For those of you with access to the Vivaids magazine ‘Whack’, my article ‘The Mysteries of Opiophobia’ has appeared in the latest edition.
The magazine has announced a cover design competition and the prize is $200. What you see above is my first effort.
This is my egg.
It gleams with a light that is nacreous and cool.
This my egg,
My beloved egg.
Couched in the palm of my hand,
Boiling with potential,
Rife with theopneustic emanations,
And potencies unknown in nature.
Who cannot sense its fierce primeval presence,
That permeates to the core of our world,
That diffuses to the limits of our galaxy,
On a wave of sparkling orgones?
This is my egg, eldritch and hallowed,
And I must guard it covetously,
For if any mind, born of this Earth or beyond.
Were to learn its secret destiny,
then it would succumb in the passing of an instant,
And take desperate flight,
For the sanctuary of gibbering madness.
My egg is fundamental and sacrosanct,
Relevant to all things, yet related to none.
It is Holy to all things Holy.
And Blasphemous to all,
That is Blasphemous.
My egg is blind to the march of aeons,
Yet is a banner for change in a seething universe.
It is an egg that folds,
Smoothly, solidly,
Into the continuum of space, time and love.
In a certain light it smoulders with a queer luminescence.
And it casts a devouring shadow.
This is my egg,
And it is faultless.
No instrument of human manufacture,
No material of sublunary provenance,
Will pierce the esoteric tension of its shell -
Composed in equal parts,
Of diabolic pandemonium,
And the arcanum of Hierophantic Flux.
There are those who immerse themselves,
In the study of the mysterious unknown;
Who lose themselves,
In the Hyrcynian Woods of Conspiracy.
These are single-minded men,
Who concentrate their wisdom,
On The Vegetable Lamb, the Voynich Manuscript,
Or the enigmatic Disc of Phaistos.
These men …
Know nothing of my egg.
Yet, at some dark hour,
When the sky is congested with sinistrous intent,
A dire wind howling at the eaves,
Then utterable thoughts may be uttered.
And some, cowled, deep in their books,
Will pause at the phrasing of a footnote,
At a scratch in the margin of a battered incunabulum,
And – in a moment of insane conjecture -
May dare to propose,
That something - something like my egg,
Lies veiled upon this Earth.
Mathematicians from the elite academies,
Versed in esoteric calculus and the reckoning of fluxions,
Do whisper of tesseracts and corpuscles
And venture to their anxious colleagues,
That in order to complete the testimony of science,
An egg,
Such as mine,
(My egg).
Must surely have been enthroned from the beginning,
At the Cornerstone of Time.
My egg.
Oh, my egg.
My egg encompasses the futurity of Man.
It is a mirror of the eternal absolute.
It is an egg of the first water.
Need I remind you,
That it is greater than the Egg of Mercurius,
In its unspeakable splendour,
Which is said to have spawned
A prescient green homunculus?
Superior by far it is,
To the membranous Egg of Xenoperion,
Which begat in its possessor,
The abilities to read wisdom from the Comet,
To quicken and manipulate ectoplasm,
And to fire coloured gases from the mouth.
And yes, it is mightier still,
Than the Egg of the Master Scarabite,
Unearthed from the abominated ruins of ancient Ubar,
Which, installed upon a monstrous staff,
Of haunted reptile bone,
Drove an army of mindless scarabs,
To victory after victory in prehistoric Mesopotamia.
My egg …
Resting, apparently inert,
In my trembling hand.
A quiet, white thing.
An unassuming thing,
Of monstrous potential and infinite benevolence,
That is said to have driven the limpid hearts of virgins
To thoughts of self-pollution,
To acts of spectacular prurience,
To crimes of relentless, howling erotomania.
In moments of jocularity,
I laugh to think of my egg,
beleaguering the instruments of Nobel Laureates.
And I dream of it, sometimes,
Suspended in the firmament,
Heralded by angels,
Wreathed in sunbeams
My egg …
Oh, my egg …
What can I say about my egg,
In its harrowing perfection?
Its curves are the curves of nature,
In infinite reiteration.
The dragonfly wing,
The falcon’s beak,
The woman’s hip,
The desert dune,
In infinite reiteration.
The bead of sweat,
The nucleus,
The apricot and her cloven pip,
The amoeba,
The assassin and the sweep of her blade,
In infinite reiteration.
*
I've been a little quiet over the last few days, but by no means inactive. I've had my head to the grindstone writing an article on opiophobia [you guessed it - 'fear of opiates' - though I think I've pushed the meaning of the term a little] for the VIVAIDS magazine 'Whack'. I hoped it would be short and sweet but, as per usual, it turned into a monster of 3.5 thousand words. Look out for it, if you've ever wondered why the hell our society has such a bee in its bonnet over drugs. It's full of nice, meaty stuff.
What lies above, 'The Ovist', is a taste from the next White Noise Carousel album.
By the way, this is the one hundreth post on Sails of Oblivion. Thank you all, particularly the usual subjects, [you know who you are]. This blog is one of the most fruitful and rewarding things I've done in a long time.
Lastly, for parents of a Lovecraftian persuasion, here is an image entitled Where The Great Old Ones Are.
Thanks to Monster Brains for unearthing this. The original by tore natkinson [?] can be found at Deviant Art, and he'll put it on a tee-shirt for you, if you're so inclined.
Tonight, I’m giving a speech at the VIVAIDS Annual General Meeting. VIVAIDS are a [drug] user advocacy group whose purpose - as far as I can tell – is to stand up for the rights of junkies.
It’ll be a casual affair, held in a Fitzroy hotel, so I’ve written a short introduction recapping the standout drug-related story of the year [Bindeez, of course] and thanking the heavenly powers for the demise of the Howards and their prehistoric drug policies. After that, I’ll read an old story of mine called Seed Habit which describes the misadventures of a mad young man with a desperate poppy seed habit.
Poppy seed habit, you say? Well, the individual on whom I based the story was drinking between one and two kilos worth of poppy seed tea per day and - judging by his pinprick pupils - it was getting him thoroughly wasted. It used to amuse me; there was something desperate and ludicrous and strangely enterprising about the whole thing. He would obtain the thirty kilo seed sacks he required by posing as an independent baker with a small business in the heavily forested Bairnsdale hills.
In my wildest dreams, I never suspected that I would come to suffer the same fate. Early this year I made an attempt to wean myself off buprenorphine and completely clear my system of pharmaceuticals. I went down to Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula, where a friend rented a big old house with a bungalow.
The first few days were fine. I dosed myself up with doloxene and tramadol. I found myself experiencing very little in the way of withdrawal symptoms. And things were looking positive – until I had the bright idea of driving down to the supermarket to buy a few small packets of poppy seeds ... just to ease the tension a little…
I soaked 300g in a plastic water bottle for half an hour, drank the resulting solution, and was shocked to find myself comfortably stoned.
Well, I thought, these are merely poppy seeds. They won’t get in the way of my recovery. So I bought some more the next day, and the next, making certain they were always the Australian kind - as Australian poppy seeds are known to be the most potent of all. It is said they wash them at the factory and maybe they do - but I can vouch that plenty of alkaloids are being left behind.
A few years ago in the US, an employee tested positive to opiates and lost her job. She appealed on the basis that she had eaten a bagel smothered in poppy seeds the morning of the test. The fact that they were proven to be Australian poppy seeds lent much weight to her case, though I can’t recall if she was successful.
By the time, I arrived home, I required a big daily dose of seed tea in order to function as a human being. I found myself in pretty much the same bind as the subject of my story. I trawled shopping centres for spice shops, delis… tested different brands… and eventually found an Asian supermarket which could service my needs, selling kilogram bags of the most potent seeds.
Jenny, to her annoyance, would find them scattered throughout the house. Though I did my best to confine my tea-making to the laundry, the tiny seeds have a tendency to get into everything. In the garden, wherever I tossed the wet used-up seeds, a thick grass of seedlings emerged. [They are quite fertile, despite what you may have heard. To my understanding irradiation is used - but in their breeding programme to force mutation.]
Unfortunately the supply was limited. Over the weeks it became increasingly difficult to find seeds that worked. After a little research on the internet, I learned that the Tasmanian poppy companies were successfully breeding for high thebaine levels, [rather than morphine]. Thebaine is used as base for the new generation of opiates that includes buprenorphine, and is more valuable to the pharmaceutical industry than morphine. Thebaine it isn’t much fun to ingest. The only noticeable effect is a mild headache.
I think that’s what happened to my seed supply. Too much thebaine. Not enough traditional opium. After a last few desperate shopping trips to unfamiliar suburbs and obscure ethnic enclaves, I at last relented and once more, sadly, became a hollow-eyed slave to buprenorphine, [this time with a naloxone chaser in the form of Suboxone].
In the yard, a few of the poppies have survived into the summer. They are a joy to behold - with their beautiful purplish flowers and their nodding grey-green pepper pots ...
*
Useful technical notes:
For someone with no opiate tolerance, 300-500g of the good Tasmanian poppy seeds is sufficient. If these are unavailable it might just be worth tracking down the New Zealand kind, which I once had; they are weaker - but I guess you could double the dose.
Make a funnel out a sheet of paper and use it to pour the seeds into a plastic drink bottle [a litre is about the minimum size for this]. The seeds are very fiddly, so the funnel is a good idea.
Then add cold water to well above the level of seeds, close and shake. Let it rest for half an hour, shaking occasionally if you wish. Then use a rubber band to fix a square of chux over the opening, pour and squeeze.
If it's good it will taste heavy and bitter. With the rise of the thebaine mutants, though, bitterness cannot be used as a guarantee that it will work. If it's not bitter, then your seeds have been washed and you won't feel much.
Generally, you'll feel the effect between twenty minutes and half an hour after drinking the tea.
If you're onto a good thing, it can be worth doing a second wash.
A pity good seeds are hard to find. If used sensibly, they can obviate the need for methadone, pharmacies, doctors and all the rest ...
Please feel encouraged to relate your experiences by making a comment
