Forgive me for not posting regularly.

I was rocked, over a two week period by the deaths of two people, Giana Eckhardt and Peter Archer. Both were good friends of mine, who left the show early on.

I don’t understand loss and how it affects us, although I understand that it’s real and every day, people are being crumpled by it.

If you’re suffering personal loss, I am with you.

“I should write a book on Gram Parsons!”

Because of my age, and unrealised ambition, I was literally foaming at the mouth. Of course, I was not remotely prepared for the humiliation I would (perhaps, inevitably) receive.

I had zero experience in the world of publishing. My only attempts at publishing were limited to newspapers and magazines. That first year, I had my first GP-related success with the publishing of an article for Australian Record Collector.

I had recently read Hickory Wind by Ben Fong-Torres, the rock journalist who would later be immortalised on film by Cameron Crowe, in his movie Almost Famous.

I loved the book immensely, and for some reason, thought that I could bring my own perspective to it. I mean, I shudder to think of it now. I was born too late in the 20th century to have a full perspective on Parsons’ achievements, let alone to have fully appreciated his personal pain.

But what I had, and would come to have, was the perspective of a musician, first and foremost. That year, I was trying my hand at university, specifically, to become a registered nurse. I needed some money, so I had accepted a job of a kind. In exchange for a bedroom in Artarmon (a leafy North Shore suburb of Sydney), I would be a nanny of a kind.

That lasted about 7 months, during which time, I delved into a murky world of casual drug use, live music and general self-abuse.

Pretty standard stuff! I segued into writing for the University of Technology magazine, Vertigo. I wrote reviews, mainly. Books and CDs, and the occasional film. I even dabbled in student politics.

I drifted away from the nursing degree after I found it too distressing for my constitution doing prac at the burns unit at North Shore hospital; there’s nothing like seeing a ward full of terribly burned children to strike the fear of God, and other deities, into you. My heart, though full of the desire to help in any way, found no reward in the suffering of innocents.

But, back to Gram.

In those far off days, things like word processors were not generally available to me, so I made use of the university’s computers, armed only with 5 and 1/4 inch disks, before the 3-inch disks became more popular and affordable.

Try telling that to kids now, I tell you. (Don’t get me started on Zip disks.)

The first draft of the manuscript was 100 pages long, ‘bound’ with a bulldog clip and covered in red ink and manic, pencilled exhortations to myself to ‘EXPAND’.

I had no realistic expectations to interview anyone - my principal methods stymied by the fact that I resided in Australia, far from any proximal relation to the epicentre of any of Gram’s achievements.

As I drifted back to journalism, I was introduced to this thing called the internet, or the worldwide web, as it was optimistically known in 1995.

By then, I now had ways of contacting people. On the GP bulletin board, I found Frank David Murphy (a fellow student and friend of Gram’s at the Bolles School in Florida) and Neil Flanz, a Canadian pedal steel guitarist based in Austin, Texas. He worked with Gram and Emmylou on the Fallen Angels tour in 1973.

These first interviews were conducted by email. Since this was new to all of us, the interviews yielded 1000s of words in answer to my queries. All this detail enriched my understanding of Gram’s personality, which I hoped would feed into my endeavours.

Well, I tried, anyway.

In 1998, I began corresponding with Stanley Booth, the rock writer who first led me into the world of Gram Parsons, via his excellent book, The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones. I read that book first in 1988, after purchasing a copy of The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which became my musical touchstone, while still a teenager.

Reading the names of the musicians on the flip side of the sleeve, one name stood out - Gram Parsons. I already knew who Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, Gene Clark, David Crosby and Michael Clarke were. But ‘Gram’? Who calls themselves Gram?

Being as I always possessed an investigative nature, I promptly went searching for more information.

I was aided by insatiable curiosity and a friend of my dad’s, John Balmforth, an English transplant to Sydney, who had a killer record collection and a set of Beatles guitars - the real thing, Rickenbackers, a rosewood Tele, an Epiphone Casino and a Hofner violin bass. He loaned me some GP albums, and the Flying Burrito Brothers as well.

In short, it was finding mutual connections among music lovers who willingly loaned me records and books, which set me on this rewarding path. (Thanks, John!)

Finding a new path to initial publication

In 1999, I participated in a radio show, with my friend, Michael Stranges, during the early days of FBI broadcasting. FBI is a long running institution in Sydney, staffed by passionate volunteers. We discussed GP at some length and I foisted my considerable knowledge of him on the listeners.

After the interview, Michael asked me how I knew so much about this (at the time), relatively little-known visionary. “Well, I’m writing a book on him.”

Michael told me that he, among other tasks, ordered the books at Red Eye Records, another Sydney institution. He told me to email him the manuscript and he would send it to his contact at Helter Skelter Books, in London. He was as good as his word, and Sean Body, the erstwhile publisher at Helter Skelter contacted me, with an offer to publish.

In 2000, following a moderately disastrous tour of America with the band Golden Rough, I sold my guitar in Nashville, Tennesee and bought a flight to London, England. My little brother, Jarrod was living there at the time

Two years later, my 9 years worth of writing had come to fruition.

I remember so distinctly when the first copy of Gram Parsons: God’s Own Singer arrived on my desk at work, via FedEx.

At the time, I was living a hand-to-mouth existence, and there seemed to be no end of possibilities coming true.

But the dream didn’t last. I still hadn’t been paid any royalties. My attitude to this was frankly laissez-faire; I assumed that with the independent book publishing industry (just as with the indie record label I was signed to), cash flow was a problem and there was just no money on a week-to-week basis.

Then in 2005, I heard the news; publisher Sean Body had leukaemia. He battled on for three more years, after closing the bricks and mortar Helter Skelter shop around Christmas time, 2004.

His death really pained me. I loved Sean’s ethos, his tremendous hospitality and kindness.

So, I tried to pursue my overdue royalties. No luck there.

Stymied by distance and money, I had no success in recovering any money.

Fast forward to 2011, I was contacted by Soundcheck Books, another UK based publisher, who wanted to reprint another edition of God’s Own Singer.

After the first edition had been printed, I managed a major coup. I found the email address for Michael Martin, the Australian guy who’d helped road manager Phil Kaufman ‘kidnap’ Gram’s body from LA airport before it could be flown to New Orleans.

I contacted Michael regarding an interview and I was able to meet him in person at his South Australia home for a memorable Saturday afternoon / evening.

My parents were living in Adelaide at the time, and they very kindly drove me to his beachside home for the interview.

Meeting a man like Michael was stunning. He had moved on from the 70s lifestyle in a big way, and was now working as a health and safety officer. He managed to clear up many of the somewhat apocryphal stories that had flourished in the years since Gram’s memorable exit in 1973.

His memory hadn’t failed him, by any stretch.

The reprint, which is available now on Amazon as a paperback and on Kindle, includes the updated chapters containing Michael’s memories, shared with the public for the first time.

In the period around 2007/08, I started noticing a lot of problems in the copy submitted by new journalism and media graduates hired by the magazine companies I worked for. The apparent difficulty they had with organising a coherent set of paragraphs, united by a single voice, for example. The copy submitted was often unreadable, and I was forced to use my red pen diplomatically, at first. Alas, I couldn’t hold my criticisms in forever.

Now, AI at that time did not exist. The problem, I believe, lay in what some universities were teaching their graduates. There was a very heavy marketing-centric approach to copy that spoke volumes about the travesties yet to come.

I choose not to work for newspapers or magazines any more, partly because I refuse to write SEO-optimised copy for anyone.

‘Journalism’ is effectively dead. The art of it has vanished, seduced by money and click-rates. It is in no small part thanks to Murdoch’s mass layoffs and industry-wide shifts toward what we used to call ‘advertorial’. I remember the old saws about ticking off the advertisers, but not ever at the cost of integrity and truth-telling.

Here are my problems with AI.

• The overly smooth tone, the short sentences (which, when used in moderation by real writers are great, stylistically)

• Endless repetition of the same errors, whether factual or grammatical. Ever read those over-long AI pieces about Jimi Hendrix on social media that endlessly repeat his name erroneously as ‘Jimmy’ or “Jimmy Hendricks’?

• AI still needs human fact checkers

Every week, the president of the largest ‘democratic republic’ in the world posts AI-generate slops, then backs away nervously when he’s called out for it.

This kind of manipulation of the truth must never go unchecked, especially for grammar and syntax.

There are all kinds of ramifications for us human beings, even if we are limited verbally or literately. We all of us have our particular strictures, whether about grammar, punctuation, syntax or feeling generally uninspired. (I still used spellcheck on this article, from my ancient 12-year old MacBook Air, which surely must qualify as machine-based learning.)

Have I ever used AI? Of course I have, making photos move and speak, even dance strangely, for the benefit of my loved ones and family. But on my writing? Never.

Let us learn these new lessons which machines are teaching us - to rely on our own creativity and the yearning of our interior life to enrich others, in some small way. That’s all we have left to us.

Don’t let technogarch billionaires dictate what we dream of transmitting to others.

The oral transmission must continue, unabated and unashamed.

What makes me happy is odd, by turns unexpected and downright annoying to everyone else.

I admit, if you look at my Youtube account, you’d see ‘pus, boils and cysts’ for example. Sometimes, I need to see huge swaths of pus being expressed from large, angry boils. I know firsthand the sweet relief of having boils lanced.

Back around 2005, I woke up with what I thought was a pimple on my face. I tried to pop it, but it turned out to be cellulitis, a skin infection on my cheek, which turned nasty, quickly. It was sending waves of infection into my brain and I got to the hospital quickly, thanks to the help of my friend, Eleanor.

About a week after I got out of hospital, I became fixated on what was removed from my head. Within a few years, I became fixated upon what infection does to the human body.

Bacteria does not, generally, bring me lasting happiness, but seeing pus being expressed brings me a certain level of positive feelings. I don’t rejoice in seeing people being cut open, or take strength from hearing their obvious discomfort on tape. It’s obvious that I watch professionals do the lancing, marveling quietly at the amount of local anaesthetic used by American doctors, but seeing a patient’s skin blanch as they are injected with lignocaine or something similar.

When I was a kid, my mother used to keep a brand of sunburn pain reliever (being before the times of SPF50 sunscreen) for anointing my occasionally horrific sunburns. I remember well that time, probably 1980 when at a school outing, we went to Waipu Cove near Whangarei. Of course, in those beknighted days, no teacher carried sunscreen or straw hats for sun safety. So, there I was, hatless, pale and shirtless on an overcast day, just burning in the less than direct sunlight.

I returned home with severe sunstroke, hallucinating and mumbling, cursing my pale forebears for my Irish skin and proclivity to alcoholic drinks.

But sweet relief was to be found when Mum applied the Solarcaine to my shoulders, as the lotion contained 0.5% lidocaine.

After a few bouts of sunburn, I developed basal cell carcinoma on my nose at age 49, which I underwent MOHS surgery, twice because my first skin graft died two days after the first surgery. I went from the hospital to the airport to join a band on tour, which involved being a passenger in a bus, navigating from Tamworth to Darwin, via far western Queensland to the Northern Territory for a few shows and a blissful holiday along the way, and back to Sydney, via Alice Springs and Adelaide, then Melbourne. All that road warrior shit, for a total of 7500 kilometres (4460 miles) with a black spot on my nose the entire time.

I went back to hospital the next day on arriving back in Sydney and a successful surgery with skin sourced from a second location on my nose, above the site of the original surgery.

The successful surgery definitely improved my mood, and my kids learned the word ‘gross’ just for my nose.

It was my pack a day habit which killed the first graft, which is when I first began vaping.

Medical care, which is free in this country- has saved my arse a few times, makes me happy. Also, records, books and my new old typewriter are currently also making my mood of happiness complete. And hot cross buns, with butter!

Let the briefest rains do their duty

as fog weaves about us once more

doubtless we soon will plough fields of snow with our feet.

The longest summer is a state of mind

for here inside our hearts

a season’s effortless unwinding

undoes our tender, bruising leaves,

but can caress the softest shoots of green.

Caught up in a northern high summer

may you gather

birdsong by the fistful,

and if the years permit you

to call the flowers from the wild grass

of the prairies and the plains,

Then forever you remain

a summer’s wraith in winter’s heart

devoid of wrinkle, his lies croak

from a thirst for death unquenchable,

threaded with no discernible

pulse …

But the syphilite feeds on ancient

blood libels, and

a compaction of time

almost artistic, densely arranged in

a intricate moment of foment

All the old lies, mistrusts of ancient arrayed,

and essayed by misinformation,

drawn from Huxley and Orwell,

who foresaw the totalitarian monolith

of the diseased future embodied ~

in billions of tears

from the pathology of billionaires

I believe that the only way for this world to get better, is to let women run everything.

Take these pathetic old white dudes, knacker them, and turn them into glue, or sawdust.

I have watched, writhing in pain at the collateral damage, as they’ve raped everything, clearfelling whatever they want.

It is plainly not anywhere like fair, or human, or good enough.

We deserve women in power.

I’m 57, and I’m fucking over it.

Please. Take your rightful place, wrest it from the bloodless hands of elderly, feeble white men ~

who hold no power, or allegiance to my gender, lay waste to them.

Break the sacs of these despoilers.

Break their hands, mutilate them.

I care nothing for their welfare …

Lead the revolution. Empty the bellies of these horrific men, with shovels and broken pottery

They are dooming us to extinction and all I want is for compassion to shatter these false idols, deprived of matrilineal beauty.

I remember the first girl I ever fell in love with.

Her name was Caroline, and like me, she was just 11 years old. She was a real spark, English, gorgeous dark hair and polite, well-spoken, but also easily embarrassed.

Oh, god. I remember having talked to her by our bag nooks, as they were so quaintly known. After she had gone, I began to sing the words of ‘Sweet Caroline’.

Another kid from my class overheard me. He had seen who I was talking to just a second before, and he laughed at me. “You’re in love with her! Ha ha! You love Caroline Nicholas! Ha ha!”

My first crush was forever unrequited, of course, it was a cyclical pattern of disinterest that continued until I was nearly 30 years old. Of course, Caroline heard that I liked her, second-hand, through the perversity of childish schoolyard whispers. She was so embarrassed by the nascent feelings I had for her that she never addressed me directly ever again.

Now, these are little exercises in learning to deal with rejection and not being a fucking creep about it. “Just move on”, my emotions said. I wrestled with these solitary feelings for the next 19 years of life.

There were a lot more girls to come along that I would be briefly besotted by. Their names are largely forgotten to memory now, but some names stand out. Amanda. Samantha. Leila and Tracy. In my youth, there were no exotically-named kids, just a parade of phonetically similar nomenclature. Kirsty, Christie, Chrissy and the like.

But they are all special to me, because by those names I can map the territory of love misadventures and misfires. I craved love, affection and eventually, intimacy. It drove me kind of mad, in retrospect. My brother had girlfriends in school and even kissed some of them. I had to accept that it was not to be my experience. I wasn’t happy about it, frankly, but what can a boy do but accept the obvious?

I remember saying to myself when I was 15, '“You will probably die alone”. Such Morrissey-esque pain was exquisite to bear. It was a load I had to take on, so I threw myself into self-destruction. Before the age of 16, I heavily smoked pot, cigarettes and drank alcohol to excess. I threw myself into guitar further, rationalising that since my brother played guitar and got girls interested, it might work for me too.

But, no.

The problem was truthfully, I was pretty much below average in the looks department (no looksmaxxing happening there, as the kids of today say). I had a lazy eye, suffered mild epilepsy, and was a bit tubby, while my brothers were much more conventionally handsome. I felt as though God had already judged me as completely unworthy.

I didn’t and never will buy into the incellish idea that any of us deserve anything in terms of attention or interest, from women.

I am not owed anything by any woman. Yes, I have had my share of painful rejections, but by the age of 30, I finally had a real girlfriend. My first.

She was patient and kind with me, loving too. I had no idea what was really required of me, but I learned fast. I was head over heels, and frankly enjoying the feeling. She is gorgeous. with auburn hair. Like most off my exes, she is still a dear friend to me, nearly 30 years later.

We went ahead of each other, then I met my second girlfriend. She was babysitting for a friend of mine’s children, and when I walked into my friend’s house, well after midnight one evening, she awoke from a nap on the couch and walked into the kitchen. Her first words to us were, “Oh, sorry, I thought you were my boyfriend”.

Knowing my dumb arse, I probably said something pitiful, like ‘I wish I was your boyfriend!’

She was dark-haired, Jewish and pretty. So, completely out of my league, I imagined, but was eventually happy to be proved entirely wrong.

Several months later, we went on a date and were then inseparable for another three years. Then, through a combination of bloodymindedness (mostly mine), unresolved mental illness (both of us) and substance abuse (shared), she dumped me. But, what happened next was we discovered ‘breakup sex’, which is just as addictive as any Class A narcotic.

What we had in common is a sense of humour, and we made each other laugh like open drains.

Since then, I have also had some horrible experiences, but hey - who hasn’t?

I’m not going to embarrass myself or the woman I love today by elucidating any further, except that I feel like I have discovered real happiness. Following the ultimate experience of a NDE, I have learned how important it is to just ‘be’ in a relationship. Not letting any external phenomena enter in to the matrix of two that is love.

Learning everyday, and grateful to be here still, after some rampant shitfuckery.

Yours, sound as ever, Jason

When my life was more sure

of itself, And time, unbound and elastic

I would drive to the lip of the continent

and immerse my being, entire

into the waters of the Pacific,

That vast blue expanse of water

which gazes unblinking into the

universe’s unyielding soul within her,

our mother the water of whom

we are primarily consisting

We are like cucumbers with bones, or melons

whose boned beaks can mouth off,

suck hungrily at the teats of obstreperous futures

unknowable and all that it may hold

We do not die in absolutism, but by reduxion

neither are we immune to its charms - but

while bleeding out, we remember the before times,

when the heavy metals and excrement

we shoveled into our mutual matrilineal fluid,

killed the sharks in breeding season and now,

having attempted reparation

Behold, they circle us once again

It sounds almost utopian, in a sense. But you have to ask yourself crucial questions - like, who is adding value for the shareholders?

The market for the war machine in the current world climate doesn’t need any help in meeting the KPIs for the shareholders. In old police procedurals, they used to ask, ‘who profits from the crime?’

Well, doy …

That would be Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now known as RTX) and Northrop Grumman. Now what do some of these companies have in common? Well, Lockheed and Grumman used to build aircraft that were used in World War 2, and have always had extensive contracts with the US government, dating back to before World War 1.

Now I used to build model kit aeroplanes in the 70s, and I built more than one Grumman Hellcat, which was a nifty and deadly little plane. Lockheed Martin is responsible for the deadliest of aeroplanes, from bombers to jet fighters to unmanned aircraft, which you all know as ‘drones’.

None of this does anything but prove the point that there is more money for shareholders and CEOs in war. Its relentless mechanical jaws feast on money invested in research and development in more creative ways to lay waste to entire countries. It eats blood and guts and shits out money, more money than God or Croesus, as cynics suggest. It’s very simple when you think about it.

But I think about it a lot.

I almost bought into the heroic myth of war. I tried to join the Navy and the Air Force but was stymied by my old affliction, strabismus (that’s a wonky eye, to you).

My dad, who likewise narrowly avoided being sent to the Suez Canal in 1950s, clapped me on the shoulder when I learned that I didn't get in. ‘It’s better not to die in the cause of money.’

That is all money is. Money slides up and down the big stripper pole of life, greasing everything it touches. No one is really immune to it’s sour charms - not congressmen and women, not senators, not even the president of the United States. The current man behind the podium with dollar signs in his eyes is particularly susceptible to this disease. Let’s not jerk around - what I, and we, are witnessing is an empire in decline. Late-stage capitalism is having it’s death throes, publicly.

AI is just their entertaining way of dying out like the dinosaurs, presented as ‘but look what robot and computers can do - it looks like they’re real!’ OK, I enjoy karate with cats, and dancing animals like any red-blooded male, but behind the algorithm is the attempt, hucksterish and depressing desperation of billionaires hoping to become trillionaires. That’s all.

I for one (and I realise I might be an island, the outlier here) don’t want trillionaire dictators telling me that a state of war, designed solely to generate profits for a privileged few to spend on golden showers and whatever other likely immoral and evil pursuit takes their fancy.

Children? Animals? Ritual sacrifice to ancient gods, long dead?

I’m going back to my less-complicated pleasures - music, movies and rock’n’roll, preferably of the country variety. This cowardly new world is not to my taste.

It seems some of us have this idea that ‘forgiveness’ means you still have to be a friend to that person, or turn away when they do the same thing to someone else you know. News flash: it’s not up to you to make amends.

Just because you choose forgiveness, does not mean that the person who is forgiven gets off scot-free. It simply means that their manipulative, underhanded behaviour over you is complete. It no longer has any power or traction with you. There is nothing in it - not any more. You simply free yourself from any further damage being done to you, by that person. You have released yourself to live your best life without further residual manipulation and second-guessing.

Holding on to past hurts is a short-term feeling, and can commit you to a longer-term undoing of self-esteem. It’s easy to see this advice as if someone is foisting a Judeo-Christian belief - but for me, it’s rooted in reality. It empowers you to move on, and accomplish more with your life. Choose forgiveness and avoid bitterness, which is a real killer.

a splendid and off-kilter gift as it were,

made flesh, given stride and

bearing, bearded and now, nearly old …

I stood beside my Father’s death

bed, and with the eye-phone eye made

a last, fast request that I could behold

that strange glow,

which his now lifeless body held

It was, indeed, a strange, almost incorporeal

colour - he was Golden,

and mythical in his serenity,

eye cannot lie!

His life had shuffled off mortality

and temporary insanity

easily and was now living elsewhere

(Spain? The Maldives?)

Where, Dad, did you go?

I made a futile joke of it, saying to myself,

“He’s nipped out for a pint of milk

and 20 Silk Cuts”

(I need not explain, but he didn’t ever smoke)

and my brother actually, perversely giggled and choked

I miss him with every fibre inside,

the skin he wore briefly was still

very much alive

(shock, I think)

… possibly … improbably,

that the man who inadvertently

raised me, lay like some limbless statue

of gold once conceived,

‘He is not dead,’ I quoth to myself,

‘He only sleeps’

and most days since, thoughts of

him come to me, unbidden,

wherein I can see him in my son’s

off-centre smile and his

identical facial tic,

which made me once

fretful, but not anymore …

I present to you

The Son of The Glint, who has his father’s

love and fortunately - not his looks!

It sounds controversial to even say this, but seriously …

You know, I was once a hardbitten, hard-nosed journalist. Yes, one of that now dead breed of people who snorted filthy biker crank off toilet seats and then licked them clean.

I once attended the scene of a car accident in which a school friend of mine was killed. I was not quite sixteen years old, freshly ejected out of an education system I was ill-equipped for, into a far less than welcoming world, where my senses and sensuality were barely appreciated. I rode my bicycle there.

My school friend was decapitated in the accident. No matter where you stood, downwind or upwind, all one could smell was how he bled out. It sounds like PTSD material, and it was. I have never dealt with it in any meaningful way. But I was blooded, and unbowed.

It is as shocking today as it was in 1984, I remember how I had the paper’s spare Canon slung around my neck, as I rode the approximately 18 or 20 kilometres (12 miles) to the site of the accident took me shy of an hour. I distinctly remember that the ride there was mostly flat, but how the ride back to the office in the complete darkness seemed to take me all bloody night. So heavy was that camera that my cervical vertebrae have never healed, to this very day.

You will be glad of heart to hear that I did not once raise the camera to my inexperienced eye.

Yet, like a photograph by the inimitable Ascher Fellig (better known as Weegee), inside my compartmentalized brain, there is in fact, a series of still photographs in which the blood on the road streaks silver, glinting dully in reflected siren lights from a fire engine and a few cop cars, and also vividly from the wrecked car, which had been forced by forward motion underneath the trailer of a semi-truck, which had braked too suddenly.

There is one more image that still floats up into my mind’s eye; that of the blood foaming like a freshly spilt beer as a fireman hosed it all away. All that blood, and none of it could have saved my childhood friend’s life. What, even, could I have done?

Nothing. And in the days before people took selfies next to wrecked cars, in some perverse act of mockery toward a lifeless body, which are then plastered all over social media, like the purported victims of ISIS beheadings, (if you are of an age when such a dismal parade of videos were presented every day on social media), I could already see at my youthful age, that there was no point in trying to capture any part of that sad, bitter scene.

There is no victory to be found in death.

There is nothing like glory to be found in its sour embrace.

I would later bear witness to victims of house fires, an airplane crash, and carbon monoxide poisoning. It only served to perhaps harden my heart a little, and also my sensibilities.

Of course, Facebook reels of wonky cats with lazy eyes make me bawl like a heartbroken child, perhaps connecting me to my somewhat stunted, not to mention cavalier way of blanking out traumatic things, only to have them bite and claw at me much later, and damn me if they can’t still draw the blood that now manages to pump through my veins.

I grew up around an adult, my dad’s youngest brother, who had Tourette’s, and a host of other problems. Seems like nobody is prepared for nuanced discussions about the people who suffer with this ailment (is that even the correct word to use?).

My uncle, who is deceased now, suffered tics all his life. I say suffered, because it was literally the cause of many problems in his life. He was beaten up by people in New Zealand, who objected - rightly - to being called the C word. Not the old proto-Germanic word you’re probably thinking of, the one that rhymes with ‘punt’, the one that rhymes with ‘spoon’.

The people who were on the receiving end of that racial slur didn’t have time for nuance in their discussions with him. It is very unfortunate that he had to endure being thumped repeatedly for using this particular word, but those terms are loaded against all parties, and there’s no adjudicating a correct response.

As a kid, I found his tics endearing - he would often make noises like a rooster (‘puukarrrk’) and I thought he was simply being funny. He was a funny man, exasperated and exasperating, prone to making hilarious, often sweeping comments.

My dad was always concerned for his wellbeing, as my uncle was the youngest in the family, and also suffered paranoid schizophrenia. In the mid-60s, when he was a teenager, he scaled a nigh-tension power pylon, and was in danger of being electrocuted, necessitating the fire service and the police to literally wrestle him down.

Another time, he became obsessed with the possums living in the roof, and decided to borrow my father’s .22 rifle to despatch the noisy buggers to oblivion. He ended up ricocheting a projectile into his own leg.

He was not a bad person.

The last time I saw my uncle was in 1993, when he came to stay with my parents. My dad built him a room off the garage, to give him privacy, where he could listen to music all day. His only vice was cigarettes and Coke, and he would record music onto his reel-to-reel to be able to listen for hours and hours, without having to change records, or flip tapes. His tastes were eclectic - he was obsessed by Alannah Myles ‘Black Velvet’ as well as Chris Isaak, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, the Beatles, and occasionally Black Sabbath.

Until recently, I had his reel-to-reel player, but got water damaged in a downpour at my home, and never produced another sound. He went back to New Zealand in 1993, and his condition, various deteriorated badly. He took his own life in 2019, less than a month before my dad passed.

It was a double blow to lose the two men I loved the most in the world, like that.

I am having my first cup of coffee, and vaping.

The early late summer air swirls around my ankles. Once seated at the kitchen table, I had to put my sandals on again, as they were on the wrong feet. Whose feet are they, anyway? I don’t recognise them as mine anymore. They’re all weird and disgusting to look at, afflicted with peripheral neuropathy and a weird fungus on the nails.

As I poured my first from the French press, I had a sudden strange but firm memory.

I was pretty young, it was still the 1970s. Not to rob this account of it’s true interest, (I’m a proud Gen Xer) but we were staying at my grandparents’ house for a long weekend, when I sauntered into the kitchen and started making a cup of coffee for myself.

In them days, the coffee wasn’t all that strong - Nescafe instant, if memory serves, in the massive aluminium canister. Two sugars, yes please. Neither of my grandparents looked askance at me as I boiled the water. I took my seat at the table, and said good morning to my grannies, who were both morning people. Suffice to say, I was not at the time, one of those people.

After a bit of Marmite on toast, I was a little better.

It was while making my second cup that Mum came down to the breakfast table, probably attracted by the noise we were all making, laughing and carrying on. She watched with precise eye as I spooned more coffee and sugar in, then added skim milk (my grandfather was a type 1 diabetic and could not stomach full cream milk).

She suddenly snatched the cup off the bench.

“You’re not drinking that.”

I looked at her, sizing her up for a verbal head massage.

She caught that look I gave her, and clipped me around the ears. She had that touch of violence from her own upbringing, with the other two in the room right now.

My grandfather roared with laughter, probably appreciating the exactness of his daughter’s deft way with remonstration and precise parenting, 70s style. “Let him have the coffee. We were having a very nice chat just now …”

My nana just giggled. My mum started to sag, having been undermined and gaslit by her own flesh and blood, again.

I clambered aboard the soapbox with my speech, rehearsed full-bore in my head.

“Mum. Please. I need that coffee.”

“Who else lets you drink coffee? Is it your father?”

Rumbled. Dad would have to cop it too. It was no small thing being chewed out by mother.

“You let me drink cups of tea, what’s the difference? It’s all caffeine.”

I had learned that early, of how we medicate the mornings to grease the wheels of the day.

Suddenly, I heard this voice, this ancient burring voice of preternatural adulthood, crawling up out of my voice box. “Just let me have the goddamned coffee.” As it came out of my mouth, I knew exactly how I was going to die.

That sunny kitchen morning skewed off course, with violence just around the corner.

“Blasphemy!” laughed my grandfather. “You’ve taught the boy well.”

My mother, to her credit, de-escalated a somewhat tense encounter with her eldest boy (or so I thought at the time), 10 years old and already drinking coffee. Blasphemy was a sin, that I knew. But mum, its my coffee, and due to half-arsed parenting and grand parenting, I’ve been given nothing but mixed signals and all manner of subtle misdirection. “So, may I have it back?” Manners would not fail me now. She slowly handed it back to me.

“Already addicted, I see.” My grandfather wasn’t helping my cause, being the impish 79 year old that he was then. He was alive during World War One, not quite old enough to join up and see the Hun off. His older brother had been wounded there, and died this very year of our Lord, 1979.

Coffee? I was either 9, or 10. My dad used to let me make his coffee and I used to drink a cup too, two sugars and milk.

I also experimented with smoking cigarettes.

The first time was about age 4, when I demanded that my uncle David give me a cigarette. It did not end well. I vomited copiously. I don’t remember much about uncle David. He was a prison screw. He died in 1983 of a cerebral haemorrhage, afflicted by the same Walker curse of incredibly high blood pressure.

By age ten, thanks to another of my dad’s brothers, Kenny, the youngest and most troubled of them all, who had schizophrenia, got me smoking casually. He would always offer me one whenever I went outside with him. Probably a form of child abuse, but it never felt bad. Did my parents not notice? I only imagine they would have no reason to smell a child’s breath. But I loved (and probably still do, though I’ve lost the taste for tobacco in the last six years) that dirty but pleasantly rewarding tang on my tongue.

In 1985, when I finished high school, I was already working, and in my Port Royal tobacco pouch, I would find little notes from my younger brothers, begging me to quit this terrible habit. I wish I had learned, but I never imagined what lay in wait for the next forty years …

My father had watched, horrified, as his own father succumbed to emphysema at age 56. He’d had tuberculosis as a young man, and had smoked most of his life, apparently, it was rumoured to ‘strengthened’ the lungs, or some horseshit. Some kind of old wives’ tale, I suppose.

My dad hated even the smell of tobacco. My paternal grandmother eventually died after her 45-year exposure to her husband’s secondhand smoke.

Coffee was my gateway morning drug, quickly joined by cigarettes full-time in the early to mid-1980s. What you’d call a hopeless case, as Graham Greene himself might put it. I will spare you the common AI mistake of inserting an image of the celebrated Native American actor …

I thank you for your persistence.

There is of course, no substitute for lived experience.

I have, mostly through being ill-prepared for real life, seen some shit, as the kids like to say. I have lived through a lot of adversity, some of it self-inflicted. I’ve lived high on the hog, but have had to huff on an oily rag for much of the last six years.

I always felt as though I had little to offer the world, apart from writing and music.

One career propped up the other, until they were both gone. Permanently, it seemed. But six years after my last stroke, I appear to have ‘flourished’.

I am not quite there yet.

I have seen my friends’ careers and hobbies take on new life.

Marriage. Not for me, I guess.

Financial security. Nope. My superannuation (the old 401K, for my US friends) is currently at 3 digits.

Savings? Ha ha ha.

I do however have my two children, of whom I am insanely proud. I never thought that I would have them. They seemed like an out-of-reach ideal.

In the early days of COVID, I went to see them at their mother’s place. They both had contracted it, and I could only stand six feet away from the door, longing to hold them and kiss their faces. Social distancing. What a concept.

I had my final stroke on April 21st, 2020. Peak COVID. There were rumours that the illness caused stroke in some victims, and I was moderately sure that this had happened to me. Not so, it turned out. I wouldn’t get it until the following year.

Strangely enough for someone who was hospitalised with double pneumonia in 2015, I had a very mild first dose. Subsequent cases (two) were much worse. But, in line with being more vigilant about my health, I managed to break out of the worst of it and have not had any case in nearly two years.

The social ructions it caused in society, mostly by conspiracy theorists and deniers, still lives with me. The way people carried on, one would think that the vaccines were poisoned with mutating RNA and nanobots designed to take us over, making us more compliant to political suggestion. I got the vaccine three times, and boosters. Suffered no extreme side-effects, or periods of madness. Well, no more than could be reasonably suspected.

Since Brainworm guy took over the reins of Health in the US, madness has become the norm, politically. Now, it emerges that a pedophile/ Moloch billionaire cult has taken over government in the US, there’s no guessing where the world can go. To hell, presumably.

As I rest on my laurels, popcorn in hand, I am mostly content to watch as civil society in the US is resisting the changes it’s government is trying to inflict on it. Everyday, the strange is coming on stronger. Apparently, there is a war in Portland, Oregon.

As disgusting as the revelations are that are coming out (heavily redacted), we are unreasonably expected to believe that billionaires just want us all to a) shut up, b) die and c) quit whining.

Massive props to Ellie Leonard, who risks life and limb to comb through the vast database of revelations being shat out of the DOJ every day.

How are we supposed to read it all?

Citizen journalists are our only true hope.

Support them, please.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but my brain chemistry has been completely altered by them.

Magic mushrooms made me vomit. Every time I took them.

Acid was, well, intriguing.

In 1994, I took some incredible acid with my brother, after we had been to a wedding. Sitting in his bedroom, we talked over and to each other, cementing our friendship forever. I watched as my brother ‘died’ in front of me, his body breaking down and his skull became visible to me, and then he was reborn before me, as if I had witnessed a new creation.

I became so connected to him for the next 26 years that when he actually did pass away, I was rendered mute by grief. Literally struck dumb. No tears came.

I felt as though that somewhat random trip we had shared two and a half decades before had somehow prepared me for his death, in advance. Of course, this sounds trite and unsatisfactory to my inner critic, and I don’t want to trivialise its impact on me.

My brother lived in London for seven years, between 2000 and 2007. I visited him a few times, staying with mutual friends near the West End. During one visit, we partook in some ‘naughty salt’ (that’s a 1920s reference to cocaine, if you haven’t come across it). My brother stayed up all night talking to a friend, as I decided to lie down and rest my body before a week-long tour of England, Scotland and Wales.

Before turning in around 1am, I had washed my clothes in preparation for my journey and set them into the clothes dryer, which was located in the kitchen.

Well, despite an air-conditioned skull and concurrently racing thoughts, I promptly fell heavily asleep. I awoke at 6am to pack my bags and get some breakfast into me. Of course, the dryer had been turned off by my brother as it was interfering with the conversation. It had not been restarted.

I was forced to don wet jeans and a t-shirt with my only pair of dry long johns and a singlet for warmth, before setting off with my suitcase and guitar into the November chill, bound for Paddington station. Not best pleased, I might add.

How does a person sleep like that under the influence of cocaine?

Of course, no drug has ever worked for me as it was described. Not heroin either. All my literary and musical heroes took some kind of drug, be it alcohol, speed, heroin, nicotine, marijuana or cocaine. Booze is the only one that worked, and I hardly ever drink these days.

Even after two cups of coffee in the morning, I’ll go back to bed and sleep another hour or two.

The desire to destroy part of myself, while attempting to create at the same time, seems counterintuitive in some ways, but that’s the creative’s lot. We are damned whether we do it or not.

by

Jason Walker

He waits by the corner, as patient and silent as some honorific statue. Cars pass him by, the occupants seem not even to see him or note his elderly face, nor do they notice the trace of military service in his bearing. His spine, having toiled for decades to carry him along upright still keeps him at near attention.

He waits by the corner. The sun swivels around, changes the fall of light. The afternoon wears him down a little. So he sits at the bus stop seat, a paper sack of groceries between his ankles, and waits. Who knows what for?

He remembers that day suddenly, decades ago, when Fox Foley came right by here to fetch him in his old Hudson. Stopped right on this corner in front of this store. Of course, in those days, there was a whorehouse upstairs, and it was popular with servicemen, ex-cons and musicians. It was 1949, and the Hudson was not even old then, but barely months in age. That car would be retirement-aged too now, Cease thinks.

So many pale ghosts here in Nashville. You’ll never see a Hudson, hardly. Some country star might restore one maybe. That’s how Cease examines the passage of time as the years tighten around him – by the cars that pass along by him. If you can remember a time when there was no such thing as a foreign car in these parts, you’re probably real old. Now the old, familiar names seem foreign to him: Terraplane. Studebaker. Oldsmobile. Edsel. Now that was a dog of a car, he thinks to himself.

Hyundais hum past, Toyotas, SUVs, a ridiculous Hummer limousine with strips of black lights in its dark-tinted windows. The bus comes by, but Cease, distracted by reverie and a young woman in a halter-top, does not wave it on so it stops. The driver cranks open the door for him to get on. Cease ignores the door and as the bus door closes again, a curse drifts out into the slipstream of the day.

His hand slips into the pocket of his coat for a cigarette, before he can catch himself, remembering that he gave up when Carter was president.

Some days, he prefers to play the game of his alternate reality; the time and place where he was as big as Hank Williams, looming gaunt and charismatic as Johnny Cash, or maybe a wildcatting egomaniac like Jerry Lee Lewis. Imagining that no matter how young or old the person passing by recognises that face in an instant, as familiar to them as their own.

He likes to think of the young women in their rockabilly clothes, the tattoos (which women in the 1950s very rarely, if ever, possessed – not even hidden in the places you might be fortunate enough to uncover on occasion) and old-fashioned hairstyles cooing and giggling over him. Once they’d figured out that I was there with all those cats.

At home, with the sun-browned table cloth and the dust, he imagines some eager young journalist, asking surprisingly knowledgeable questions, helping him fill in the gaps of years, the session dates, the old, pleasing game of “Whatever happened to...”.

It was the one reward of his obscurity, this ongoing game. He would sometimes give into the game entirely, and talk out loud to no one, as though he had taken some unheard telephone call from a German record company about to reissue all of his earliest material as a 4-CD box set.

The sort of treatment he had always wanted. Instead, those sides had probably vanished forever. The few that had been released had sold almost nothing, repudiated by jukeboxes and teenagers alike. Somewhere, there was a box of those few rare 78s, buried beneath suitcases and boxes in the garage or basement of some long forgotten rented home.

Or more likely they were landfill, graded and bulldozed flat for tract housing around 1987 or so. That didn’t seem to fit the tone of the interview, the polite young German interviewer on the telephone, his questions anticipating glories that had long since been passed on to others, the many who had already gone to Jesus. Roger Miller. Jerry Reed. Charlie Rich. Feathers. Presley. Riley. Few of them had lived long. Fame saw to that. Without fame, no one gave a fuck, or lit your smoke for you, no matter how far you stood from the door of the club. The kids and wife nagged you into knocking off the booze and quitting cigarettes and prescription medication. Even reefer was out of the question.

You stopped eating breakfasts consisting of protein and animal fat. You never made a compact with the devil, but you never could hold onto a record deal either. You didn’t go and woodshed with Bob Dylan and come back to Grammys and song pitchers trying to get you to record a song by some grunge band you never heard of.

Instead, you became the jealous rooster with cigarette ash in your age-defying hair; the hard-hearted man who only warms up enough to feel anger; the cold fish frozen into pitiful self-mythology; the bitter could-have-been that spits on the doorstep of someone else’s success. And yet, your blood keeps circulating, as the jealous curse against every life far more celebrated that came to a premature end.

The shock of death is a blow that hits hard, but like having a violent step-father, eventually you come to anticipate the punches until eventually death is just some ex-boxer wasting away to nothing in a home for the indigent, his onslaught little more than the tiny pattering his shrivelled muscles can muster.

Death shocks us first, it cuts deep until we cannot summon anything but tears. Then over time, it becomes inconsistent. Some deaths hit us harder than others, for reasons hard to substantiate. Children, friends, roadies, drummers, old flames, bartenders and luthiers come and go out of the shelter of life, their feet kicking out into the dark and rain, just a splash before disappearing. Death is reduced to a word, or a phrase: “he passed on a while back”; “cancer”; “suicide”; “OD”; “electrocuted”; “he never really recovered after his daughter died in that car wreck with her boyfriend”; “heart attack”; “He Stopped Loving Her Today”. They never really just go – they stop being around as much, and that sometimes doesn’t hurt so badly.

Eventually, you get used to it. Murder on the other hand takes some getting used to.

Weeeell, yes and no.

Having been caught up in the deception of my own unworthiness for all of those 55 years, I came to a decision. Learn to appreciate what’s good about myself, or become blinded to my own pain, so I no longer have to look at myself in a mirror - let alone attempt to see myself from the standpoint of others.

I have decided that I’m no longer objectionable, obnoxious or unworthy of love.

So how in the name of all that’s good and holy, did I get so twisted up?

It’s actually relatively simple.

When you are handed constant circumstantial evidence that you are a difficult, unloveable child with an odd turn of mind and phrase, and you have a lazy eye and a fat belly, the shortcomings begin to pile up around your legs, a lot like cars wrapping themselves around utility poles on the corners of slippery winter roads.

The first hint that I could be appreciated by others, first started last year in the loss of my late teenaged acquisition of weight.

Having shifted nearly 20kg of prime bodily real estate is frankly superficial to even boast about, but the obvious health benefits and dropping quite a few notches off my belt helped me reframe a new appreciation for my self. Even in the throes of better physical attributes, I suspected that I had an awfully weird body type. I carry all my weight around my middle and on my face.

I lived with a constant barrage of negativity directed at me, not excluding ‘self-directed’ hatred. For years, my levels of self-worth dipped so low that I attempted suicide five times. I self-harmed, abused drugs, and kept a tally of my flaws.

I really did not like me. I could have smashed me. And frequently, I did.

I had had no relationships with women until I was 28. I know - it just screams ‘incel’, doesn’t it?

But I never thought or believed for a second that I was somehow even ‘owed’ some degree of sexual interest from women. That just sounds wrong to my ears.

I could easily have recited you a list of flaws that would be eventually cast the deciding vote on my status as a human male.

I just could totally see why I wasn’t ‘enough’.

It wasn’t like I didn’t put any effort into meeting women. I pursued them actively, but the constant lack of interest caused me no end of perilous self-examination. It sounds exhausting, but if you spend your time fixating on physical appearance and what even plastic surgery could possibly achieve, dear reader, eventually, you will burn out on self-loathing.

I became aware 25 years ago that I apologised for everything. ‘Sorry’ wasn’t just me making amends for misdeeds - it was a matter of subtly (and increasingly unsubtly), ‘sorry for existing’.

In my recent post about ‘panic disorder’, I noted that I seem to have to apologise more.

These days, post-stroke, I have to use a mobility scooter to get around some of the time. Walking used to be a pleasure, but the category 5 hurricane of a vascular event that cancels out the left side of my body means that I can now steer my way through life without having to sit down every 500 metres.

Of course, being mobile with a scooter means I now have to deal with pedestrians on their bloody phones.

But I am moving ahead now, and trying hard not to be a judgy budgie.

If you’re still reading, know that I’m grateful for your perseverance, and I will stop battering you with this wilted lettuce now.

I was interested that the very root of the word ‘panic’ is from the Ancient Greek ‘panikos’, which is directly linked to the god Pan.

When I was diagnosed with it in 1996, I was 27. Of course, upon learning more about this particular psychopathology, I realised that it was firstly genetic. My father probably had it (certainly, if I’m honest). I had the trauma of sexual assault from around my 9th birthday, which makes anyone more fearful, withdrawn and prone to anxiety.

Having been diagnosed, I was of course given benzodiazepines to medicate myself with.

That offering brought with it crippling addiction, for one.

They were handed out like candy to unsuspecting kids on Halloween. And like the old stories run, that candy was in fact tainted, albeit with a different kind of razorblades and heroin.

In the intervening years, I unsubtly alternated between victimhood and triumphalist.

Let’s face it, when croakers hand out feel-good pills, its no surprise that I for one got deeply addicted. I took the doctor’s almost offhand recommendation to pop the Xanax with a glass of wine with a liberal and literal misreading.

Cue 25 years of mixing them with alcohol, and a peculiar sense of elation, enlivened by vertigo.

Now, in my case, I was really helped by something that otherwise seemed like a tragedy. I had a stroke (my 4th, aged 51, in 2020). Now the stroke was a right median pontine stroke, which performed a hard reset on my brain stem. One rather interesting manifestation was a complete dismissal of panic, anxiety and major depression.

Having lived with these matters for 40-plus years at that point, this new reality was both welcome and uplifting. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a miracle.

For the last 6 years, I have lived with a rather new sense of the preciousness of life, a sense of optimism, and I have discovered ‘emotional lability’ (where one alternates easily between crying and laughter).

To combat the more optimistic feelings I experienced, there also came a kind of irritability with strangers. This has seen me become more apologetic, ALL THE BLOODY TIME. I know what I’m doing, and it horrifies me.

Now the real kicker is, I feel depression trying to kick me in the nuts again.

And anxiety is making its inexorable return, although only, so far, when I am trying to pay for my groceries at the supermarket and my phone starts doing unpredictable things, like freezing up or shutting off entirely.

I don’t know, and cannot explain why this drives me head or arse first into a spiral of panic. But at least I can see the problem is there, and at least attempt some regulation of my emotions.

This is my story, and I’m sorry if I repeat the same mistakes that I make every day.

I appreciate you all bearing with me, and I hope I’m not pissing you off, banging on about my previous health issues.

I appreciate you all.