuck washed away and everything is very ordinary for a moment. that's my sadness i guess. i don't know. shake it mission, shake it and move onwards, that's what you have do isn't it?
disappointment after disappointment you have to let it go, hurt, anger, sadness, everything has it's number. me i'm sweet nuffin. just a lonely traveller in the army of love, fighting a losing battle, defenceless and perhaps a little wounded. i'm lucky. some people never get to be in the army of love. i'm glad i signed up, even though its a war. i'm really glad i'm on this side. i seen the other, it's filled with fear and fucking stupidity. i took the warrior code, you gotta be a warrior to be a lover, there's no choice unfortunately.
here's the amazing strange thing though, my queen, the one that supplies me with love has made an unexpected appearance through her usual convoluted channels of synchronicity and coincidence, she is all powerful and moves in mysterious ways, i guess i should meet with her.

what a fucking day, what a strange yet powerful day today has been. miss cupcake and i have separated company, i'm not sure how long for but as i write i am feeling something really bad has happened and it's going to take a while for me to resolve itself.
i am saddened and deeply hurt and very very angry.
she has bad choice in friends, i seem to remember something about this from before, from the void, ten years ago, stupid friends who are not that friendly to her as all they seem to do is fuck everything up with stupidity, paying no mind to the impact such stupidity would have on the people that genuinely care. she never taking any responsibility, 'oh it was him, oh it was this.'
that's the problem. right there. at least i know why i had an emotional blockage, it was my intuition. i feel so stupid about this, she would not even have a clue how deep it cuts.

the first thing your friend tells me when we are alone is how supportive and helpful he has been and what a great friend he has been to you through the pregnancy, then does this?
i have done stupid things, i'm no angel but i'm a good friend and now i just feel kicked in the head. all that worry and panicking thinking how terrible it would be to be broken down in the pouring rain, pregnant with your phone about to die, you offering a number that may assist, i was so worried about you. so fucking concerned and when i dial it's a gay chat line.
not only do i have to deal with my concern now i have used a work phone to call a gay chat line. yeah right, laugh at my expense. very funny joke, very smart. kinda really sick and cruel to me. and then in a strange revelation i remembered your friends, they played some sick twisted fucked up games with me. i never said anything much about it then, but i'm not the same person now.
i'm over your friends, they are (here's a word i hold sacred but in this instance is a profanity) cunts to me and sadly to you.
i'm so depressed im going to fucking smoke a joint and listen to something like the rain for a while until i pass out and have to leave this miserable day.
i just feel so fucking saddened at the loss, it's truly a veil of tears filled with more zombies than ever, kicking down the back doors, trying to eat our brains cos they just can't stand anyone who is unlike them.

i'm a magickian, the universe supplies me with partners who are aspects of myself. this is how karma works, and this is how i have to deal with my own growth and desires lest i don't get the relationship i want with the partner i want. they just return in different guises, different aspects of the same thing, repeating themselves over and over endlessly. it's the same woman different face.
what do i want?
that's the real problem. i want the whore, the priestess, the wife, the lover, the smart girl down the street, the ones that crop up out of the blue with their nice soft words, and that's what i get, bombarded all the time by these beautiful women.
so what do you want captain mission?
i want to be free from want.
and here i am wanting...
desire is such an entrapment, buddha was really correct about it and sexual desire is the most powerful trap. i have to be strong and disciplined, attract only love. only love. only love. only love and keep it all sacred. well as best i can, there's always room for the profane in my life.
my night friend told me an old surfing tale, how he was taken out by some tropical dude one morning and as he ran to the water his friend stopped him and said, 'hey wait, don't race, give thanks and honour for this is a sacred place, where the land meets the water,two different states, two different energies, one must respect the change from one state to the other and let the water embrace you. he slowly walked in, letting the toes feel the first touch of ocean and letting his consciousness spread through his body and out as an expansive force. he slowly let the warm water take him, it gave him a clear passage out while others struggled, it offered him a perfect wave while others were not so blessed, it offered him the best ride he had ever had, along the pathway of water to the shore line, where an islander on the shoreline had watched the whole process and recognised the event, he signalled to my friend and acknowledged what had just occurred, they both smiled.
this is the way forwards, the past does not shape me, i'm now,, the present does present choices, and sometimes i feel like i need to always make a choice, but in this particular version of myself i don't want to chose, i want to be free from choice. how excrutiatingly difficult freedom can be. even that is a choice. it don't have to be anything other than what it is. and i have to process it through my own truth, which is my heart not my brain. stupid brain!

my night friend and i see monsters, he is a good and brilliant man, he is a singularity and my friend. we have a healthy bite, some sort of sushi for night friend and a eggplant wrap for me and then watch this amazing film. it's a beautiful story, and terrible to. it's what's happening. somewhere, some one's being oppressed, and it's usually women and children and animals and trees and extra terrestrial octopi beings 200 metres high that bear the brunt of it. i love this film, it's just such a sci fi ending and perfectly human at the same time, it's really given me a new breath of fresh air in my quest for the best meme.
and the winner is.... LOVE closely followed by sex.
you have to agree, it's the best of two worlds. my kind of science fiction.


some one said to me today, 'you have a double life.'
i pondered it as something i never thought of in those terms before.
i mentally concluded it's a multi dimensional life that's for sure. you gotta travel around a bit more inner space than outer space to get that perspective. take the red pill or have your mind blown apart and getting defragged by a south american goddess and the experience was very sexy let me remind you.
'keep spreading love.' she said to me when we parted company. i knew it would be a long time until i saw her again, but she is always close inside me, all the time, she's there, guiding me. helping me in her way. no fucking wonder they take this stuff, those cheeky south americans have the sexist life on planet earth plugged in to ayahuscia. she is some what possessive but she is my mistress.

hello groovy cats.
it's true that i love the one i'm with, i fall in love fast and it's not relative to how i fall out of love either. i'm trying to modify that, take my time, slow love, simmer the stew, but i'm a free love kinda guy, as long as everything is some what equal and honest. i do all types of relationships, i've had them all, as long as i feel safe i'm happy.

nico, you make me feel safe. how strange, i guess i trust you because you had the decency to be honest with me from the word go. i find that so fucking refreshing and attractive, although you're quite the package, supermodel type, super woman, super mum super sexy as hell. mmm. i like you a lot.

yet here i am spending my time with miss cupcake whom i love but can't tell her because i am emotionally blocked with her. she's brilliant and beautiful and she's having a baby. i'm actually so happy about this, she looks pretty beautiful right now, wow, maybe we can just have a threesome, then it would make life simple for me again.

and then there's my true love who has sustained me and saved me. i love you so much. everyday you overwhelm me with your love, it's beautiful and i am so grateful and humbled by it. i cry when i am in your arms with absolute joy.

the only other time i ever cried tears of joy (apart from when jake was born and when the church played that 25th gig and they played constant in opal and steve started singing 'on a great big clipper ship,' in the middle and, 'if i had a hammer.' in that real angry voice of his, that was such a brilliant night. and tiare put me on the front seat. wow! come on that's just the best thing anyone ever did for me.

no sleep in two days but miss cupcake and i are travelling into unusual areas of sleep depravation, we are perfectly matched, linked in as our brains operating at quantum level in perfect synch, soon we will not need to talk, all communication will be instant, our minds merged. yes this was the future i saw 10 years ago, it's some what askew i didn't think she would be having another mans baby, but what the hell, the rest is exactly how i saw it.
a few blogs ago i wrote that when i meet a woman and a relationship starts i usually have visions about the future, i can perceive future events, get a sense of quality and often i am so excited and enthusiastic i wanna jump in and get there. but obviously this is a dangerous thing to do because i can't expect my partners to know our futures. it's something of a curse but what can i do. at least it helps me extract myself from relationships i know there is no future.
its what i want. a future but try selling that to a girl and they don't wanna know. so i keep it all inside as best i can and watch it all unravel.
anyways the last few days with miss cupcake have been the future i saw many years ago when we were actually together but she was young and somewhat nuts, not interested in futures with me.
time is a strange thing, especially when you hack it, invoke the past to return and iron out the wrinkles.
we do everything together, we shop, eat, swim, read, play scrabble, watch dvds, movies, talk about everything from my crazy theories to her interesting observations about people, and we laugh a hell of a lot more than i recall us laughing first time around and slowly i think she's getting me, but it's probably gonna take another decade or two. i'm hoping that one day she will meet my other friends, evan, leanne, hp, nico, agent stone, steve, yeah maybe then she will see the wide canvas on which i have painted my strange life. who knows, all i know is tomorrow i will be reading to her bump.

what ever you do, this weekend, get the self down to the moves and watch the film called 'monsters'
it's one of the best films i have seen, finally a science fiction film worth watching, a story that is absolutely breathtaking and has what very few films have these days, soul.
yeah monsters is more of a beautiful love story, a travel narrative, a meditation, a low budget but very classy film. i sat there absolutely thinking this is a perfect film let alone a perfect science fiction film, thank you to gareth edwards who has made a very rewarding movie, with a decent original soundtrack for a change. the directing and camera work was excellent, the acting was perfect and the ending, well endings don't get better than this. i want to watch it again.

bizarre love pentangle, oh lover where arte thou?
here we go again, another strange journey into loves infinite manifestations, the open relationship is the strangest of all, it means i'm no longer special. ha!
just as well i am very special, otherwise probably would not be able to manage it. it's just as well i am fucking resilient and resistant to all things. i've done these avant-garde relationships, they all end in tears, usually mine but that's because you get hurt and then i feel responsible but ho hum, me with the infinite personas, the unbounded heart, i'm up for fucking anything you throw at me, i just beat it all with my love. come on baby, come on sister, shape me, make me, break me, you can never influence my velocity. i got the crazy horse spirit, i'm not shaped by flames and forged by fire, i'm water the bringer of life, i'm sexy and cool and smoke high grade bio-dynamicly grown weed, i worked out my damage, i healed myself, i un ravelled my own dna and then i hacked the cosmos, i unlocked the fucking universe and she spoke to me as she held me in her arms and she said, 'captain mission, i love you so much i'm gonna blow your tiny mind.'
and she did, i had ultimate sexual relationship and sister what ever kick you're on baby, it's a one way street but it's your street. and it may cross mine somewhere down the space time line and when it does we will play.
love just pours out from me and it still does. i'm ejaculating love and there's nothing you and your open relationships can do about that, go forth multiply, share your body, share your beautiful soul, why fucking not, it is beautiful after all.

and meanwhile i'm digging that canadian  and her brain. wow, she has the fucking best brain when it's working creatively, when it's clear and clean from all the bullshit toxins. i think i'm in love with that brain. i want to eat it.

strange decent into weird full moon mood swing, serotonin uptake inhibited, stars aligned unfavourably, the cards read ill omened, my past is a veil of smoke and sometimes i feel an anger for that which is lost, sometimes i cast a line into the smog only to see it fade away in the receding nowhere. ekhart tolle says, the power is within the 'now.' he is right of course but there's a responsibility that goes with that, isn't there? how can there not be?
can the mind really avoid responsibility by being present in the moment, i think not. therefore the power is in the responsibility. and my responsibility weighs down heavy, where is my brother to carry the weight, where is my sister to bear the laod, where is my wife, the one who said she loves me. where is my happiness in this now. where is my reward. where is my life gone? where is my life going?
everything is devotion, my universe loves me but my mind sometimes dosn't. it plays tricks and leaves me alone with myself, hell is other people, hell is me, heaven is in the arms of the women you love, heaven is inside the women you love, heaven is fleeting, and therefore heaven is hell.
my old soul carries itself well, for a decrepit used up thing, it has experienced far to much now, it longs for an end, it years to return to the source, it just wants peace and love and the good things, the simple things. gimme some truth my mind says, gimme some peace my soul says, gimme some love my heart says, gimme some narcotic haze my brain says, make it dark and deep, like opium dreams, escape....quickly i'll manifest a portal. his last words were, 'the horror the horror.'
i found myself here back in 1962, born into this strange working class family of jewish immigrants, they had all escaped the horror but lived in it's shadow, 'fear nothing' the ghosts whispered to him, 'fear not even death.' but those old ghosts never warned him about life, they never said, you gonna get smashed to pulp out there, they gonna break your spirit every which way, they gonna destroy ya and rape your hope and fuck your dream, they never mentioned the other horror, the horror inside you. ha! the undead are just jealous, they are jealous of the living. and some living are jealous of them.
i cast me some spells out there, protection, 'get me of the street', you yelled in a berlin nightclub, 'need some protection.'
and then hurled towards infinity you breathed in the truth and saw it all. liberation. you take responsibility for the bodisattvah vow you made. you have no fucking choice, face it baby, be a man, face the void, eat the fucking void. it's just a void after all. and you?
you are...

things hang by virtual thread, anxious about a number of things, specifically an e mail i sent which could shift my life in a direction i would really like or leave me floundering or maybe both. how strange waiting for a response is, the internet is only as efficient as we are really, although i rather wait like this when no news is good news.
i'm heading to the quack, they gonna x ray me more, apparently i have a fractured vertebrae now, mmm, the fickle tides of health. ever since the quack told me i been feeling twinges.
the sun is out at least, solar powered me.

strange paper worlds with miss cupcake, the cards unsent, the virgin blankness of creativity and possibility, in many forms, this is miss cupcakes fave shop on earth, it's smaller than i thought but filled with interesting things to look at, pictures, cards, objects specimens and creations, yes it's all a wonderfully visual tactile sensory experience. we stop in manly for a bap roll and some lunch accessories that miss cupcake somehow makes me pay for, she's gifted at this, i recall glimpses of her extortion skills from a long gone past, but her parking ticket seems to balance everything out and i feel somewhat sad that she got it but manly is a very difficult place to park.
so we part company and i head back home, the sunday sun daze gloriously drenching me as i listen to some grove armada and white light.

captain mission on an ice cream run, three gourmet flavours and a sack of dog food for pansy, we head into little manly to visit nico and her tribe. and what a tribe they are, wow, soon the house is filled with soft toys and there's songs and dances, pictures and games, old captain mission don't have many friends but he likes these new ones a lot, they are colourful and funny and make him smile and make him feel younger. nico their sexy mum makes me some prawn salad type thing which although simple tastes exotic and nice.
in the morning we head down to the aquarium, captain missions fave place in sydney, where we pile into the toy shop and play with the stuffed toys, we wreck the place and we have not even gone inside yet.
oh we see fishes and sharks, we see trevally and rays, we see big slimy things with jelly eyes and we see alien looking aquatic species luminous and bright, but we are all captivated by the octopus and the cuttle fish, we watch as these beasties play for us, the blue ringed octopus climbing up the glass and then launching itself off and gliding down only to repeat it's climb, then the cuttle fish uses it's hover power to emerge from it's hiding place and from it's little squiddly diddly mouth shoots a long tongue that grabs some hunk of prawn carcass and swallows it whole.
all the family are stunned by this beautiful beasty and it's strange ways.
see there's all sorts of miracles in the world, life is so diverse and varied, it ain't no random thing, man the designer of this universe has imagination.

Christopher Hitchens, thanks for joining us again.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Nice to be back.

TONY JONES: The first time...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Or still here, whichever it is.

TONY JONES: Definitely still here.

The first time I met you face-to-face was on September 11, 2002 and as you will recall we were sitting on a building across from that awful hole in the ground that once held the Twin Towers...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...And at the time I can remember you describing to us that it took that event to totally transform you into an American. Tell us why.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I had by then lived about a quarter of a century in the United States with a Green Card - Platinum Green Card, as a matter of fact. It was so old it didn't run out. They now need to be renewed.

I had a European Union passport, had an American wife, American children - three of them.

I thought I could carry on the rest of my life like this, being, if you like, an Anglo American or an Englishman in America. But I began to feel that I was in a sense cheating on my dues a bit, that what was being attacked in America was what I liked about it.

Many things that I didn't - that I had been a leading critic of, in fact - those aspects were in some people's minds a good enough excuse for an attack to be made. But not me.

I thought what is really being attacked here is the pluralism, the openness, in some ways the hedonism, if you like - the idea of the pursuit of happiness - all of these things, as well as my favourite city in all of the world - New York.

I, if you like, took it personally. I am not ashamed to put it like that.

And it was really that form of initial solidarity plus a revulsion for the anti-Americanism that was being put around so cheaply at the time. I realised I couldn't bear any argument that made the assumption that the United States had invited or let alone deserved this atrocity.

And I also realised that as well as involving the things that I like, or love, it also very much conscripted in one thing all the things that I hate - theocracy, cult of violence, anti-Jewish paranoia, worship of a leader, supreme sheikh - all of this sort of hideous imagery which I summarised in a column I wrote at the time as fascism with an Islamic face, which has contracted a bit into an expression I don't like: Islamo-fascism, for which I am sometimes placed.

But you can't say "fascism with an Islamic face" every time, so shorthands do occur.

So I decided to take out the papers of citizenship.

TONY JONES: So let's talk briefly about that day September 11, 2001.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: You described it very tellingly soon afterwards, if not on the day, as it being as if Charles Manson had been made God for a day.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Mmm. Yes, I remember thinking that as I watched this huge cloud of filth emerge from the wreckage, as the towers sank, up came this sort of billowing cloud of ordure and wreckage and including the shredded remains of about 3,000 of my fellow creatures.

This is a really evil looking cloud. There was shot from a helicopter above Manhattan showing it sort of spreading on this really beautiful day all across the southern tip of my favourite island. And I thought "it's as if Charles Manson is giving orders today, yes".

TONY JONES: The other...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: That's how it felt. I think about it every day, still.

TONY JONES: Take yourself back then to watching it. Because one of the most horrific images - and I think you actually described this as one of the most horrific images that still remains in your head that you have ever seen and that is, the burning people falling or jumping, in fact, from the towers before they collapsed.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

Yes - hesitating between jumping to their deaths or being burnt alive and getting both - jumping while burning.

And a terrible little shrill cry that was overheard on the streets of Greenwich Village by a school teacher who was trying to escort some children along the sidewalk and one of them pointing and saying, "Look, teacher, the birds are on fire".

A childish attempt to rationalise what was going on, make sense of it or, if you like - the wrong word but to humanise it.

That stayed in my mind as well. Still does.

TONY JONES: One of the more remarkable things that happened in the aftermath was the reaction of some on the Left - and I am sure this rather helped your - or helped galvanise the transformation that you were already undergoing - particularly from the reaction from people like Noam Chomsky.

Tell us a little bit about that.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, once I had sorted out my various impression of the day, which I had in common with everyone else - and which also included the realisation that a friend of mine had just been flown into the walls of the Pentagon.

I felt, with that additional horror, much as everyone else did, to discover, work through shock, rage, fear - not so much, oddly enough. I didn't feel I was frightened by it but I was very powerfully shaken by it.

And then - I wasn't sure whether to trust myself with this but I actually have to admit it - a sort of sense of exhilaration coming from, "Okay, it's everything I hate versus everything I love".

It's a summons of a sort. It's "Okay, now if you don't recognise this as a crisis, when would you recognise one?"

And then very soon succeeded by the realisation - I then had been working for The Nation magazine as columnist for the flagship journal of the American Left for upwards of two decades - immediately realising I wasn't going to like what a lot of my comrades were going to say.

And I remember thinking of Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, and a few others. They would find a way of explaining this away.

And that I wasn't in the mood for it. And I don't just mean mood for that moment. It wasn't a temporary sort of eruption of my digestive system or anything.

I wasn't prepared to tolerate that.

TONY JONES: It's interesting because your memoir - particularly the last chapter or not only the last chapter but all through the memoir, this is a recurring theme. You talk about mutating from one identity to another. And in fact the last chapter deals with people changing their minds on big issues.

Are you trying to deal once and for all with your reasons for moving away from the Left.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. I suppose I am. But I am trying to do it in such a way as not to seem to follow - or indeed to follow at all - a script. And I think everyone knows in their mind that roughly speaking, people are sort of idealistic lefties when they're young and they become paunchy and compromised and cynical and they become more conservative and so forth...

TONY JONES: What your friend, Julian Barnes, the novelist actually wrote about - wrote about you in this regard...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, he doesn't say me.

TONY JONES: He doesn't, but you identify it as being you, as...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I decided to pick a fight on it. Yes.

TONY JONES: ...as having made a "ritual shuffle" from left to right. You strongly objected to it.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I objected to it but only because it was phrased so perfectly for that script. Ritual - in other words, something completely predictable. You're following a prearranged schedule, or schedule - I never know how to pronounce that as an Anglo American.

And second, "shuffle" has this sense of the senile, whinnying person in a walking frame following the arrow marked "This way to the right wing".

Well I can't be judging my own cause and I don't know how I look to other people or how I seem on the page but I think I'd have a fair chance of beating that cliche rap. I'm not a reactionary; I have never been any kind of conservative.

I think the positions that I hold against Islamic theocracy are - for example, and especially its extension by criminal violence - are defences of the enlightenment, which is the most radical conclusion humanity has yet reached and the greatest of this radical achievement.

I won't enumerate them. I just assume people know what I mean by that.

That these things probably do need to be defended every generation - that this is our call for that. I don't want to be found wanting.

The reactionaries, I think, are those who try and accommodate themselves to it, or try and make excuses for the use of promiscuous violence or the existence of or proposal for, say, something like the re-establishment of the Caliphate.

What could be more conservative than saying that not just an empire should be established - religious one - but a former empire should be re-established. I mean, imperial nostalgia as well as imperialism.

That gets subsumed into the more general view that, "Well, the real enemy is globalisation and the United States".

TONY JONES: It's your experience of reporting in Sarajevo under siege - I think that was back in 1981...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...that seems to have transformed your ideas about using military power, and particularly using American military power against the perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I decided I had to go to Bosnia to see if it was really true that mass murder on the basis of ethnicity was being employed as a tactic in Europe.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall. With NATO doing nothing about it. And the United Nations and the EU powerless to do a thing.

Is this really happening? Can we actually be watching this as spectators?

I went to Sarajevo and saw it happening - modern, sophisticated, cosmopolitan city with no defences being bombed and shelled around the clock by militias trying to carry out what they themselves call - the propaganda term was not used against them, it was coined by them. They said they were "cleansing".

It was really happening, it was really true that no European country and no international body was willing to do anything to arrest it. And I thought "Well the only power that can possibly stop this or turn it back is the United States".

TONY JONES: In fact, as you watched mortars hit the great library...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The National Library of Bosnia.

TONY JONES: The National Library in Sarajevo...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Deliberate destruction of the cultural patrimony of one of Europe's most beautiful cities in broad daylight - unrebuked, unpunished.

I thought and what ... I agreed with what most of the Bosnians, I knew wanted to see. They wanted to see the USAF appear in the skies and blow those militias off the mountain and get rid of the Milosevic regime.

And I should just add - because it is not a detail - in the end we did win the argument.

I came back to Washington and I joined the faction that was arguing for this intervention. We took a long time to persuade Clinton. I don't say we did it but we were among those who tried.

Tony Blair was very important, too, in persuading him, I think, to adopt this policy.

Here was an intervention that stopped the recrudescence of fascism in Europe, stopped the spread of a terrible war, put an end to an absolutely obscene dictatorship and saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people - returned them to their homes and put the war criminals in the dock.

And most of the Left - not all because people like myself and Susan Sontag and David Rieff and the tribune group in the British Parliamentary Labour Party and many other honourable Leftists were for it. The majority of the Left was so to say anti war - in other words, either neutral or in some cases at least sympathetic to Milosevic's serving socialism.

And I thought that, now to me, has become a reactionary position.

And if I had been anti war at this point, I'd want to look back and ask myself "am I so sure of the rightness of the policy that would have left Milosevic in charge of two cleansed and bombarded provinces and him as dictator of Serbia, the greater Serbia?" No.

But this, um, outbreak of self-criticism has yet to occur among many of my comrades, I'm sorry to say.

TONY JONES: There are some extraordinary moments in your journey away from the Left.

Tell us about the voice message left by the old communist diehard Dorothy Healey after you volunteered to testify against Bill Clinton and his aides, accusing them of lying...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ...when they said they were not slandering privately and defaming privately Monica Lewinsky.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Slandering and defaming Monica Lewinsky and several other truth-telling female witnesses, I might add.

Well, I can't do Dorothy's wonderful old rasping straight street fighter voice but she was a veteran Stalinist who could claim credit among other things for recruiting Angela Davis to the Communist Party. And she and I had been friends of a kind.

But she thought that to offer to tell my side of the story to a house hearing on the impeachment of the president was like my going to volunteer to testify to the McCarthy hearings or something.

There is somewhere on the Left a deep belief that you're a stool pigeon if you're willing to give evidence.

TONY JONES: Can you remember what she said because it began with you...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well pretty much. I can't do her voice...

TONY JONES: It began with "you stinking little rat".

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I can't do her rasping street fighting voice so I won't even try but it was, "Hey, there you scab and stooly and rat fink. I hope you die. There's no hell too hot for traitors like you".

I mean, going on in this absolutely amazing way. I mean, she'd by then lost most of her communist convictions - as who had not by then. But something of the old real party line spirit was still alive in her and she thought she had identified a rat fink and it sort of made her feel all her brave days were back again.

TONY JONES: On a serious note, the Clinton episode had a searing effect on your friendship with Sidney Blumenthal and I am wondering if now there could be any chance of a reconciliation?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Um, I rather tend to think not.

He considered himself to have been injured by me and I can perfectly see his point of view. When he told me that Monica Lewinsky was stalking the president - and I remember thinking even as he was telling me "how can a president be stalked in his own White House. If he doesn't want to see her he sure doesn't have to". What nonsense.

But when he told me this, it hadn't then become a public issue, as it did in the impeachment hearings. It then became a question - had the White House used executive power to defame a potential witness.

So I had been told it before it was, so to speak, so toxic. But I thought if I was asked I wasn't going to say I hadn't been told because I would have been suppressing evidence, among other things, which I am not prepared to do.

But it did put Sidney in a bad position and he is entitled to resent it. Though I think he should resent the president who put him in such a false position, having hiring him for his brains - which are considerable - and his political insight - which is likewise, not negligible - prefer to use him as a dirty trickster, as has since has his wife.

Most of the slanders against Obama that were circulated in the last election have Sidney Blumenthal's fingerprints on them, I am sorry to say. We wouldn't have much to talk about if we were to meet again.

TONY JONES: We were talking about the transformation that you underwent in Sarajevo, the sense that the use of military power against despots is necessary.

The war in Iraq was probably the biggest experiment ever - maybe the biggest we will ever see - in regime change in nation building. But it does appear to have been a failure.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well it depends how you quantify it. I mean, it's a terrible disappointment. And of course "disappointment" is too neutral a word because that suggests no one is really responsible for it and there were some things that couldn't have been foreseen about Iraq but there were some that could, for which no provision was made at all by the American planners.

And that is - I describe it in my book as an impeachable culpability. There were also things that were not just not done but were done, such as the atrocities at Abu Ghraib for example - which again one would qualify as impeachably culpable.

And damnable.

But there is the unquantifiable, which disservice more attention than it gets.

Our Iraqi friends have written a federal constitution, inscribing rights for national and religious and ethnic minorities, where differences are to be settled by parliamentary election - of which there have been two, both in the teeth of appalling odds and intimidation, both of them so far with very disappointing outcomes.

There's a Supreme Court, there's a free press - or the simulacrum of one, the idea of one and quite a lot of the practice of it. Almost every Iraqi now has a cell phone. They were illegal until quite recently.

Huge number of Iraqis can connect to the internet. They have a convertible currency. They have diplomatic relations with other countries now, which were impossible under the UN rules of the old regime. Iraq was sanctioned almost out of its sovereignty because of the crimes it had committed and not uncommitted.

It's still a maimed and traumatised country coming out of three and half decades of war and fascism and the political class is made up of pygmies.

Saddam Hussein made a sweep of the intellectuals or any possible rival.

But it has a pulse now. I can't say that I know that the Iraqis will take advantage of all the wonderful enactments they've made but I still think it's an inspiring thing to see - to have seen - and for the very small part I can claim to have played in advocating it, I would say I was proud.

TONY JONES: But if you want a policy of US intervention to bring down despotic regimes, to move countries towards democracy, to build nations, you actually have to prove it'll work. And that seems to be the big problem here because one cannot imagine any more the United States committing itself to this kind of experiment in regime change. So it's over.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: You're quite right. That is probably not the least of the casualties of the things. Though when one says casualties one mustn't forget the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been murdered, most of them by people who we wrongly call insurgents - that is to say, the hired international psychopaths of Al Qaeda in an open, very cynical alliance with the riff raff of the previous Baathist regime who know where the bodies are buried, who know where the weapons are, who know where everyone lives still, a lot of them - and have been able to do, in proportion to their size, fantastic damage to the Iraqi society, never giving it a minute to try to recover its breath.

But, yes, again non-quantifiable casualty - complete collapse of any will in the United States to have another such confrontation, great scepticism in the international community about taking on any such undertaking.

And as a result - I feel like I can sense it. At the moment there's a real sense of impunity and confidence and swagger among regimes like those in Burma and Zimbabwe and Sudan, and Iran. They all act not just as if "you can't touch us, we've got Chinese backing' - which of course is part of the story - but 'you can't touch us and we know you won't".

And that is a terrible thing. I was fervently hoping that the removal of Saddam Hussein would be the beginning of an era of democratisation and the realisation that the age of dictatorship is dead, that dictatorships are redundant, they're historically condemned as well as morally. Not so.

TONY JONES: You obviously watch the Tea Party phenomenon very closely.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: I was intrigued to see you referring to it as, in a way, White America comes to terms with the fact that it may - or certainly will - eventually be minority in this country.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well... I think one of the great latent causes of anxiety in American society at the moment is the realisation among white people that if they're not going to become a minority - I think that's the way they think about it. That's a long way off. But they will no longer be the majority. That is rather different.

They will be the largest population but they won't be the preponderant one.

And the various forms that this anxiety takes, the silliest of which is the Tea Party. And in some ways the nastiest.

I mean, I think obviously it’s a serious question, as is the decline of the United States and the Americans having to get used to the idea of being one power among many - something the Tea Party has nothing to say about, by the way.

They don't have a foreign policy. They don't discuss defence or foreign affairs. They don't know much about it or seemingly care. They are another incarnation of the old know-nothing isolationist tradition.

And that shows also in their domestic attitudes.

I mean, whatever tone of voice we're going to have to come up with to discuss the ethnic balance of the future of America - and it will have to be very careful and thoughtful, I think, and well mannered - we know what tones of voice you can't discuss it in and that's the tone of voice these people adopt, calling the president a secret Muslim or a closet Kenyan or ... believe me, this is said and widely disseminated - the unacknowledged love child of Malcolm X.

Try anything once. Any old smear will do. It makes me very angry. I've seldom seen in my longish life grown-ups behaving as stupidity, as immaturely in the election as in the last cycle in this country.

TONY JONES: Can I bring you where we started with your illness and the affect on how you think. It's clear from the way you're talking that you're still engaged with the ongoing conflicts in the world around you.

I mean, is that necessarily part of your condition that you remain engaged with what is happening in contemporary politics in the United States, so you don't sort of drift away from that and start thinking only about the bigger issues?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I think...

TONY JONES: By which I mean life and death.


CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. Well all the time I've been doing this - and I've always spent a good bit of my life on the political questions and trying to keep up with them and trying to influence the outcome as best I can - I've always known I am going to die.

And I've always known that in theory it could be any day so all I know is that, squared, now. It doesn't remove my interest, no.

Because if one wanted to become or had any tendency to become cynical or burned out, I think you are likely to do it when you've got a comfy middle age to look forward to it, as not.

I hope that's a fair answer.

TONY JONES: Christopher, we're really very happy that you are able to keep your side of the bargain with us.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Very nice to offer.

TONY JONES: All I can say is thank you. And until next time.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, absolutely. Many more times.

err so much for sleep, i drifted into an almost sleep state when i realised i needed to walk my dog and feed him, so i clambered off my sofa and woke myself up with some stretching and yawning and drooling. pan the ever jubilant hound covered me in love, dog love, slapping that huge tongue over my face and covering me in his fur. yeah this is the love i'd like, loyal, consistent and something you can depend on. mmm, unlikely to get it from any women although their curvy bits make it difficult to rule out the picture entirely and just when i'm feeling good, just when i think, hey things ain't so bad i get some very bad news and disappointments come rolling in one after another. it's hard to really fight these sorts of things, it's hard not to be despondent, it's overwhelming. one mans deity is another man's demon, i have to meditate on the new future, weave some magick, turn the lead into gold and take this awful situation and make it good.

i watched christopher hitchens last night, his interview with tony james was brilliant and powerful, such an incredibly honest and articulate man, his brain still works acutely and despite his lack of belief in an intelligent universe i think politically he is the best journalist of contemporary politics writing. here's the transcript.


The interview's in two parts.

Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year while on tour promoting his memoir Hitch-22.

Tonight's interview deals with how he responded to the illness and whether facing death has softened his fierce atheism or caused him to modify his belief that "religion poisons everything".

Here's the first of our two-part special.

It's very good to see you.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR & JOURNALIST: Tony. Nice of you to come to DC.

TONY JONES: It's a pleasure to be here, although the circumstances aren't great. And the question that most are going to want to know is how are you at the moment? How are you feeling?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: If this had been yesterday - I was wondering in fact yesterday if I could do this today.

That's because I've just had a kill-or-cure dose of venom cocktail mainlined into me, and in the first few days after that, you feel very compromised, very nauseated, very weak, very demoralised. And that's on top of knowing why you have to have it, which is I have a tumour in my oesophagus which has spread. So it's called stage four.

The thing about stage four is that there is no stage five, so I'm finding out how this can be managed, whether I can live with it, whether it can be - I doubt curable. I think the word "curable" doesn't really apply, but it can be treatable. What kind of life and how much of it I have is my big preoccupation now.

TONY JONES: Are the treatments working? Do you know?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, the tumours were shrinking with the first round, but they've stopped doing that. They're having to try something a bit stronger now and I may be a candidate for radiation therapy, which is a very tough thing. You've got to be quite strong for it. I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

TONY JONES: We wouldn't say advanced years.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

TONY JONES: So are you actually up for a long interview about life, death, the universe and everything?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Oh, yes. I mean, my interest in all the large questions hasn't dimmed at all. In fact, it's quite a good way of concentrating the mind.

TONY JONES: You've talked and you've written about the cancer right from the very beginning and people have been following your account as you put out your monthly pieces in Vanity Fair. You've talked about crossing a border into the land of malady. What is that like?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, for me personally it was a bit like being deported, in that I woke up in New York, having gone to bed feeling more or less OK during a very gruelling book tour, and I woke in the morning thinking I was actually dying.

The whole liquid sac, the pericardium, as it's called, around my heart had just filled up. It was if my whole chest (inaudible) had been crammed with wet cement. I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe. And I managed to call the emergency services and these wonderful New Yorkers arrived, very heavily armed with cuffs and torches and boots. And I remember thinking idly as they loaded me into the ambulance, "Why do they need all this for one stricken civilian?"

It was a bit like being arrested and deported. And in fact, in their kindly way, they were escorting me across the frontier from the land of the well into the land of the very ill indeed. And, well, it's not a transition you can ever forget making and of course it's not one you can ever fully make back again either. However well I respond to treatment, I'll never be able to feel the way I did the day before.

TONY JONES: What does it actually mean for your day-to-day life because we see you continually out there writing, doing interviews like this, taking on, as you said, lectures, debates? I mean, how hard is it to actually get yourself out of bed in the morning to continue the life of a public intellectual?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, I don't get out of bed much before 11 these days and I go to bed much earlier than I did, so I can do about half, I suppose, of what I was doing before. I can continue to write as well. That's my big test.

There were a couple of days when I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to write, and that terrified me very much because being a writer is what I am, rather than what I do. It's my - without sounding I hope too affected, it is my raison d'etre, and as well as being terrified of the thought that I wouldn't be able to do what I'm supposed to do, I was afraid that it would diminish my will to live.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

TONY JONES: Being a writer, you actually personified or personalised the cancer. You call it a blind, emotionless being. You know, that is a pathetic fallacy; you've acknowledged that yourself. But does it feel like that: that you've been invaded by something?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, obviously it can't have emotions and as far as we know it can't see. It is a being. The thing is, it can't have a life of its own, but it is an alien and it is - it is alive as long as I am. Its only purpose is to kill me. It's a self-destructive alien.

It's like the absolute negation, I suppose, of being pregnant, having something living inside you that is entirely malevolent and that wishes for your - doesn't wish for, but is purposed to encompass your death. And keeping company with this is a great preoccupation. Once you think about it like that, it's hard to un-think it.

TONY JONES: How do you feel about the people who are praying for you, because there are some, there are some who are praying for to you go to hell?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: There are many more in fact who are praying for you to be cured and some who are praying for you to be converted?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: That's right - or converted and cured, to be fair to them. Well, to the people who pray for me to not only have an agonising death, but then be reborn to have an agonising and horrible eternal life of torture, I say, "Well, good on you. See you there," sort of thing.

I don't feel I'd be very much obliged to engage with them. For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly. I mean, it's a show of concern, it's a show of solidarity, which is a very important word to me. It's a kindness. If it doesn't do any good, and I'm sure it doesn't, it doesn't really do any harm.

The only objection I have is one I touched on a moment ago which is it seems to me a bit crass to be trying to talk to people about conversion when you know they're ill. The whole idea of hovering over a sick person who's worried and perhaps in discomfort and saying, "Now's the time to reconsider," strikes me as opportunist at the very best and has a very bad history in the past.

There've been false claims made by people who bothered Thomas Paine while he was dying or - and published reports later that he'd recanted on his death bed. Even tried that on Charles Darwin; there was an attempt at a false story of that kind. This I think is shameful, and to the extent that it reminds me of that, I resent it.

TONY JONES: The New York Times says your illness has actually spurred one of the most heated discussions that they can remember of belief, religion and immortality. It's almost inevitable, isn't it, when a famous atheist faces death, that this will happen?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. Yes, it's an occasion and people never tire of saying when - as they do, many people write to me or email me, including perfect strangers, readers, well-wishers, sometimes former students or people who know me a little bit, they all, one way or another, make the point that, "OK, I won't pray for you, don't worry," or, "Perhaps you won't mind if I do."

They are all doing as if they're doing it for the first time. It's rather touching. But as I say, the argument's about immortality, the supernatural, the last things - death, judgment, heaven and hell - are or are not valid quite independently of my mental or physical state. And so there's something fishy to me in the suggestion that, "OK, now that your system is breaking down, wouldn't it be a good moment for you to repudiate the convictions of a lifetime?" Again, there's something about the underlying assumption there that I want to resist.

TONY JONES: More than 20 years ago - you mentioned Thomas Paine - but more than 20 years ago, the Oxford philosopher AJ Ayer wrote about being drawn to a red light when he'd had a near-death experience and that was interpreted by a lot of people as a suggestion that it actually changed his views of a lifetime. Are you worried this kind of thing could happen to you?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: There are two great - well, Freddy Ayer's dead now. He died not long after that. But there have been in the recent past two great humanists and atheist thinkers: himself and Professor Daniel Dennett, who've come very, very close to death and in a semi-conscious state, enough to allow them to speculate about consciousness independent of the brain and other things that fascinate all of us.

But both of their conclusive essays on this matter are in my collection The Portable Atheist, because they both, having undergone, so to say, that test, came out with their convictions unaltered.

TONY JONES: Not entirely unaltered in Ayer's case. I mean, he did conclude the experience weakened his conviction that death would be the end of him. So, he had a - not a conversion, but at least a doubt thrown in about his pure atheism.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no after-life. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

But I think I'd be much more willing to say there's no evidence at all that any human being can tell you how you qualify or what's meant by seeing some bright light at the end of the tunnel or coming towards you, or that if you'll only make the right propitiation or right incantation or join the right church, they can tell you about how things will be after you're dead.

I'm quite sure there's no human agency that can do that. I like surprises. If there's to be a second look around with somehow not me and not my brain, but some kind of consciousness, well, that would be more fascinating than many days I've spent in real life.

TONY JONES: It would indeed. These debates have been going on for centuries, though, and ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes, and I think will persist.

TONY JONES: You quote Blaise Pascal, who talked about a wager that could be made with a god that would actually allow you at the very last minute to make a deal with him, ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: ... to believe for a brief period and that wager would be that, "What have you got to lose?"

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well it's rightly called a wager 'cause there's something rather hucksterish about it. And I'm not a Christian, let alone a Roman Catholic Christian as Pascal was and I'm also not a theorist of probability as he was. He was a great mathematician.

But I say hucksterish for this reason: his wager assumes two things: one, a very cynical and credulous god; in other words, a god who would say, "Well, I can see your mind working and I know that you're wagering on me because what have you got to lose, so naturally I'll reward you if you say you believe in me." Why does that follow? Why wouldn't you think, "That's not a very good reason. It's not very good reasoning. It's not a very good (inaudible)."

You might just as well be a god; in fact, you should perhaps prefer to be a god who would say, "Actually, I've more respect for the person who couldn't bring himself to believe and certainly wouldn't claim to do so in the hope of getting a favour."

TONY JONES: Yes, we're talking now logic, and of course, ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, not just logic; I think there's a moral tinge to this.

TONY JONES: Well, exactly, because there's an argument that the jealous god who would consign non-believers to hell is actually immoral, so why would you follow him anyway?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: There's actually a Sufi prayer from the Middles Ages that is addressed to the creator and says, "Master," or however these things are addressed, "If I pray to you in the hope of getting heaven for myself, you should deny it to me. And if I pray for you only in the fear of hell, you should send me there."

These would be bogus forms of belief, they'd be simply behaviourist, reward and punishment stuff, conditioned animal reflexes, coercive and they'd require a slave mentality, which is my second objection to the Pascal wager: it demands of us that we think of this god as a cynical, rather credulous, rather capricious opportunist, easily flattered, and of ourselves as the raw material for a pretty cruel and meaningless experiment.

Now, often we un-believers are accused of being nihilistic and not seeing the lovely deeper meanings of life. Well, what could really be more negative, more pessimistic, more cynical than the attitude I've just described?

TONY JONES: Let's go back to those people who are praying for you, because if you are in fact cured, then they'll take credit for it to some degree and perhaps even describe you as a miracle. Are you a bit nervous about that?

Because, for example, we've had two cases of spontaneous remission from terminal cancer that allowed very recently the first Australian saint, Mary MacKillop, to become St Mary of the Cross. It only happened a month ago. But the idea of intercession by prayer has certainly not disappeared in the 21st Century.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, no, it hasn't and nor will it go away as long as our fear of death persists, which I rather think that it will. We are the only mammals, we are the only primates who do know that we're going to die, and we're the only ones who have made the attempt to award ourselves, under certain conditions, an afterlife. And it's a very tenacious illusion and it's very unlikely to be dispelled.

(Coughing). Sorry. This sometimes happens. How far back should I go?

TONY JONES: That's alright.

I'm wondering have you softened at all and are you prepared to concede anything at all to the faithful that there may be some value in it. I mean, the comfort that religious belief for example gives to people who are in the same position as you?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Tony, as with a lot of this argument, looking death more closely in the eye, as I have been doing, doesn't teach you much that you didn't already know, surprisingly enough. It focuses it, brings it into quite a sharp relief, but it isn't as if I didn't already know that some people, whether they're sick or whether they're well, derive great comfort from the thought that they have a saviour, that they're a member of a flock, for example.

I mean, I personally am incapable of describing myself as a member of a flock for reasons that I hope are self-evident. I'm not a sheep. Some people like to be called sheep and think that they'd like to have a shepherd. And if that makes them feel happy, I must say I think it's a rather contemptible form of happiness, but doesn't bother me as long as they keep it to themselves. As long as they don't try and make me believe it, as long as they don't try and have it taught in schools, as long as they don't want the government to subsidise it, as long as they don't want to block scientific research in its name or because of it, then that's fine.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "I don't mind if my neighbour believes in one god or 15 gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." As long as he or she leaves me alone. I don't want to even have to know what they think. But will they requite this bargain? Of course not. Of course not. They - it doesn't really make them happy. They can't be happy ‘till everyone else believes it too, and that's sinister, in my opinion, and creepy.

TONY JONES: You've grown to distrust the idea of a utopia.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes.

TONY JONES: I presume actually you would imagine a world without religion would be utopian. But, let me ask you this: what do you think a world without religion, without all the cultural side-effects of it, would actually look like? I mean, would it be verging on pure commercialism and materialism? I mean, would it take people away from any spiritual side of themselves at all?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, no, that wouldn't be it because as we know from bitter experience, materialism and commercialism are unusually inordinately compatible with religion. That's why there've had to be so many successive affirmations, because the religious life goes so well with greed and accumulation and acquisition.

When asked where they really want power and influence, this world or the next?, they tend to think rather the same as the more crass materialists (inaudible) do. That doesn't make it any easier to imagine a world without religion, and it's not that I don't think that I have too little imagination to imagine that, it's just that I think it cannot in fact be imagined.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

All of them very crude and all of them long-since transcended and left behind, but respect for tradition alone makes it, I think, necessary for me to say that someone who doesn't know about religion or doesn't take an interest in it is only quasi-literate.

TONY JONES: I want to ask you what you think about Martin Amis' idea that writers like you must actually believe in some form of life after death because not all of you, not all of the parts of you are going to die because the printed words you leave behind constitute a form of immortality. I mean, is he just being kind, or do you think that there's a truth to that?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Littera scripta manet - "The written word will remain". That's true, but it won't be that much comfort to me.

Of course I do write - I've always had the sense of writing, as it were, posthumously. I once wrote an introduction to a collection of my own essays. I stole the formulation from Nadine Gordimer who said you should try and write as if for post-mortem publication because it only then can screen out all those influences: public opinion, some reviewer you might want to be impressing, some publisher who might want to publish you, someone you're afraid of offending. All these distractions, you can write purely and honestly and clearly and for its own sake. And the best way of doing that is to imagine that you won't live to see it actually written, then you can be sure that you're being objective and you're being scrupulous.

I think that's a wonderful reflection, but it doesn't - it isn't the same term as immortality at all.

TONY JONES: As you say in your memoirs, you've written for decades day in, day out - I think you said at least 1,000 words a day for many, many years - despatches, articles, lectures, books - in particular books. Doesn't it give you some comfort that your thoughts, and indeed some version of you, is going to exist after your death, is imperishable?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, if you want to know - because I try to avoid the blues when talking about all of this, but if you want to know one of the most sour reflections that I have when I think that I'm 61 now and I might not make 65 - I quite easily might not.

One of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coalface, I worked very hard. In the last few years I've got a fair amount of recognition for it. In my opinion, actually, rather more than I deserve. Certainly more than I expected. And I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just, as it were, relishing that, enjoying it.

Not ceasing to work, not resting on the laurels, but savouring it a bit and that - I was just getting ready for that, as a matter of fact. I was hit right at the top of my form, right in the middle of a successful book tour. I'm not going to get that and that does upset me. So that's how I demarcate it from immortality.

Similarly, I'm not going to see my grandchildren - almost certainly not. One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

The great Cuban writer Jose Marti said that a man - he happened to say it was a man - three duties: to write a book, to plant a tree and to have a son. I remember the year my first son was born was the year I published my first real full-length book, and I had a book party for it and for him - Alexander, my son - and I planted a tree, a weeping willow and felt pretty good for the age of, what?, I think 32 or something.

But, the thought of mortality, in other words of being outlived, is fine when it's your children, your books or your trees, but it doesn't reconcile you to an early death. No, it doesn't.

TONY JONES: Is it only people outside of your existence then who can actually romanticise this idea of the immortal Hitchens?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, people write to me - and it does - I will say this having, sorry, surrendered briefly to the blues there, but I don't want to put on any false front. I mean, in the same way, by the same token there are people who write to me and say that what I've done or written has meant something to them, that I haven't wasted my time, that I've - my life's been worth living. That's very nice too, but I'd like to have hung around to get more such letters.

TONY JONES: It's interesting you say that because that's actually where I plan to end this part of our interview, because I do plan to give my sons Letters to a Young Contrarian, and I really hope that they then pass it on to their children. And to me, whatever that means to you, that's a kind of immortality, but it's something that only people who've been following you for years can actually do.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, you couldn't have said a nicer thing and I hope you would have said it - I'm sure you would anyway. And I have to have - I'm afraid, they're the same response. I would like to have heard even more people say that. And even met some of their grandchildren and seen if it worked for them too. And this I won't get, but I've - look, I've lived longer than I used to think I probably would.

I've written and published more than I thought I would. It's been better received than I expected, and without being falsely modest, in some cases better than I think I deserve. So don't mistake this for self-pity, but I'm not going to resort to any kind of bogus joviality either.

TONY JONES: Christopher Hitchens, we'll leave you there for now. In the way of things, we're going to come back to you again tomorrow. We thank you for ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: If I'm spared. Inshallah.

dreaded xmas is upon us, it's everywhere now, that day of festive cheer and consumerism, where forced happiness is inflicted upon the lonely, the broken, the beaten and me. i hate xmas, it's a horrible time of year unless you have kids or are surrounded by loving family. i usually go surfing or devote my day to a good cause but this year i feel like a lost cause myself so i think i'll hide away.
i get invites from people but i always feel so intrusive, the token orphan although i did get an invitation form a kid i may take up, she's the new woman n my life and i really think she's very cool. i'm gonna take her to the aquarium soon. i can't wait. maybe if that goes well i'll pop in for xmas dinner at her place. maybe i can sit next to her mum. that would be an xmas present that would make me happy.
anyway's i'm having a day of resting now, my eyes are sleepy because i was up late playing 'angry birds' on my iphone, a great game, and this morning at 6am i was doing a paper round with a client through one of the most amazing streets in sydney, burns road, waitara, where the trees meet and form a canopy, and the houses are all big and beautiful, it really looks great at dawn and dusk.
anyways i'm feeling sleepy zzzz

more rain fall, more silver clouds with dark linings, the messengers and heralds of the gods have determined we pass through into slow time, with magick knives pierce the veils, align the stars, turn the lead into gold, the fortress of transmutation, the idolatry culture pours away like dust in the redemption drug swirl.
headless men run the planet and they have no hearts to match as they watch their money gods turn out to be smoke and mirrors, behind the veils, all the solid mechanism is nothing more than abstract art, everything alluded to nothing.
'hoax'
yes the great hoax. you were warned, they sat upon their horses, along the canyon and looked down at your folly, they attempted to educate you with wisdom but you torched their villages, they showed you the great spirit but you saw a savage primitive heathen and fed them your alcoholic poison to match your ideological one, where man stood with the buffalo you cut him down and killed the beast, where there was honour and dignity you laid waste. where the arrow of truth and will cut the sky you brought your fire stick. the fork tongue of deception stole but the truth always finds a way back.
and now watch closely, listen and feel the tremors of the great spirit.

oh dear, just when you least expect it some sort of curve ball comes travelling down the space time continuum, if it's not some weird terminal double shadow over the heart drama it's some girl that opens your heart up like a can of spam. fuck me did i see that coming, nope. is it complicated as hell, yep it's unbelievable. why would t be straightforwards and simple, why would it be smooth and easy, have i ever had smooth and easy, nope, never except when i was married. that was smooth and easy. so what's the path, man, its the path i always take, the one with no resistance. the one less travelled, the one that no one else dare take, it's the path of the heart brothers and sisters, that's my path, that's where i'm at, and if it doesn't kill me, it makes me stronger.

sell your house, sell you car, sell your ideas, sell your body, sell your history, sell your present, sell your future, sell your image, sell your mind, sell your wife, sell your kids, sell your friends, sell your possessions, sell your confessions, sell your lust, sell your sex, sell your love, sell your blood, sell your tears, sell your story, sell your self, sell your soul, sell your mother, sell your lunch, sell your dreams, sell your liver, sell your lungs, sell the other organs, sell your father, sell your whole family and the people next door, sell the third world, sell the first and second, sell your planet and sell your stars, sell everything you can think off and then what are you gonna do with the cash?

suddenly i realise what i find distasteful in people, the idea of common sense. i was constantly picked on at skool due to a lack in this apparent quality that all people must posses. i never had it. i functioned differently with something called uncommon wisdom.
why do what's common, when it's obvious the common approach has failed us all. how can man aspire to walk on water when common sense dictates he can't, to me the idea is ludicrous, we are bound by the physical laws of the universe because of this collective agreement. well i disagree, i inherently know that your collective truth is a lie. this is reenforced every time i take a psychedelic. now i understand this is not everyones cup of tea but psychedelic thought should be investigated as much as any other. the great sages all know the mind is just a filtering tool, restricted due to the physical limitations the central nervous system puts on the body. in the same way time is linear, the cns stops all information overloading the brain. there's an averaging out that occurs. most brains join the common sense reality, mine joined the uncommon wisdom one.
so far on my travels i only found a handful of like minded folks who took the red pill and jumped down the rabbit hole, it's not for everyone. and there's no judgement in that what so ever, but when people look at me and categorise me in their box i wonder what limited common sense understanding they have of such things.
many have tried to know me, but i can honestly say few do. very few people get me at all. this is a strange thing for me, and it makes me isolated which is a shame, but it's the way it is and i have to accept that.

finished john burdets book, left me feeling somewhat strange as it will be a long time before i read a book that good again. he's a brilliantly acute commentator, i resonate with the main character, it's absurd how we have developed similar perceptions of reality, his through his buddhist path and discipline and i through my own, the result is the same. we know what the truth is of maya, we have both feet in all doors as we migrate through our pains and move towards liberation. life times of wisdom eventually something sinks in, it's the law of numbers, i'm no saint karma has released me from such mindless classifications, i am wandering the bodhisatta realms, a little sad, heartbroken maybe, but i know what that is now, and i know what i have to do with it.
that voodoo love god inside me turns on some powerful mojo when necessary.

delicate matters, i smoke a spliff in quiet contemplation, my friends have left, everyone tending their gardens, i am drifting a bit, inconsolable to my aloneness, i didn't plan it, just kinda worked out that way. the way i figured it i would be married to a beautiful woman, writing for a living, i'd have my muse and we would live simple lives, a bit of travel, a bit of this a bit of that, yeah it would be hard at first but my muse believed in me and she loved me so totally i would pierce the maya of finance and my genius would set us free, fame and glory, recognition. i'd turn up one day with that big cheque, i'd tell my wife i love her and we'd put the kids in the car and drive to the airport for warmer shores and a new life, with some luxuries. anyway that's how i saw it, i guess it's never to late. but instead here i am slogging it out alone, writing songs and a blog, devoted only to the universe who has loved me in a way no one had ever loved me. here i am living on molasses and supplements, overwhelmed by bills, court appearances another awful xmas of sitting at home alone despite millions of invites, not wanting to impose myself and the sad fact that things are getting tricky. here i am falling into peace via codeine dreams, reaching out for love but finding only complexity and maya, pushing at the boundaries and finding only limitations.
i had a good life, i guess, i sucked the marrow from the bone, sex, drugs, rock and roll but love eluded me, soul mates slip past me, relationships are fleeting, i think my longest was four years being married. that's long these days i guess.
anyways i'm sitting at home feeling somewhat melancholy when the phone rings, it's her, my karmic broker.
we launch into greetings, i can't help but wonder what she is wearing, and then i wait for her knock out blow.
'mission. i have some news?'
'lay it on me baby.'
'well i'm looking through your records, i discovered something strange, you have an unaccounted aspect we need to consider.'
'what's the score?'
'you have resolved a lot of stuff and it looks like apart from your relationship with mum you are all square, in fact your very plus. but there's a past life thing here, and it's about to, if not yet manifest itself. you gotta be ready for it cos it's big.'
'relationship?'
'yes, really big. it's gonna be good, it's the road to nivarna for you and her, looks like you're going to cash those chips in very shortly.'
'mmm,' well i must admit i been wondering when it's all gonna come together.'
'well i'd hold on to your hat. it's gonna happen fast, and it's gonna last.'
'what ya mean like my soul mate?'
'not for me to say, i have taken vows, but yes that's a good metaphor.'
'wow.'
anyways i cheer up a bit and take pan for a walk.

in codeine, which is a plant based opium derivative, old skool medication, i found the perfect sleeping aid, slipping into that deep state has never been so easy, like drowning in molasses my eyes close and emptiness takes me, under i sink, darkness abounds, peace and freedom, painless nights, no one can enter my fortress of isolation, here i am like sleeping beauty in reverse, i am the prince suspended in nothingness, body turned to stone, after battles and war, after love and loss, after the cruelty and brutality, after watching the kingdom being over run by barbarians and the wild black vine, their sharp razor thorns grow around all the remains. there in the centre he lays under the codeine's enchantment for the eternal night. the only magick that can break this spell is a kiss on the lips, from her.

the biggest challenge i face on a personal level is one of expectation, here i am awash with psychic ability and an highly attuned intuition, super consciousness or stupid consciousness, it's always an extreme. as i navigate the highways of potentiality with women i usually get a series of visions. this occurs in some sort of semi flash forwards image's move into my mind, often feelings and situations, i can see them as though i'm living them and they have a certain reality that i dare not dismiss.
i see myself with this person, we are happy and the future appears to be very good for both of us, i get a general impression that things work out and i use this to influence my present. sometimes i pass strangers on the streets and get a similar vibe, it's a time line, a possibility, maybe in some other reality in the multiverse i talk to that person and start some sort of relationship, maybe we had one in the past or the future, maybe the connection between us will repeat itself. i trust these feelings yet i am always defeated by them.
for a long time i though other people, my partners would share this or at least understand i have this gift, but they can't, how can they?
then there's the problem of expectation which is fired for me, i had the vision, i'm excited and enthusiastic, i play my cards, force it a little, and here is where it starts to fail. how can one enforce ones reality on another. it happens all the time in the world actually but love is a mysterious force and requires a few special mantras.
so i have learnt how to do this, but it still frustrates me a lot.

another perfect day with miss cupcake, wow, that baby is here and wow, she makes you look so beautiful it's absurd. with all your whining and moaning and carring on, all those magic mirrors and baggy dresses, it's not going to change the fact that you are absolutely stunning at the moment, just filled with some sort of raidence, that mythical glow ain't no myth. yes it's true.
most women go through the process you do, they lose a big part of themselves, lifestyle changes, everything changes, but you embraced it so well and when i look at you i'm proud to be your friend. i think the world of you, i should tell you this but i'm fucked up that way, i should tell you what a beautiful person you are and how much i love you and need in my life. when we were together i had strong visions of us in the future, and here they are, those days have come to be. not quite how i thought it would be, you carring another man's baby, we sleep in seperate beds, we have our lives but there's something between us now that's good and i treasure that, and despite what you think of me i would die without it. if i didn't think you would punch me i would hold you and give you a hug and kiss you but i don't think you would let me in your little force field, so i guess i have to settle for writing words in a blog.
we have seperate lives but i guess we are close despite that. that's good enough for me.

it's a perfect day for a change, in a week of rain and clouds, bad news and ill omens, i meet a beautiful friend and she spends a day with me, oh nico you really are something else, in possession of that rare quality, a radiant inner beauty and outer beauty to match. a complimentary binary that creates a sort of perfection, maybe this is how new stars are born, i noticed in the herald science section two stars were created from a black hole, something never witnessed before except now a giant telescope in the new mexico desert has picked up the image, it's really wonderful.
i don't understand why you chose your history of brutality and pain although it fits a pattern i have seen over and over with most amazing women.
i don't know what self destructive urge lurks under your surface, i can't help you in that department but i'd quite happily lead you into the metaphor death wish, straight into rebirth and liberation, the story of n. you're such a bright star with those three in your trail, almost a galaxy, i don't want you to extinguish yourself because some idiot thinks it's his male duty to destroy all women. i don't want to see that happen to you, call me selfish but i seen it all before, it kills me nico when women settle for something less than they deserve.
i loved watching you in the sunshine, you just merged into the day, looking like the archetype poster girl for sex, playfulness and femininity without even trying at all, those eyes all sparkling and vital and you have a wonderfully independent mind, it's sharp and bright and super aware except in that one department, where i will have to lobotomise you psychically and repair that glitch. don't worry it's painless and actually quite pleasurable.
we don't get many moments together but i really like them, a lot.

man i am so inept sometimes, inarticulate for some one who likes words and writes relatively well, i can't use them to speak with. i should be allowed the chance to just go away and write my responses and ideas down then present them without using to many vocal communicative techniques. that would make things simple but no, old captain mission jumps through the hoops, he bounces over hurdles and obstacle courses that he puts there himself due to the fact he is a little deficit in some areas.

songs are sounding excellent, the sax tracks and new mixes have potential, i don't like to talk about my music but i think it's gonna be a good piece this work. it's gonna surprise everyone, i only want to surprise one person, there's only one person who's approval i want and then i can die happy. every one says it's sounding like david bowie, i can't see it but i can't deny it as bowie is such a major influence on my style.
louis from andromeda plays clarinet and saxes, he's hooked up to an effects box, making squelching sounds, he's playing to parameters i set him, following my menatl images and metaphors, while val turns them into gold. i tell you this, hear this cd from start to finish then tell me what you think, tell me if the deep fix mean something, i think we do. i know it. i also know we have only just begun. wait till you hear all about the next project.

down on what for beach with nico, we are facing the ocean, looking at the waves wash up seaweed, we are talking deep, like we do, under the surface we dive, fishing down at the depths we pull up a few pearls. she looks like a golden girl, sitting in the sunshine, something akin to a stunning supermodel on her day off while i am her grotesque body guard, a strange figure, unshaven, unwashed and somewhat slightly dazed from my codeine hangover, what am i doing with this beautiful girl?

i wonder why i don't just kiss her, or hold her hand, i wonder why she don't do that to me, it's a moment like that. i want her to but there are laws i guess, usually people need alcohol and drugs to behave like that, not me, i'm the opposite of that, but i'm slightly paralyzed emotionally at the moment, somewhat lost.
she looks so good.
i could do this all day, except i can't, i have to go.

i meet miss cupcake for a quick chat in a car wash, she looks all gorgeous in her red hair, i start to tell her about my clusterfuck situation but i'm unable to, to much interference and confusion and she's unable to listen, unable to grasp what i'm trying so hard to express, it's not really her fualt, it's me being somnewhat emotionally blocked. i can't think while some awful music plays, while everyone stares at us, while the second hand spins around that clock, while time is slipping and while she's not that interested in my stuff.
'don't think about it,' she says, 'just see how it plays out.'
she's right but also so very wrong.

what a nightmare, the clusterfuck hits hard, it has changed strategies and entwined itself around everything that comes at me, it's unrelenting and getting me down. i have to dismiss it, put it away, it's to hard to deal with, it's a head trip that just fucks me, it's to big, overwhelming me, sending me into madness.
i just want someone to wrap their arms around me and to kiss me and tell me i'm okay. i want to fall asleep in their arms and wake up in the morning sun, that's all i want, some release from this.

a brilliant writer, talker a conjurer of words pulling phrases from a hat, manipulating language and twisting it's dials, reading in between the lines, paragraphs flow and ever more lucid they glow with ambiguity and attract ambiguity after ambiguity until your overwhelmed in underwhelmedment and all those words sit there on a page as if they mean something. what can they mean to you, but what you want them to, but what can they mean to another and is it your responsibility to even care or consider this, no. you're a word man.
sparrows and crows, straight lines and curves, nurture and nature, duality is the curse we have to negotiate, the killing joke, the reason winning is loosing and losing is winning, just have to remind yourself not to be attached to an outcome.

i'm down at the beach with a friend, her daughter has made me a beautiful bracelet, i really love it and part of me knows that it will fall apart one day as it constructed from string and buttons and trinkets but i do love it so much i don't want to loose it. anyway we are all down the beach when this renegade american guy comes over with his dog and gives us his history of guns. now my friend is very attractive so she's gonna attract every man and his dog but this one has an aura that is very complex and as they talk im reading it, touching on something so dark i have to withdraw and detach myself from, but my friend is able to continue the conversation and engage him without the same kind of retreat i have. he's focused on her, we all know this, he is talking about his life as a police man and the eight bullet wounds he received in the us. eventually he goes away and we debrief.
'did you feel that' we say.
'yeah,' we all agree.
'really bad.'

the rest of the morning is pretty brilliant, i'm really happy sitting there in the sun, playing with the kids and pan, basking almost, wow, why can't all days be like this. simple.

your an amazing man, inspirational, you worked so hard, blood sweat and tears, you never sold your soul for profit or greed, you were a beacon in the darkness to us all, your wisdom has accumulated over lifetimes, your experience is immense and still you have the gift of laughter and here you are faced with the impossible situation, the weight is heavy on your shoulders, the burden of responsibility bears down like a new gravity, you feel betrayed and yet you also feel as though you betrayed, yet we are not the keepers of these books, that's for a higher law to determine.
every karmic debt you ever accumulated is staring you in the face and leering at you from it's endless vampyric feeding, sucking up your spirit, your watching evil destroy all you ever believed in, guilt and personal responsibility are the nails that hammer hard into your cross and the remains of love is the crown of thorns. despite your talent and ability, you are only a man. you have your limits but you have your friends and they love you enough to make sure you never have to face these things alone.
here is where your enemies, the evil spirit will fail, yeah you will take a hit, it's a battle scar, no one gets out without a wound or two, but your enemy is only a pathetic weak force and it can never tolerate a strong force like love. it needs you to fear it, it feeds on fear, the less fear you have of it the less energy it has to defeat you with, it will only reflect your own fear, and it has no power over the love that we have for you. this is the shield that will protect you, our love. you will have your sword akin to elrics sword stormbringer, only it is the sword of truth that will defeat evil and this sword we will call killer and when you need to you will strike the killing blow into this spirit and free everyone from it's intention. everyone.
this is your time, these are your days.

and from this moment the exact opposite of the cluster fuck will be born, the big bang reversed. everything falls into place, everything comes good, truth beauty and liberation reign and love liberates from the personal apocalypse, pain is healed, sickness leads to health and sadness to happiness and emancipation to freedom, the culled trees will grow again, the prisoner will eventually know freedom, the sick will return to health, life will be un suffering. everyone will move from the pain of experience towards the joys of innocence. discord will become harmony and war will become peace. and the killer will be the life bringer.

making music healed me, it always does, it healed my brain injury it healed me yesterday. there's something to be said for doing what you love. i believe in love. i'm a romantic who has had his heart shattered so many times but it never stopped me. the cynics of the world don't really impress me, they just disappoint, how sad to not believe in love. no wonder people are depressed. love is the fucking bees knees. turn it on, tune it in, fuck even if it's love between a man and a dog, a little fucking pot plant on your balcony, love makes stuff grow baby. it fixes and mends. it spins the earth around the sun and guides people together like a strange stronger force. the one scientists will never discover, the one mystics have, the one magick that works. do what you love.

driving cross newtown i stop for some soul food, it's been a while since i ate anything so i order some protein. it's wet and cold, people scurry about running for warmth and shelter, company and sustenance, i watch them from the little restaurant through a torrent of rain, it's theatrical, i wonder if one day some one will make a film from a doorway or a window, a romance obviously. it's the perfect evening for a romance to be born, but not for me, i'm absolutely sick.
i don't get sick much, very rare but the last few days have been a kind of hell, my body is ravaged and tired, there's a strange interference in my head, like static on a tv but turned up loud, my eyes can't focus. i sip my water and watch the waitress who is really cool, warm and friendly, she has a nice soothing voice and right now that's like an wonderful opiate.
what am i doing in newtown?
i'm on my way to the studio, we are going to record the sax parts for the new cd. loius from andromeda turns up while val and i are doing some quick tweaks. let me tell you right now val is a genius, we both work so well together, intuitively, like reading minds, i've never know anyone to actually understand my ideas so well or grasp them with such ease apart from the high priestess. i speak in metaphor and val gets it before i've even said it, and vice versa, we work fast, loius can't believe the process, 'it's how we roll' i say.
everything is falling into place around this music, the songs are now coming into being, they had form but now have shape. it's the substance that takes a youth and makes it mature. these songs are mature now with saxophone.
we use arcane methods to mould the sounds, to capture the spirits of words and music, we do fuck with the mix, we do the un obvious, we take the structure apart even when it sounds complete, everything is reassembled through an unconscious process made conscious. there's a lot of random elements, chance and synchronicity, loius is perfect, he's a master, adding wind to my water, vals, earth, all we need now is nevin's fire and the backing vocals and then a final mix, master and it's done. snuff music is almost finished.
often we use the sound-basements atmosphere, after all it's next door to the mortuary, it's not uncommon for strange things to happen and be seen here, ghosts, spirits, invariably lost and confused, not quite understanding the transition plan. so we use the trail of energies, we use their presence and then help them on their way, it's all there.
as i am about to leave i meet pipsqueak, it was good to meet you pipswqueak, now i remember.
we will have to get you playing on some of my projects one day, i have so many ideas. i've already recorded two songs for the next project after 'snuff' and i've written the one after that, and then there's various other music the deep fix needs to generate, it's all coming, in time.
i drive back across the city, rain and wind, i don't stop, for food, shelter or romantic day dreaming. i get home and slip into a bath and sleep. my body is tired and still feels really worn out from the illness and drama, but it's healthy now, no illness left, no symptoms at all.