Patrickjkiley

I got my wood delivered today. A sixty-five-year-old Ojibwe man from the M'Chigeeng First Nation brought me twelve chords of hardwood he'd cut, split and loaded himself. He talked to me the whole time we unloaded it, as we heaved it toward the deck where I was to stack it , tarp it, and store it for the winter. For me, it was a big job. I got up early and made the kids sandwiches and got their lunches and packs together for school like everday, but today I had got up a little earlier to eat a good breakfast, take a walk to limber up before Dominic arrived with the wood. Now it's not just anyone I would freely choose to spend a half hour, muc

It was a different era with little education (or misinformation or demagoguery for that matter) about the implications or perils of addiction and misuse of drugs. But it was also an era of openness and experimentation and hope for a different way of seeing the world and doing things in it. I look at the 60's in some ways as a failed revolution with no guns (uhm, except Viet Nam and Kent State and ..., well, I digress). Sure the peace and love thing seems naive and corny but what's wrong with it? Why does it have to make you sound intellectually stunted to yearn for it or expect it? I believe part of the war on drugs is a war on altered consc

From an article in The Guardian: Trocchi was still a writer when he fled New York, after being charged with the capital offence of supplying heroin to a minor. He made for Canada by bus, and was met in Montreal by the young, then-unknown Leonard Cohen. After almost killing Cohen with an accidental overdose of opium (he invited the young poet to lick the bowl after his fix) he took a tramp steamer to Aberdeen, and made his way to London, where he became a registered addict on the NHS. And there's this other weird Canadian connection. Again, from The Guardian: He was an astute book dealer, with stalls in Portobello, Kensington, and Kings Roa