Look, I don’t say months are bad very often.
I don’t like to invite fate to make me redefine bad. I don’t like to just write off an entire month of my life at my age when time is ever more valuable.
But September was a bad month for me, personally.
My husbands health isn’t doing great. So that’s probably weighed on me more then I like to admit.
All god damn month I’ve had seizures. I have dizzy spells. Depression. I just can’t seem to get my brain to click back to where it needs to be.
My joints swelled up, hands, back, feet to the point I was taking Advil and spending all day in my chair, again. I suspected whatever was wrong with my brain was causing my joints to go also. I’ve been vegetarian home made health food for the entire month – but I have such touchy digestion (what digestion?) that I guess it doesn’t matter.
I weened off coffee. I stopped most everything ‘fun’ in my diet (ode to chocolate – I’m really missing you…) and still I’m having problems.
After awhile of seizure activity my brain is silly putty.
I couldn’t do much this month but I read two books, Casino and Wise Guy by the same author Anthony Pillegi I believe is his name. Both are about organized crime back in the day and it’s very well written and put together. I felt like it was an insightful read about how the world works.
This month was definitely limited by my health, and I tried so hard to do a good job of it.
I started reading the biography by Greg Reese, “Sex, Drugs and Om” If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having an alcoholic in your life, that’s pretty much this book. I didn’t finish it, I moved on. It was very well written, he has a talent for writing. Biographies generally have a redemption arc that is hopeful and inspiring and I think maybe this wasn’t his genre. It was too much, very negative, and dark. Very dark. I know people who are into shit like that and will gorge on the darkness – but it just makes me dizzy, nauseous and regretting ever picking up that book.
Then I started reading a book called, ‘Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon” about the Laurel Canyon hippie scene of the 60’s – 70’s. Long book short – at the heart of Laurel Canyon on the outskirts in the hills of LA is a secret military installation. In the 60’s starting around 67 tons of musicians materialized in Laurel Canyon from all over and without any really noticeable reason for being there, and despite money limitations or what have you it thrived as an artists community.
The musicians and ‘freaks’ were mostly military brats, military adjacent or otherwise connected to the highest echelons of blood lines going back to the founding fathers. The book dives into the mystery of, what was really happening in the Canyon?
Then there were tremendous numbers of murders that look a lot like the mafia hits described in Pillegi’s books. A favorite past time in Laurel Canyon, or if you had visited there recently or were a boyfriend / girlfriend of someone in the canyon was getting stabbed to death. Amy Gossage just 20 was stabbed nearly 50 times and someone in the book was stabbed 154 times, and several people just got chopped up and thrown into a bush.
I believe the premise is the CIA created the counter culture flower child hippie scene because they could easily marginalize them, much like they’re creating the counter culture in the US at the moment. I think they were playing with LSD and mind control doing some MK-ULTRA stuff. Oddly enough the first name of the MK ULTRA project was project bluebird. It’s interesting because it’s two words, and the number of words meant something back then in top secret lingo, and it uses the word: BLUE which = space.
The Laurel Canyon book is a little hard to read so I’m unsure I’ll finish it. It was probably hard to craft a narrative out of a list of dead people. I think it needed photos, maps and some visuals. I am almost 50 and don’t recall the people the book is about, so a lot of people reading these days won’t know who is in the Byrd’s right away or maybe the significance of who Neil Young is etc.
The interesting question so far is, did the CIA craft the boomer flower power movement? Did they write the music that defined the 60’s?
I listened to a good podcast about Rendlesham forest this week. I took a couple of bike rides. I didn’t get a lot of Japanese studied because my brain is mushy. I will begin again on Monday.
