Ra Robin!

Wednesday 7:55 p.m.
In the book Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrar (?) says the Tibetans weren't very good at getting on with the digging, partly because they tried to help the worms that were exposed by the work.

After lousy weather today, up the allotment was beautiful this evening. During the two hours I spent digging, a wee robin was in close attendance. It would come and go, come and go. Once I held an earthworm on my finger and thought I'd let it have the worm if it took it from there. It flew off and I covered the worm up. Then, it came back and it was a wee bit agitated. It was looking for the worm. Where is the worm, Hotboy?

They must have great eyesight, Robins. It was eating stuff I couldn't see; wee centipedes, slatter like things, etc. But it's a wee bit odd eyeballing a robin, so it is.

Christianity divorced us from nature, perhaps because Christians think human beings are the only living things with souls. And God gave man dominion over the birds of the air and .... the monkeys. Despite Darwin, we seem amazed at what they've found out recently about primates; the use of primitive tools, etc., and there has been great resistance to accepting that we're embedded in nature, are part of nature, and should watch what we're doing.

Thank god, we don't believe in anything, eh, Jack? We ate the planet. If we think the history of the twentieth century was pretty bloody, well, we aint seen nothing yet! You wouldn't want to be reborn in a lot of places in the next hundred years. Dearie me! Ignorance, greed and hate are the three baddies ... but it is the greed what did it, Jack.

After talking to Allan Guthrie about the kind of things agents do, I feel very calm about my prospects with regard to possible publications. James Bond, my secret agent, will do just what he said he'd do. He'll go through the books. If he thinks there's a chance, he'll tell me what he thinks is wrong, and I'll fix it.

I don't have to rush with anything. I don't have to worry about anything. In fact, I don't really have to do anything. I'll potter about with a wee bit of re-writing and concentrate on ra bliss.

Apart from seeing the auld maw on Friday, I have nothing lined up. Now, I'm going to do ra bliss in the bath and listen to the Chelsea/Liverpool second half. I feel tired from the diggings, but a most fortunate creature right now!

Ris Life!

Tuesday 22: 52 p.m.
Well, I remember someone asking me in my fourth year at uni what I was going to be. I said I'm going to be moi! I did not say I am going to be a car mechanic, or a plumber, or a university servitor, or a famous author. I said I was going to be moi! As good a moi as I could be.

I am well pissed off now that I have had to ask Onan the Bavarian to do things to my webpage to disguise myself ....


This bloggy had about 31 hits yesterday. Most of them were probably spiders and spam robots. I reckon about four folk hit this blog regularly, and I am glad of that, and they have been a joyous thing for me. But ...

What's it going to be, Jack? Let's get the hut in the boat once more, Hotboy! Let's start rowing. We were happy in the Unheard of and McDonald Islands, Jack! So we were! Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream! Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

What about the flatheids, Hotboy? I didn't know anything about ra bliss, Jack, when I started meditating. There's nothing you can do for flatheids. Even the smartest flatheids are too dumb too meditate. If they were going to meditate, they would meditate. No point in waiting for the flatheids. Just head for ra bliss!!!

Wednesday
It was the footie what did it. The best laid plans .... got in four bottles of Erdinger last night to watch Manchester United progress to the final of the European Cup. After that I decided I was going to abandon this bloggy and start again, but ..... what's the point? Blogging is very ephemeral. One burst of solar wind and it'll all disappear anyway! Blog on!

Ris Bloggeration!

Tuesday
I've spent quite some time editing this bloggy and the previous one ... taking out references to the kidsbook and the one before. Blogging used to be such fun! Now, I've got to worry about stupid basturn editors reading it, and such like. I thought it was bad enough when the schoolgirls were after me. Also, Onan the Bavarian has had to do sterling work on the useless blinking webpage to disguise it. Crumbs, crivens and help ma boab!

I don't want to take the webpage down because occasionally it gets hit from a couple of ebook directories I inputted ... fung putted ... basturns the lot of them!

The other blog and this one does get hits from folk looking for the 6 dharmas of Naropa, vase breathing, deity yoga and whatnot, so I don't want to stop blogging about that. There aren't a lot of drunken bums doing this vajrayana juju, you know. Onan says the webpage is probably getting hit by spiders. Fung spiders from cyberspace! Bad enough the fung spam robots.

Hotboy, if it wasn't for the spam robots, where would you be? Fair play to the spam robots, Jack. If it wasn't for you, I'd be talking to myself, wouldn't I?

Now that I've been paid again, the cunning plan for this month is to give it all to the credit card basturns and stay cashless, and beerless and bob hopeless, at least for as long as possible. My capsulitis shoulder is a lot less sore now and I can get back into shadowboxing and running now that the diggings have only two big diggings left in them.

Are you going back in the ring, Hotboy? I hope so, Jack. I'm at supermiddleweight at the moment, just about. I've got to go straight down to lightmiddleweight as fast as possible because the sensei and reverend sent me a tubey thing of Marvelous Marvin's greatest hits. In the video Alan Minter waves him in for a brawl. Big mistake! Big, big mistake. No, we're not fighting Marvin Hagler. Not for all the tea in China

Ra Nova Scotia

Monday
I can't do lucid dreaming, which might be a lot of fun, but I tried last night, going to bed sober and straight. I didn't work, but I wakened up a couple of times through the night and seemed to be emerging from heavenly dreams. This is a big improvement from dreaming that you're lost in the slums of Nairobi, I'll tell you.

When I was taking refuge with Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche down at the Samye Ling, he gave us a wee talk. One of the things that really struck me was when he said that when you owned something, you should always think that you've borrowed it, that it wasn't really yours. I assume this is to deal with attachment, clinging, craving, and whatnot.

I've often thought that borrowing books from libraries and giving them back was communism's last stand.

The previous Panchen Lama was, I think, quite excited by the opportunities offerred by the Chinese revolution at first. The commies are atheists, of course, and so are the buddhists, no believing in a creator god anyway. It's utopian, so it is, putting these two philosophies together. Shame the Chinese turned out to be flatheids.

Since the Traverse artistic director has changed, there's no free tickets to first nights anymore. The end of an era! But last night I went to a preview performance of a new John Byrne play because you get in for half price. Much enjoyed it. I think it's the fourth part of the Slab Boys trilogy, called Nova Scotia, and I thought it was really good. I liked it better than the other three. I laughed a couple of times which is good going for me. Be better tonight, it's real first night. Great that John Byrne can still be bothered. Great that whoever persuaded him, persuaded him!

The only performer I recognised was Gerda Stevenson. Gerda acted in a radio play of mine a long time ago and showed what a class act she is once again. A stellar quine, that one!

Later:
I spent several hours today taking any mention of the blissy book out of all posts in this or the old blog. Dearie me! What tedium! That'll teach me!

Ra Signings

12:40 p.m.
I had a most fascinating time talking to Allan Guthrie in the Filmhouse Bar yesterday morning. Allan has had four books published in the last three or four years and is an agent for twenty writers, so he knows the writing business back to front. He's conspicuously smart and will make pots of money, I'm sure.

Somewhat bizarrely, I was the first writer he ever met ...when he was working the till in Waterstone's one day eleven years ago, and I asked him how many copies of Are You Boys Cyclists? had sold. This kind of info is accessible at the till. Anyway, I remembered the conversation because when I asked him if that was a reasonable number for a first book, he told me it wasn't the writer's first book. We had this conversation without me saying I was Hotboy. I was amazed that anyone knew I'd written City Whitelight, which had been published over a decade before.

He was very kind about Are You Boys Cyclists? which he seems to have read twice. He had copies of both books with him, which he asked me to sign. This was a bit weird.

He said the webpage was not a help at all and I should take it down. Since it is a useful repository, I've asked Onan The Bavarian to change the title, etc., so that you can't google me and find that.

He also said agents can't really sell two books by the same author at the one time and made me understand my agent's position much better. I don't think I'll be able to refer to him by name again in this blog. I think the best known agent is James Bond and I'll call him that, if anything.

Brian Wilson and I donned the viking helmets and rampaged through the beautiful, wonderful city last night after meeting at a memorial service for Angus McSorley, a character in the book I'm re-writing at the moment. I have vague visions of falling out of one of them bike rickshaws. I really enjoy binge drinking with Brian Wilson though I know I shouldn't. Bad boy!

10:40 p.m.
Sober and straight on Saturday night. That's the way to do it!

The lama said he allowed his students three hours sleep a night, and that sitting up in a lotus. Hmmm? I'll try sitting up in bed tonight and maybe wait till I fall over.

Would you like a piece of advice, Hotboy? What, Jack? Don't tell folk who don't know you well enough to realise you are crazy that your main ambition in life is to emanate as a deity. Allan Guthrie looked a bit phased by that. But it is my ambition, Jack! Just keep it under your hat, Hotboy.

You see a lot of sky if you look up the slope and pause from the diggings. A blazingly beautiful sunset tonight. Sunsets and birdsong in the middle of the city. What a fortunate creature I am, I am! What a fortunate creature I am!

Ra Changed Days!

Thursday 10:32 p.m.
The folk upstairs were the granny and grandad, then the last daughter, her man and the two beautiful wee boys. The McCools. In the Fullwood Foundry the ladle full of molten iron spilled at the wrong time and the men went running, and some of them didn't make it. One of them was Etta McCool's man, John Murray. A quiet guy. He used to walk passed me as I sat on our step, and he'd say hullo. He was the young family joe from upstairs. Ninety five percent burns. He only lasted a few days after that.

His eldest son was brought down to sit with us and watch the telly while all the grown ups were going to hospital. He'd never been down to our bit before. I'll never forget the way he sat there without moving and how he stared at the telly for a couple of hours while his family went and waited for John Murray to die. Just sitting there, perfectly parked.

They don't have the pits, or the foundrys, or steelworks in Bellshill anymore.

When I left uni, I got a job in the No2 Mill of the old Stewart and Lloyd's, where they rolled the giant tubes that maybe you would sink into the oil wells. A couple of times I walked through the No1 mill where they make the steel and saw the big vats where the steel was made. I remember thinking what it would be like if the giant vat tipped over and you had to run for your life. You stumble and fall.

Today, as I was walking to the auld maw's, this wummin was crossing paths with me and these two young guys, maybe twenty years old. It's Thursday lunchtime, about quarter to one. Into the mobile phone: Aye, here's Shuggie and Jim. They've got a carry oot. He's got two bottles of Buckfast ... the tale of Buckie and bottles of cider....

I worked in the steelworks for a year after I left uni partly because I wanted to see what it was like to be a joe from Bellshill who had to work there, the three shifts, etc. Hmmm? I should write about that again after I finish the next unpublishable book.

One of these days maybe I'll write something worth reading. Of course, it'll be free.

Rose Commuters!

Wednesday 3:55 p.m.
As you're standing at the bus stop in Princes Street of a morning, you're not going to see many happy, smiley faces. Blank, or at best neutral, going to the jobbie. I'm not smiling either. Sometimes when I'm really not smiling, I try to cheer myself up by thinking how long I would have to stand there before someone passed me who had even the faintest connection with ra bliss, or any access to it at all. Almost the whole population of Edinburgh could walk passed me and I'd still be standing there.

The world is full of sad basturns, so it is, Jack! The really weird thing is that you can become a clergyman or woman and stand up there telling folk all about God and Jesus, and not have a fung clue about ra bliss. Dearie me!

One of the reasons for writing this bloggy was to let anyone fortunate enough to land here know that it isn't all that difficult to surf the oceans of bliss, given a little time and effort.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the most fortunate creature of them all?

Apart from being skint, that is. My chances of getting any money for the short comic novel are now, I think, almost nil, at least for the foreseeable. It's been a year and a half since I finished it, and still no takers, despite the literary agent's best endeavours. I don't think there's anyone left to punt it to. There were enquiries about a kidsbook at the London Book Fair, so that one is still afloat. You'd think someone might be interested in a kidsbook which was basically an allegory of the Chinese invasion of Tibet, but I suspect the kidsbook business has been sewn up by the big literary agencies. At least, that's what I was told by Nicky Singer when I was trying to flog it on my own. But who knows?

If I'm going to meditate full time and do big retreats, I'm going to have to get a break with The Real McCoy. I've got Jacob Merryweather in the desert at the moment, so I could be finished that in a bit of a rush if I just put in some time with it. So that's what I'm going to start doing soon after I finish here.

When I fix my gaze on anything, the visual field goes very strange very quickly these days. I know I've mentioned this before, but it's becoming more pronounced. It's a blur of brighter lighting effects with distances much foreshortened, etc. For a moment today I thought it might be possible to project a reality onto this light palette. I was gazing at the Kalachakra Mandala at the time, but going from this notion to actually being in the Kalachakra Mandala seems a long, long way away.

Before you even go anywhere near that, you should be able to sit facing the Medicine Buddha, the front visualisation, while you are the Medicine Buddha. So you're there and here at the same time. I imagine this might help you understand how much of what's supposed to be outside yourself is projection.

There is something out there, Jack, but it's really hard to say what it is, or even what it's made of. You just need to be rational to know that. Emptiness isn't really a belief. Obviously, nothing exists in the manner of its appearance.

Jacob Merryweather is a far, far nicer joe than moi. Unlike the short comic novel, which made me mad, this one is really a wee bit of a joy to re-write.

9:30 p.m.
Being up the allotment tonight was lovely. Watching the sun go down, it was a wee bit cold and damp and very nice indeed. There are now seven beds of onions and garlic, and only about a sixth left to dig and plant. I'm looking forward to getting back to completely useless physical activities like running and shadow boxing.


Working on The Real McCoy, I discovered that twenty odd pages are missing from the copy on my webpage. Dearie me. So the ending there doesn't make any sense. I doubt if anyone has ever downloaded it anyway and, fortunately, I have these pages and will have to type them in. Apart from that, the book feels nearly finished, or will be finished far faster than I expected.

Rat Waiting For Goddo!

Monday 1:23 p.m.
While they were trashing the reputations of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir on the radio this morning, I remembered looking up a definition of existentialism once, and what a big effect it had on me.

Once I believed in God, then I was an agnostic, then I decided I was an atheist, Thomism and the first cause argument notwithstanding.

I might have written about this before in The Buddha and the Big Bad Wolf.

So the definition said that an atheistic existentialist was in the position of a person with their toes on the edge of an cliff, looking down into the abyss of personal annihilation. When there's no goddo ... when you're dead, you're dead.

I said this state led to feelings of angst, which is perhaps some kind of generalised anxiety or alienation.

The first noble truth is the truth of dukka, which can be interpreted in this way.

To get over this angst, your existentialist tried to find methods of connection, such as, humping folk (Moravia) or becoming communists. (Sartre)

In the first turning of the wheel, you'd ask who it is who is suffering from the angst, and hopefully deal with this false sense of self.

To be religious is to know that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. L. Wittgenstein. The Wall.

I found this definition when I was working as a library assistant in a university around here. I got the job because at the interview I was asked if I had any mental problems. On looking at the two guys interviewing me, I wondered if mental problems were a requirement for getting this job, and told them I didn't really have any mental problems, but I was a member of an amateur boxing club and didn't know if that counted or not.

The physical attributes of Angus McSorley in The Real McCoy, which I'm supposed to be re-writing this afternoon, are based on one of these interviewers. I heard today that he'd passed away after a fall. Michael Wills, one time deputy librarian at Heriot Watt. What a great guy he was! Everything I knew about him was flashing through my head this morning and nothing but good things arose.

What can I say about the meditations this morning? We're not waiting for goddo around here, Jack! March on! March on!

Rat Talent!

Sunday 6:52 p.m.
When I started this bloggy business, I thought I could stop raving at flatheids I knew about ra bliss. I can have whole conversations with folk now and never mention it once. But someone at the start of this weekend mentioned it to me. They said they'd tried to meditate by repeating a sound to themselves for seven minutes, but couldn't last that long.

It brought it all back, Jack. When I started trying to meditate, I thought ten minutes with your eyes shut muttering mumbo jumbo to yourself seemed like an awful long time.

One of the reasons I started to write when I left uni was that I'd realized by then that I hadn't any god given talent. Prodigies have natural talent. You need natural talent to be a musician, or a painter, or to do hard sums. I didn't think you needed much to have a bash at writing novels.

Of course, I've been singularly unsuccessful in writing novels, having made about two and a half grand from prose in thirty odd years of endeavour. Still, it gave me some shelter from doing anything sensible with my life like having a career and toadying up to the evil bourgeois.

I haven't done any writing since I stopped work on Wednesday, but I've done as much meditating as I can. Once I would have spent all that time writing. But for meditating you need even less talent. You can be as thick as two short planks and be a brilliant meditator. All you have to be able to do is sit and think. You don't even have to know the alphabet!

After you've repeated the mumbo jumbo to yourself for a while, something else will begin to arise. Eventually, a great envelope of ra bliss will arise and you will then be a truly fortunate creature like moi.

Someone sent me an advert for a 15 hours a week jobbie in the jail. There isn't enough cash in it even for me, but I am sorely tempted. Being a librarian in the jail is but one little step away from getting the jail. They'd maybe put me in solitary for my own protection since my brother was once a prison officer. Solitary confinement has some attractions when all you know are flatheids who don't even know they're flatheids. It would be horrible at first, of course, but after a wee while .... what oceans of bliss there would be to surf in!

I cycled up Kirk Brae today on the way to a most enjoyable visit to our friend with the MS and I'm too knackered now to dig, but I'm away to the hut. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Ra Froggy!

Saturday 7:40 p.m.
I dug up a frog today. What a surprise! Do frogs live under the ground? Do they hibernate? Anyway, it was about the size of my thumb and yellowy green. So I'm lifting the ground with my fork and letting the soil fall through so I can remove any couch grass and such like nuisance basturn interlopers when there's this frog sitting there. It was alive, but disinclined to hop off so I picked it up and draped a half mangled sod over it after putting it to the side. I'll look and see if it's still there tomorrow.

One whole side of my allotment is now dug and planted. Five beds of onions now lie below the shallow graves where the half tatties are holed up. That's about 600 onions. There's little more than a half of the other side left to dig. If any nice middle class people who think that manual labour is somehow romantic would like to dig the rest for me, then I won't charge them very much. The Subsistence Farmer Experience! Hours and hours of digging fun! Dig the stress out! Just leave your wallet with the man in the hut!

11:41 p.m.
Sober and straight on Saturday night. That's the way to do it! The meditations today just got better and better. The one between nine and ten tonight was something else. Roll on tomorrow!

Ra beddy byes!

Saturday 00:40 a.m.
At the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: Can you or can you not, do ra bliss!?

Well, not so much after all the Guiness! Great evening though. Nice with so many folk who are like me, extended family.

Take a breath! Do not succumb. Tommorrow is a bright, shining wonderment, and on my own ... into ra bliss!

Rem Analytical Meditations!

Friday 12:42 p.m.
The Hotboy project will never be anything other than a work in (slow!) progress, but practising meditation is supposed to make you happier. If you are a Hotboy Madyamika and you can surf the oceans of bliss, at least sometimes, well, you're not going to get much happier than that, at least in those moments.

As you stumblebum towards breathlessness and ecstasy, it could be said you are happier than when you are in mere bliss, but this equates happiness with experiencing wonderful sensations. Anyway, it's quite possible to resume normal life and be very quickly once more the greetin', crabbit faced basturn of yore.

Analytical meditations are supposed to help you with this; help you become more happy in your grotesque bourgeois version of existence, and so they will!

Does all this take forever, Hotboy? I think, Jack, that it probably takes the whole of your life. But if you'd rather live like a self satisfied moron; if you'd rather look for sweeties to suck; if you think it's okay to continue as a greetin' faced, crabbit basturn, just keep your head up your backside. You'll have plenty of company.

Once the lama told me, when I was asking him about the great vajrayana, that I'd get "everything" from calming meditations. I had my ten seconds of non-self and emptiness before I knew anything about analytical meditations.

I thought it was just thinking about stuff and concentrating on that kind of thing, whereas I was looking to widen the gap between thoughts. The sweeties I was looking for didn't seem to be in thoughts as such.

Ultimately, losing your false sense of self is what is going to make you happy, but this is probably not going to be easy, or happen overnight. Of course, it might be for some lucky basturns. For the rest of us, it seems to me that the more you think about this "false sense of self", which is supposed to be what is causing the suffering, the more difficult losing it seems to be.

I was going through this routine one day of denying the existence of an "I" in the body, senses, perceptions, consciousness and mental formations, which include ideations and volitional impulses, when it struck me that it was in everything I looked at. I was trying to narrow this down to mental formations, thoughts, but it dawned on me that this false sense of self was everywhere, in everything I looked at, totally bedded down in my perceptions. If the computery thing seems separate from you, I think that's because of your false sense of self.

The mind game is the only game in town.

When I had the ten seconds of non-self and emptiness, the false sense of self was gone, but it came back. At least, this was a huge incentive to keep meditating, but you want this false sense of self to fung off eventually and, hopefully, not be there at all. Then you will have serenity, contentment, satiation and true happiness.

As they say, you might not be inducing retributions to your own wee self, since at last it has gone, and then you can do what you like as long as your motivation is sound, which it should be since great compassion for the flatheids is supposed to accompany this transformation of perspective. Bring on the dancing girls, beer, drugs!

I wish sometimes I'd forced the kiddo to meditate. There's no reason why you can't get your mind sorted by the time you're thirty odds, which is when I started. What a great life you could have after that!

I had a most exhilerating cycle in the wind and rain back from visiting Shiva last night. He's off the fags, so it's reefer madness all the way. Sometimes I'm concerned about the kiddo being a flatheid all her life like everybody else, but last night I got a full face image of her in my head. It's a big smiling baw heid. Then it interchanged with the face of the lama I used in my meditations, then went back to her. I thought: she looks a bit Tibetan! The wee fat baldy guy has a big smiling baw heid. It was as if all the accumulations of worriedness about her just disappeared. That kind of relief makes you more happy.

The first full day I get to myself is Monday. Be nice to keep down the collateral damage to the nervous system over the next couple of days. The only real difficulty is tonight. I suspect I'll be up shit creek without a paddle as soon as Froggy McDuck rings the doorbell!

Ris Wonderful Life!

Thursday 9:33 a.m.
Just deleted a post from apres the footie last night.

All the way there I wasn't going to buy a carry-out, but succumbed at the last off-license. Though the forces of darkness seem once more in the ascendant, the huns got put to the sword with practically the last kick of the game. What joy!

I've dug and planted about two thirds of my allotment now. Yesterday I bought 700 or so onions from the Botanic Gardens shop and much enjoyed the stroll through the gardens.

I've been keeping a diary/journal since I was seventeen, but the last book of about 200 pages lasted three years, which shows how little I've been writing in it since I took up blogging. Hmmm? Blogging is more fun, but it's not the same.

I wonder where this blog is. Where is it kept? Does it have any actuality at all? Someday I'll switch on this computery thing and it won't be there anymore. The journals are kept in an old battered cardboard suitcase my Uncle Dan took to Australia in the 1950s. They're under my bed.

I'm going into the lobby now to meditate till lunchtime. After that, I'll cycle to the respite hospital in Liberton. Despite the beer, I feel good today and here comes ra bliss!!

Ra No Jobbie Days Ahead!

Wednesday 18:04
A third of kids at bog standard comprehensives by the time they reach fourteen do not reach "expected" standards of reading and half do not reach "expected" standards of writing. This means they cannot read and write very well. Of course, being able to spell is well beyond anyone's expectations these days.

The last book I wrote was partly about this. I hasn't been published yet, and probably never will. If you want me to email you a copy, just ask.

Half the kids who come into my place of work at breaktime and lunchtime are Polish. I've been told how they don't have much in Polish schools, but you don't need much. The Polish kids I've dealt with all seem to be able to spell and do all the stuff that my generation were taught to do in school.

By the way, I heard of this PHd student who stopped doing tutorials at Strathclyde Uni because the essays she was getting handed were doing her brain in. Screeds of words without decent punctuation, paragraphing, spelling, etc. It was a history course she was teaching.

It's amazing how kids these days get such fantastic results for their exams when they can't spell, or punctuate, or write, or count, or anything.

The education system in this town is a blight on working class kids, so it is. But I don't have to go back to the jobbie till next Tuesday, so hurrah for that.

Anyway, to amuse myself I've been trying to learn some useful Polish phrases. Nie biegaj ... don't run. Nie bij sie ... don't fight. The wee Polish lassie just takes the pencil out of your hand and writes this down. Scottish kids get told they'll get written work to do in class as a punishment. Anyway .... the great thing about wee kids is that sometimes they laugh so much that they fall down and roll about, literally. So today they were high as kites, and like Mexican jumping beans. I stand in the middle of this melee and ask this kid to write down the Polish for don't jump on tables. I suspected the kid was taking the piss, but I was up for it anyway. Nie hojaj po stole! I shouted in the worst Polish accent anybody has probably ever heard. All over the shop, the Poles exploded with laughter, and did this falling down and rolling around stuff. So I shouted it out another couple of times. I wonder what it means, maybe fung off the lot of yous. It might have just been my accent.

Rem Evil Ways!

Tuesday
Taking anything which disturbs your central nervous system is a complete no-no when it comes to progressing in this juju. If you're not going to meditate before going to sleep - which you should! - you can get away with having maybe three bottles of Erdinger or eating a wee bit of soapbar ... not enough of anything to have much effect the next morning.

Falling occasionally into open graves and carousing in general with flatheids is very bad indeed. Doing that for a couple of nights in a row is ... well, it's really a terrible blight on ra bliss. Basically, it probably comes under the heading of greed. Greed, anger and ignorance are all to be diminished somehow.

My latest cunning plan was to be so skint for the last two weeks of the month that I couldn't afford to be bad, and I am right now cashless.

Just about all social engagements are regarded as obstacles to me these days. I only socialise with flatheids with bad habits. The only joe I know who doesn't drink, smokes like a lum.

Froggy McDuck is coming to see me on Friday night, all the way from the South of France. His brother Beef will probably show up as well. Brian Wilson is teetotal in comparison to this crowd.

Just say no, Hotboy! I'd have to leave the country, Jack. I'm like a rabbit in the headlights right now. I need flatheid repellant. Oh well. Once more into the breach, dear friends. I'll stay straight and sober till Friday and then just wait and see.

The London Book Fair is on at the moment. If I only had a grand, I could be a millionaire! If I only had a grand, I could spend six weeks of the summer at the Samye Ling. I haven't been there for nearly a year. Flatheid respite!

Ra Respite!

1:52 a.m.
I got told the wummin had MS by Shiva when I was about 26. When I heard this, I sat down half drunk on the wall which runs along Dalgety Avenue, and said she was lucky her husband was a tim, because he would stay with her if he was a tim. It shows how awful it is when you mix with the evil bourgeios that you have to say re-assuring things like that to yourself because obviously your husband should stay with you whatever comes along.

So I will go and see our friend with the MS tomorrow.

I know she doesn't like being there. Maybe you get left on your own. I can talk to her for about an hour. What the wummin needs is company. A dead rat! Ah, what company that would be! So tomorrow I'll stare out the window after speaking for a bit, and do ra bliss, and tell her about ra bliss, and just spend as long in her company as I can. Previously, I'm in there for an hour. I just have to calm down and be there. The babes isn't going to talk back anyway.

Ra Auld Maw!

Saturday 23:51 p.m.
My auld maw is 89 years old tomorrow. The trains don't run to Bellshill on Sundays, so I won't be there.

I started intervening in my auld maw's life when she couldn't get to sleep. She'd had a lung haemorrhage and had been a bit old and ill. Everything seemed to cheer up for the auld maw when she started listening to the yoga nidra tape.

About twenty past one, the third CD from the devil worshippers goes on, and I must admit, the description of emptiness on it is superb. About two, the CD stops and I look over and up at the auld maw and she's not moving, but staring straight ahead, lying there in the lion pose on her bed.

The auld maw is the last of her primary school class to be alive. The auld maw can remember standing beneath the banner in Mossend at the start of a march during the General Strike.

Here's to the auld maw! Happy birthday!

Ra Sorry Heid!

Saturday 1:40 p.m.
Most thoughts aren't worth thinking, but usually it doesn't matter these days what your thoughts are like before you sit down to meditate. Today I was a bit slow off the mark, and feeling a bit fashed and bashed after Brian Wilson visited me last night.

Gin? Why did he buy gin? I wish all my chummies took illegal drugs!

But as soon as I sat down, I soared away in ra bliss. Flatheids only get flatheidedness, sleep and dreaming. It was wonderful to be able to move away from the mild hangover thoughts and go into ra bliss. The too dumb to meditate can't do that, no matter how gifted they may be. It's a shame really about flatheids, so it is.

The amazing bliss and warmth have moved on and turned my day around. I'm off to the diggings now.

8:50 p.m.
Sometimes it's alm0st worth staying British for the BBC. Well done to Dan Cruickshank and BBC2 for putting on the Lost World Of Tibet tonight. What a treat! It was really a show about the Dalai Lama in some ways, with lots of old colour film of Tibet, the Dalai Lama doing his final exams, etc.

I owe an awful lot to the Tibetans down at the Samye Ling. A literary agent will be trying to hustle two books of mine (I hope) at next week's London Book Fair, and both of them are products of my contact with Tibetans. That's the least that I owe.

I think my root guru was in a party of over three hundred trying to escape Tibet when the shit hit the fan, and only about thirteen of them survived the journey. If I can get some money from writing the two books, I will put my head in his hands. Allah Akbar.

I was planting shallots today. To plant anything other than tatties, I dig enough to straddle. So I'm straddling the earth today and planting the shallots, trying to do as much juju throughout as I can. Then I straighten up, as you do, and bending from the waist does something, and the colours start to be shimmering and the world looks more luminescent and less concrete. Perhaps when things work through, I will have this view. I don't know if I could live with the view I had on my ten seconds of non-self and emptiness, but that one I could live with.

Ra normal joe!

Wednesday 23:50 p.m.
I was watching this programme about gifted children. Let's hear it for the common man! I am dead ordinary. I always told myself I was completely normal. In fact, the norm. You don't want to be gifted as much as supported. Hut management is everything.

I kept digging. It's another addiction. The personage to the south is really taking something out on the ground. There are now about 220 little holes with half tatties in each hole. Plus a mound of couch grass and sods, and bits of half burnt paper, and old, discarded tatties. My money is on the detritus. You just get in the way of stuff wanting to grow.

It's four years since I walked off the jobbie and sat in the hut, and the breath became somehow connected with ra bliss, at least, sometimes. Due to the abysmal efforts at self control, the progress since then has been .... no, it hasn't. I'd be much happier if I didn't do bad things because the thoughts are badly framed, but the other thing is the other thing, and it just seems to be rolling a long. I do meditate a lot, but I am a total disgrace. Bad boy!

Ra Holidays!

Wednesday 1 p.m.
Oh, how good it is to be moi right now! Apres the jobbie, normally these days it looks quite good, but today ... today .... today ... it's just a lot better. There is almost a clear view till Sunday night since the Domestic Bliss has gone off to Barcelona with the kiddo. I have to visit the auld maw on Friday and will see our friend with the MS who is going once more into respite care. But it's ra bliss, Jack! What a fabulous amount of ra bliss there will be! Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Ra Different Strokes

Tuesday
This was sent to me from Michelle in Spango. It's a talk by a brain scientist about having a stroke and what it's like to have no left side brain imput. Fabulous talk! I'll try to link it and it won't work. Clicky here. Sorry, I can't get it to work. The URL is www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU. This effort might have been a mistake!

Ra Sunday!

Sunday 12:32 p.m.
You might waken up like your usual flatheid; a wee bit grumpy and groggy, with that generalised feeling of mild dissatisfaction and frustration. You know you have to start pulling yourself together now.

I know it is possible to go to sleep in ra bliss and emerge once more out of ra bliss, but this rarely occurs with moi since my non-meditating behaviour leaves much to be desired.

But almost immediately after you start into the juju, a great glowing globule of ra bliss arises and it's as if thoughts will only bounce off ineffectually and not penetrate to any degree. There is a peacefulness and some sense of serenity accompanying this great glowing globule of ra bliss, and then you put a vase breath in there ..... and after an hour or so passes, you have to get up and the memory of ra bliss starts to fade immediately, but you know that there is nothing but nothing which could ever be as wonderful as ra bliss.

And so I expect the day to go on doing ra bliss then keeping the flatheid in me occupied. It's baltic again and there has been snowings.

10:20 p.m.
Let's be joyful that I have got a jobbie to go to tomorrow! Hurrah! Hurrah!

I haven't socialised with any of my deep dear friends since Tuesday evening. I've probably meditated for about twenty five hours since then until now. Today I donned the full Beer Monster Reduction Vehicle and did six three minute rounds. But I felt alright and did some diggings as well. The fight back against the evil demon nicotine is underway, and all's right with the world.

Saturday 22:14 p.m.
It's not so often it happens, but sometimes you just want to sit. I sat all day, and then indulged, and now I just want to sit. You should be me. Being me is sometimes fabuloso. Sometimes when I forget to disbelieve everything, I get upset. But I have totally wonderful and amazing moments in the aftereffects of the vase breathings these days . These are just a congromeration of fantastic and unbelievably wonderful sensations, but surely mere signposts on the way to ra bliss of blisses, and beyond ra bliss. Now, I will retire to the lobby and get totally out of my face on air!

Ra Reefer Madness!

Friday 9:20 p.m.
Two full days without any people. It was wonderful. I should not now tell yous about the outstanding bliss because ... inchoateness.

I decided to stop reading the Scotsman a long time ago. I used to read books and had a look at the reviews on a Saturday, even although I knew it was a freelance cheapie. Then, one day there was a review of Michaele (?) Tournier's autobiography. I was a fan at this time. The reviewer started by explaining that the book was really about his books, but the reviewer had never heard of Mr Tournier and hadn't read any of his books. In the same review section there was a review of a boxing book by a woman who started her review by saying how much she hated boxing...

I don't know why I bought it today. I'm reading it whilst waiting for the train to take me to Bellshill...

It's a piece all about skunk factories, and all these criminals coming from Vietnam to Scotland, and what a dearie, dearie me all that is.

Then he says how the plants can harvest four times a year. This is an expert. This shit palimpsets into people's heids. Fabulous plants though. You chop them down and smoke them and they spring up again! If you had the byre, you could harvest plants four times a year, but not the same plants.

It's a police press handout about how well they are doing and how we should watch out. The writer couldn't be bothered translitering it properly.

Well, did it make you go schizophrenic, Hotboy? After smoking a half ounce of it over the last week, I must say that it is really quite good. But a terrible gateway drug. I am now definitely a nicotine addict. Again. So it's back to the drawing board, except for the amazingness of ra bliss. Since further and further it moves on and in, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

Rem Undulating Rows!

Thursday 8:00 p.m.
There are now eleven rows of tatties down one side of the allotment and nine rows down the other. A personage came walking by and stopped and inspected the rows. She said there were little holes all the way along. Why was that? I said I found it aesthetically pleasing. She asked if there were little tatties down all the little holes. I said there were. She asked if the hole would kind of collapse in. I said I had no idea. I supposed the rain might collect in the holes. I told the woman that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But whatever it is certainly kicks the crap out of you. After only two hours of digging, I came thinking: I'm knackered. Completely fung knackered!

Ra Beautiful, wonderful day!

Wednesday 4:19 p.m.
When you have to put up with our winters, you can really appreciate a day like today. Blue skies, daffodils everywhere, and the birds hopping about, tweeting their heads off. I was actually enjoying the digging.

Now there are eleven long, thin, undulating shallow graves down one side of the allotment, and four down the other side.

Sometimes one pauses, and looks up. As you stand straight, there is a hint of this breath sheath thing emerging, and the lovely colours kind of pulsate and shimmer a wee bit. The world was just a gorgeous place this afternoon.

23:54 p.m.
I moved from the lobby to the living room when the Domestic Bliss came in, so I could keep her company during Desperate Housewives. Says I: this might be the best hour of my life. Of course, I'd have my eyes closed and the noise blockers on; plus the blasts of noisy vase breathing interupting everything.

'A dead rat! Ah, what company that would be!' The Great Samuel.

The aftereffects of the vase breathing were just so fantastic in the lobby. Then another brilliant, brilliant hour. Just amazingly beaming with ra bliss. Oh, ra bliss, ra bliss, ra bliss!

And tomorrow is all mine! Mine! Mine, I tell you!

Ra Discoursing!

Tuesday 23:43 p.m.
Speaking to flatheids over the course of more than two hours without recourse to drink or drugs is enough to make me lose the will to live. It used to be the same long times ago with straights. The nicety nice. Folk sitting, having cups of tea and looking nervous, for hours and hours and hours. And that was just moi!

After having two full days at the jobbie ... there's nobody there, Jack. Just me and the computery thing and the passage of time. I say hello once a day ... I really feel the need for some empowerment.

So you're skint. Being skint isn't really too much of a problem if you can just tell theflatheids to fung off. Being skint, if you're trying to be nice, is a misery. My problems with money don't involve the money, they involve having to do things on account of trying to be nice with the rich basturns, and the evil bourgeois, and the flatheids.

I want to be skint. It would be better if everyone around me was as skint as me, and then they would go back into their burrows, and get depressed, and never come out again. I don't want to be skint when I feel that I have to justify myskintness to folk. I'm trying to tell them to fung off and leave me alone. I'm trying to be nice. I really hate nice people. I'll have to stop being nice and just tell them to fung off!

I've got enough money. I can get stoned and drunk as much as I like. I could grow grass and make home brew if it came to that. Pots of money really.

The sweetie eating, evil bourgeois and otherflatheids just have to be told to fung off! Just fung off! If you don't want to meditate with me, just fung off and leave me alone!

Apart from the crabbitness .... three really good things occurred today. Or good things occurred three times.
1) Ra bliss was so full and thick, the breathe was very slight, the thoughts as they arose were very slow ....this is a difference from a couple of weeks ago. I think I can go there now. But not right now.
2) The seats in the cinema for the Bette Davis movie, Now, Voyager, were lousy, yet ra bliss came on and I started to get quite warm. It's better if the seats are good and it's a foreign language film .... one day I will take my noise blockers to the movies .... but I had to wonder about ra heat.
3) The third good thing is that I cannot remember what it was. There were a lot of good bits today, but they were all concerned with investigating ra bliss. The breath sheaf is the one to gambol in. This getting wrecked stuff is completely useless by comparison.